[P] the order you've imposed is just pretense;

[Seraphina]

my mania becomes / a metaphor / the word kindling /
the way a small burning thing becomes a fire / the way that this makes the fire / once again / a small burning / thing / after all what is a sun / but every possible thing / burning?

It’s cold.

The creekbed has not gone dry in winter, but much of the creek has frozen over; a few deeper eddies swirl beneath icy overtures, here and there, their sound reduced to a whisper, but the creek seems strangely silent and strangely still. The waterfall has frozen entirely and frozen foam-white, less like ice than a jutting rock formation grown on the side of the ledge. The grass is dead and brown, bent over beneath its own weight, and the trees have lost all their leaves, bare-bone branches reaching up towards a near-white sky. (There are clouds, but they are thin; she can see the sun through a haze. It will snow, soon.) During the spring, Seraphina knows that Amare looks beautiful. Now, it looks ashen and dead. There is no wind. Nothing disturbs the grass, or her long white mane, or the empty branches.

Only the water moves, and, even then, only barely – strangled by jutting river-stones and thick sheets of ice.

It’s cold. She is unarmored and unarmed; she isn’t sure if she even needs weapons, anymore. Sometimes she thinks that she could simply fling someone and crush their skull, but she tries not to think about it. (It reminds her too much of her own skull, crushed.) She resents the sound it makes in her mind.

Ereshkigal is gone, today. She is not sure why, but she was not at her side when she woke this morning. She has not called for her, but she imagines that she is hunting. Prey is scarce during the winter; she works harder, and longer, to find something to devour, particularly when they are not in Solterra. Seraphina is not sure that the demon needs to eat, but she certainly seems to enjoy the taste of blood in her mouth. (She cannot sympathize.)

It feels strange to be without her. She loathes the demon, and the demon loathes her – but, in all her lonely wanderings, she has trailed after her like another limb, an extension of herself. Her presence is a barrier against being all alone – terribly alone – with her thoughts.

Now she is alone. The world is silent, and the world is still, and she cannot help but feel like she is frozen, like the mottled creekbed, but frozen in a time and a place that no longer exist. She isn’t even sure why she came here, on the slow walk back from Veneror. She didn’t have to. (The answer, though she would not admit it, is that she is never quite sure how to return home.) She didn’t have to, but now she is here, and she is cold in a way that the desert never is, and she is sure that it will snow soon.

Her breath trails behind her like fog. She walks on the bank, but, as she approaches the white arc of the frozen waterfall, she steps out onto the ice, her steps tentative although she hovers above the ground. (There is no danger of falling in, and the water is shallow, but she dares not look down regardless.) She takes one step, and then another, and then another, and finally she finds herself standing at the center of what would be the pool the waterfall feeds into, somewhat deeper than the rest of the creek. (Fish collect here, in the spring – fish and snakes, and frogs.)

She stands, white cloud of her breath collecting in front of her face, and, ever so slowly, her magic seems to dribble out of her like water, and, for the first time in what must have been quite a while, her hooves press down on something solid.

The ice creaks beneath them, unyielding and entirely unlike sand.

She looks up – towards the frozen spray of waterfall, and the rocks leading up the cliffside, and the clouds collecting snow, and the sun.

---

<3 || time for.....an attempt............................ || torrin a. greathouse, "self-portrait as a kindling model of hypomaniac symptoms"

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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