☼ S E R A P H I N A ☼
I do not know many things. Least of all
my own tendency to see stars and think first of dying.
Once, her hooves sunk into the sand when she walked on the beach. Now, out of habit – learned behavior, cultivated over months of work as a revolutionary, traveler, desert ghost -, her hooves hover a few inches above the sandbank. There is a difference in how she inhabits the world, nowadays; she seems to feel like less and less a part of it all the time, like she is watching it slip away from her like sand carried out by the tides. There is a difference in how she inhabits the world, and, by extension, a difference to how she inhabits her own skin. Her body hasn’t felt like something that belongs to her in a long, long time.
(It makes her unchanged appearance somehow grotesque. (She resents mirrors, or water clear enough to reflect; she often finds them shattered in her wake, or muddied and disturbed.) Save for the golden scar ripped across her cheek, she looks the same as she did in her youth, as a queen – but when she moves, she does not move the same way at all, and, though she is not sure what you might find if you look at her too closely, she is sure that it is something darker than any darkness she used to possess.)
It is cold on the coast, during the winter – colder still for the wind, which buffets her, but does not seem to disturb her trailing white hair, which rushes and dances behind her in the opposite direction entirely of each passing gust. Her telekinesis has become more unhinged, lately, and, paradoxically, far stronger. She does not want to think of the implications; she is trying not to think of the implications. She does not want to think of a lot of things, all of those responsibilities and people that she knows that she is running from, but she is doing a poor job of thinking of anything else. She is not even sure that she is willing to admit that she is alive. Most of the time, she doesn’t feel like she woke up, after he killed her – most of the time she feels like she shouldn’t have woken up. (It is hardly fair to the dead.)
Ereshkigal trails behind her in lazy spirals, a dark speck against a tumultuous and grey sky. Occasionally, she dips down low over the sea, talons outstretched, and catches the squirming, silver shape of a fish; the demon is always ravenous. Seraphina’s gaze is turned out towards the waves, which are especially choppy and foam-strewn, suggestive of a coming storm. She is not sure what draws her out to the coast so often nowadays, though, if she had to guess, she would guess that it is some misguided fatalism. To Seraphina, drowning is a very particular kind of death. She remembers her delusions of being swallowed by great waves of black water as she was bleeding out just as sharply as she remembers the flowers, and the moon; and sometimes she still wakes up at night drowning, her mouth choked with water, unsure if she is on the Steppe or in a maze that no longer exists.
Needless to say – she has long given up ambitions of learning to swim.
She is picking her way across a black and rocky stretch of beach when the winds shift, bringing with them the abrupt revelation that she is not alone. The realization is not alarming; she recognizes him, though, until she turns her head to look back at him over the curve of her shoulder, she doubts her senses, but there he is, in the flesh.
“I thought,” she says, slowly – her voice raised above the howl of the wind, “that you’d left, Asterion.” She suspects he could say the same of her. (Disappeared, dead, swallowed by the dunes; in any case, lost.)
Perhaps that is why she speaks with no condemnation. Her voice is subdued, and, though her tone is inscrutable (if vaguely, strangely empathetic), it lacks any pretense of the mechanical apathy she used to hold up like a shield.
(Rather than the steel she is meant to be, she more often feels that she acts the part of a gaping wound.)
tags | @Asterion
notes | sad immortals that ran away from their lives meetup?I wrote this in the middle of the night yesterday & I keep noticing Problems, please forgive me for any incoherence
"speech"
I do not know many things. Least of all
my own tendency to see stars and think first of dying.
Once, her hooves sunk into the sand when she walked on the beach. Now, out of habit – learned behavior, cultivated over months of work as a revolutionary, traveler, desert ghost -, her hooves hover a few inches above the sandbank. There is a difference in how she inhabits the world, nowadays; she seems to feel like less and less a part of it all the time, like she is watching it slip away from her like sand carried out by the tides. There is a difference in how she inhabits the world, and, by extension, a difference to how she inhabits her own skin. Her body hasn’t felt like something that belongs to her in a long, long time.
(It makes her unchanged appearance somehow grotesque. (She resents mirrors, or water clear enough to reflect; she often finds them shattered in her wake, or muddied and disturbed.) Save for the golden scar ripped across her cheek, she looks the same as she did in her youth, as a queen – but when she moves, she does not move the same way at all, and, though she is not sure what you might find if you look at her too closely, she is sure that it is something darker than any darkness she used to possess.)
It is cold on the coast, during the winter – colder still for the wind, which buffets her, but does not seem to disturb her trailing white hair, which rushes and dances behind her in the opposite direction entirely of each passing gust. Her telekinesis has become more unhinged, lately, and, paradoxically, far stronger. She does not want to think of the implications; she is trying not to think of the implications. She does not want to think of a lot of things, all of those responsibilities and people that she knows that she is running from, but she is doing a poor job of thinking of anything else. She is not even sure that she is willing to admit that she is alive. Most of the time, she doesn’t feel like she woke up, after he killed her – most of the time she feels like she shouldn’t have woken up. (It is hardly fair to the dead.)
Ereshkigal trails behind her in lazy spirals, a dark speck against a tumultuous and grey sky. Occasionally, she dips down low over the sea, talons outstretched, and catches the squirming, silver shape of a fish; the demon is always ravenous. Seraphina’s gaze is turned out towards the waves, which are especially choppy and foam-strewn, suggestive of a coming storm. She is not sure what draws her out to the coast so often nowadays, though, if she had to guess, she would guess that it is some misguided fatalism. To Seraphina, drowning is a very particular kind of death. She remembers her delusions of being swallowed by great waves of black water as she was bleeding out just as sharply as she remembers the flowers, and the moon; and sometimes she still wakes up at night drowning, her mouth choked with water, unsure if she is on the Steppe or in a maze that no longer exists.
Needless to say – she has long given up ambitions of learning to swim.
She is picking her way across a black and rocky stretch of beach when the winds shift, bringing with them the abrupt revelation that she is not alone. The realization is not alarming; she recognizes him, though, until she turns her head to look back at him over the curve of her shoulder, she doubts her senses, but there he is, in the flesh.
“I thought,” she says, slowly – her voice raised above the howl of the wind, “that you’d left, Asterion.” She suspects he could say the same of her. (Disappeared, dead, swallowed by the dunes; in any case, lost.)
Perhaps that is why she speaks with no condemnation. Her voice is subdued, and, though her tone is inscrutable (if vaguely, strangely empathetic), it lacks any pretense of the mechanical apathy she used to hold up like a shield.
(Rather than the steel she is meant to be, she more often feels that she acts the part of a gaping wound.)
tags | @Asterion
notes | sad immortals that ran away from their lives meetup?
"speech"
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
