☼ S E R A P H I N A ☼
my body, the quiet grave
it's the difference between drowning & burning
Maybe I’m a ghost.
The curve of his lips is horrible, almost.
(She does not mind.)
Asterion is worn-ragged. That is what she thinks, first. Flotsam. She sees it in every unkempt inch of him, in the black and utterly careless curls of his mane – in the way that he moves across the sand, or, perhaps worst of all, in the unsoft darkness of his eyes.
It is ambitious (and untrue) to say that they know each other at all. They have barely met; they have barely spoken. (It has been something like five years since their first encounter, but she tries not to think about it. Her memories are in tatters – she scarcely recalls it – and she has lost her sense of time altogether. It is unbearably slow and terrifyingly fast, all at once. She can barely believe that it has been so long. She can barely believe that she had ever been so young, and she can barely believe that she thought him soft and self-pitying. She could laugh at the irony. Or cry. They’ve changed terribly, haven’t they?)
She feels a palpable wrongness when she looks at him, and she loathes that she takes some strange comfort in it.
Seraphina regards him for a moment, her froth-white hair twisting and bobbing like she is suspended in the sea, not standing in front of it. And then – she moves.
But for the steady, metallic click of Alshamtueur at her hip, when Seraphina bridges the remaining space between them, her approach is silent.
She brushes up against him, the faintest ghost-touch of her side against his. It resembles, barely, the press of his muzzle to her shoulder when they’d met on the island; she still isn’t sure what touch means to her, but she no longer runs from it. (Some foreign, gaping part of her even longs for it, the part that begs for any assurance that this any of this is real and that any part of her is still living.)
It barely lasts a second. She settles into place alongside him, hooves still trailing off the ground; and then her head turns, mismatched eyes shifting to meet his. “We’re both dead, then,” Seraphina says, and her mirthless voice suggests that she is not quite joking, either, her exhale of punctuation the bare echo of dry, cynical laughter.
It occurs to Seraphina that she does not know him well enough to know what to say to him, that they are no longer two sovereigns at work or even two strangers; they are just two once-rulers, ghostly and fleeting as foam on the shoreline.
She turns her stare to the sea, not him, though she wonders if there is any remaining distinction between the two. (She is almost envious. She thinks about what might have happened, were her magic more world-bending and frightening, if it were more a part of her and less some terrible rebellion, more often than she would like to admit, and then she hushes them, because she loathes to think of the past at all.)
A few words catch in her mouth - I saw your sister recently, or what have you been doing with yourself, now that you are no longer a king? or how have you been? (She thinks that she can guess his answer to the third.) They are perfectly polite, cobbled together from the meaningless small talk she became accustomed to during her days in court, as an emissary and a queen alike.
She abandons them, though.
She knows why she left. She died, and she didn’t know how to come back from it. She died, and she might be dead, or she might still be dying – she can never quite say for sure. Her life has seemed like a horrible dream for what must have been years, now, but she forgets that, sometimes, and it barely seems like a moment.
Asterion left. He left his crown behind, where she was torn from the position. She will acquiesce that she has run, lately, but only because she was already tattered; she is not so sure that she has ever chosen to walk away from something in her life. She longs to, sometimes – to leave this land behind, to leave Solterra and its god and all of the people that dwell within it. She never quite has the fortitude.
She is still looking out at the waves when she asks, “Why did you leave?”
tags | @Asterion
notes |my rambling skills are on full display here <3 <3 <3
"speech"
my body, the quiet grave
it's the difference between drowning & burning
Maybe I’m a ghost.
The curve of his lips is horrible, almost.
(She does not mind.)
Asterion is worn-ragged. That is what she thinks, first. Flotsam. She sees it in every unkempt inch of him, in the black and utterly careless curls of his mane – in the way that he moves across the sand, or, perhaps worst of all, in the unsoft darkness of his eyes.
It is ambitious (and untrue) to say that they know each other at all. They have barely met; they have barely spoken. (It has been something like five years since their first encounter, but she tries not to think about it. Her memories are in tatters – she scarcely recalls it – and she has lost her sense of time altogether. It is unbearably slow and terrifyingly fast, all at once. She can barely believe that it has been so long. She can barely believe that she had ever been so young, and she can barely believe that she thought him soft and self-pitying. She could laugh at the irony. Or cry. They’ve changed terribly, haven’t they?)
She feels a palpable wrongness when she looks at him, and she loathes that she takes some strange comfort in it.
Seraphina regards him for a moment, her froth-white hair twisting and bobbing like she is suspended in the sea, not standing in front of it. And then – she moves.
But for the steady, metallic click of Alshamtueur at her hip, when Seraphina bridges the remaining space between them, her approach is silent.
She brushes up against him, the faintest ghost-touch of her side against his. It resembles, barely, the press of his muzzle to her shoulder when they’d met on the island; she still isn’t sure what touch means to her, but she no longer runs from it. (Some foreign, gaping part of her even longs for it, the part that begs for any assurance that this any of this is real and that any part of her is still living.)
It barely lasts a second. She settles into place alongside him, hooves still trailing off the ground; and then her head turns, mismatched eyes shifting to meet his. “We’re both dead, then,” Seraphina says, and her mirthless voice suggests that she is not quite joking, either, her exhale of punctuation the bare echo of dry, cynical laughter.
It occurs to Seraphina that she does not know him well enough to know what to say to him, that they are no longer two sovereigns at work or even two strangers; they are just two once-rulers, ghostly and fleeting as foam on the shoreline.
She turns her stare to the sea, not him, though she wonders if there is any remaining distinction between the two. (She is almost envious. She thinks about what might have happened, were her magic more world-bending and frightening, if it were more a part of her and less some terrible rebellion, more often than she would like to admit, and then she hushes them, because she loathes to think of the past at all.)
A few words catch in her mouth - I saw your sister recently, or what have you been doing with yourself, now that you are no longer a king? or how have you been? (She thinks that she can guess his answer to the third.) They are perfectly polite, cobbled together from the meaningless small talk she became accustomed to during her days in court, as an emissary and a queen alike.
She abandons them, though.
She knows why she left. She died, and she didn’t know how to come back from it. She died, and she might be dead, or she might still be dying – she can never quite say for sure. Her life has seemed like a horrible dream for what must have been years, now, but she forgets that, sometimes, and it barely seems like a moment.
Asterion left. He left his crown behind, where she was torn from the position. She will acquiesce that she has run, lately, but only because she was already tattered; she is not so sure that she has ever chosen to walk away from something in her life. She longs to, sometimes – to leave this land behind, to leave Solterra and its god and all of the people that dwell within it. She never quite has the fortitude.
She is still looking out at the waves when she asks, “Why did you leave?”
tags | @Asterion
notes |
"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
