YOU SAY: SOFT.
You say: tender. / I say: there is a hole in me that needs tearing open.
When she realizes that she is not alone, she does not quite react. There is the backwards flick of one of her ears towards the sound of hooves, but otherwise – she is nearly statuesque, perfectly still, unconcerned. (At her hip, Alshamtueur gives a soft sizzle, but she never pulls it from its scabbard.) There is a beat of wings, and then Ereshkigal is in the air again, having, evidently, done enough; Seraphina does not flinch away from her, and she does not watch as her dark shape goes circling up and up, then sweeps out to sea, perhaps to hunt. She is always hunting, always ravenous. Sometimes Seraphina understands her hunger more than she would like to admit.
And she is still hovering – quite like a ghost, in the way that she does not touch the ground, in the way her white hair swirls in spectral, suspended tangles, in the way that she is not quite present, in every way save for the trickle of blood on her shoulder – when the golden mare approaches her, and when she whispers in a soft and sweet voice, tells her that she is bleeding, that they should see to her wound, that her name is Elena. Her head turns, ever so slowly, and her gaze slowly turns to the golden mare, the golden scar on her cheek catching like a dash of flame in the low, storm-swept light. The look in her eyes is strangely vacant, and strangely cold; she is angular, and there is a dark sallowness to her features that betrays her sleeplessness, her near-starvation, how she has spent the better part of two years wishing that she could disappear entirely.
There is something about her worry that burns her. There is something that she wants that she cannot find words for.
In the end – she was never quite strong enough to save herself. She was never quite strong enough to play the hero either; it was always someone else, and she was always, at best, collateral damage. (In the end – it seemed like everyone around her scattered like ashes or smoke, and somehow she had found herself isolated, only half-meaning to. Maybe she’d hoped that someone would catch her, or find her, or stop her. Thought that someone would catch her, or find her, or stop her. Maybe she didn’t want them to. Maybe she wanted to disappear entirely, never be seen again. She craves both; she is shame and loneliness, two kinds of agony, perpetually torn. And then there is that part of herself that knows that all of this is deserved, a kind of useless punishment that serves no one (least of all the dead), that she should stop longing for things that she knows she cannot have and will never, ever deserve.) And now she has this golden girl, so like Bexley Briar, so unlike Bexley Briar, so like the sun, and so unlike the sun god, worrying over a scratch on her shoulder.
Her concern stings like a slap to the jaw. It doesn’t show on Seraphina’s face.
The scene reminds her of, in some twisted and unpleasant way, the night she’d met Caine. She could laugh; she could cry. She does not do either. Instead, she dips her head, and says, softly, “It’s superficial – you don’t need to trouble yourself.”
She should introduce herself, she knows. It would be more – polite.
Lately she does not even want to speak her name aloud.
@
"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
