AND THERE'S NO WAY TO ESCAPE THE VIOLENCE OF A GIRL AGAINST HERSELF
Her corpse follows her.
The worst part about it isn’t the reminder. It is the fact that she has not changed at all. It is the fact that she still looks the same - there are no signs of the passage of time worn onto her face or onto her frame, no sense that she has outlived the dying girl confined to the frame. She is a corpse and the corpse is her, and, although only one of them is walking, they are both moving in the same direction.
She keeps walking. She walks faster and faster, but the image jumps from frame to frame, reflects itself from mirror to mirror. She walks and walks and walks and walks, but, even when she breaks into a run, her hooves skidding against the slick, reflective surface of mirror-shards below, she can’t escape it. (Even when she looks away, the image is burnt two-tone into her mind’s eye; she sees herself dead in third person, she sees the moon in the sky through a veil of blood and white blooms.) The world has moved on, and she is still the same. She died there, in that field. He killed her. He killed her. She doesn’t know who she is, now, but she isn’t Seraphina.
She is what is left behind after a fire. A city’s skeleton. Not its substance. She looks over into a mirror, and she is standing above her own corpse, her coat smeared with blood and ash. Who is the murderer here-? Oh, he’d ruined her.
(Oh – she’d ruined herself.)
She turns corner after corner, wanders the labyrinth. Her breath trails her, a spectral fog, and her hair untangles from its tight braids, billowing behind her as though she is suspended underwater; her hooves stop touching the ground, and she doesn’t even notice.
She isn’t looking to get out, quite. If she wanted to escape, she could – Ereshkigal is still perched on her shoulders, and she could easily fly up and over the spires, guide her back to the shore and the bridge and the desert in the distance. But she doesn’t. Some morbid part of her longs to smash her jaw down against the cold stone and scream at herself to look at the reflection. She has marinated in her misery for so, so long. (She has almost forgotten what it feels like to be otherwise.) There is a part of her that wants to confront it – and shatter it to pieces, like the mirror.
She winds a corner and-
Blue eyes. Electric blue, like a shock to the system or a knife to the ribs. She’d recognize them anywhere.
Well, says the golden girl, her tone acrid, you’re not me.
“No,” she says, “I’m not.”
So – there are two girls standing there now, in a sea of mirrors. One silver. One gold. Two dead girls, with two twin scars across their faces. Two wraiths, maybe (she is depleted enough for it), but Bexley feels more like a banshee.
She isn’t sure why she’s back. She isn’t sure why either of them are back, or still here. Most of the time, she doesn’t want to be. But she looks at the familiar features of her once-reagent, which are still gold gold gold, brighter and more brilliant than Solis could ever hope to be, and she feels a gnawing sense of something in her chest. It’s almost relief. She hasn’t felt it in a while.
She could laugh. She could cry – but she never does.
“I thought you were-“ Her voice stumbles, slightly; catches in her throat, like she isn’t quite willing to spit out the rest of the sentence. (When she’d heard it, when she heard that Bexley Briar is- gone, she hadn’t wanted to admit it. She couldn’t admit it – not that she’d failed her, too, not that she’d abandoned her like every other sharp and fragmented shard of her former lives. That would be too much.) “-dead. I should have known better.” Who could kill Bexley Briar? Or, the better question: why would she ever think that either of them would be allowed to die?
They always say that the worst part is the wound. The knife. The bear’s claws. The cave. But Seraphina knows better. She has always known better. The worst part is remembering how to stand, and-
and even if you remember, you never quite remember right.
@
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
