I say : if the heart is a muscle I will train it to be sinew.
I say : the heart is a muscle and it will resist. / I say : because I am master of myself, I will not be weak.
Winter is as grey as she is.
She is a few inches above each black outcropping of rock and bone-bleach sand; try as she might, she cannot keep her hooves to the ground, anymore. Her magic is wild and hungry, and it spends most days scraping at the inside of her chest, begging to be let out like some starving animal. She doesn’t know what it wants. Sometimes, she is afraid of what it wants.
(Whatever it wants, it isn’t what she wants. It is a second heart beating inside of her. She wonders if it had always been there, even before that night on Veneror; she wonders if Raum gave it to her, violent as the scar on her cheek, or if it has always been a part of her, and he simply brought it out, tooth and claw.
Her magic tells her to grow stronger, from all of this; her magic tells her to become powerful and angry, to become feral and hungry as a sandwyrm. It tells her that she has earned the right, after everything that she has seen, and that it is the only way forward. Her magic tells her that it would be better to seethe than to weep. Her magic tells her that she has nothing left to lose, anyways.
She doesn’t want that. All that Seraphina has ever wanted is-)
The water is grey, and, with it, the sky. Where the sea meets the rocks, where it should be most shallow, where it crashes up on the basalt like an open, foam-toothed mouth, it is nearly black. She doesn’t bother to examine the paradox; it isn’t as though she understands the sea, anyways. Ereshkigal is above her, circling.
The sight is so ordinary that she cannot remember the day. She can barely remember where she is – she presses against the wind like she is walking through water, white hair twisting and coiling in a way that is not quite due to the wind. Her hooves don’t touch the sand. She moves like a ghost. She feels like a ghost. She wonders how long it will take for her to feel like a living thing again.
There were moments – where she did. When Raum was still alive, she still had direction. She still had purpose. Briefly, after his death, she managed to pull herself together. Briefly, after his death, she thought that she might get better.
But there were the nightmares. Every night. There was the backslide, and the guilt. There was the way that she stepped into the capitol one morning and found that she could not look down the streets without wanting to vomit; there is the way that it’s only gotten worse, that she can’t even look towards the city now without feeling nauseas. Every time she thinks that she has managed to pull herself together, she falls apart again.
She hasn’t felt like herself. Not since he killed her.
She wonders if she will ever feel right again. (She wonders if she has ever felt right to begin with.)
She stops when she is hovered above a gnarly outgrowth of basalt, hovering like a specter above the stone; her unbound hair flows behind her, movements in defiance of the wind, and she stares out at the sea, solitary and monochromatic. Ereshkigal’s talons clamp down on her shoulders like a vice as she circles down for a slow landing, though they only pierce her skin at the tips. She doesn’t notice; or, if she does, she doesn’t flinch.
Fine lines of red drip down her legs like small rivers, washing out to the tide.
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"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
