BECAUSE NOTHING SHE COULD SAY COULD CHANGE THE MELTED MUSIC OF HER SPACE
Because the privilege of her misery was something she could not disgrace / Because no one could imagine reasons for her grief / Because her grief required no imagination / Because it was raining outside the palace / Because there was no rain in her vicinity.☼
“So,” Ereshkigal says, and laughs in a sound like the waves, “have you decided what you’re going to name them?”
It takes every ounce of Seraphina’s self-control not to reach for the bird – and, while reaching, to curve the sickle-shape of it around the slender curve of her throat and press down, hard. The violence of the impulse nearly shocks her, but it doesn’t; she has spent most of her life violent. What surprises her instead is the suddenness, the way that she can normally tolerate the demon’s prodding without batting an eye, the way that she nearly wears her bruises like they are begging to be disturbed, the way that she has the distinct feeling that she is standing on the edge of something precipitous, and any wrong move will send her falling somewhere sharp and dark, into some abyss even deeper and emptier than the ones she has tried to claw her way out of before.
She looks at the bird – the demon – for a moment, sharp glints of eyes alight with ill-contained loathing. (Ereshkigal laughs, again. She is always laughing, and it is never at anything good.) And then she looks away, towards the black, churning waves beating up against the shoreline, and she sets her jaw in a line and refuses to let any words out of her mouth, or to allow any of her wayward thoughts to leak out to her companion. Ereshkigal would only find them hysterical, she is sure. She would only encourage them. She would love to see her try to kill her – and she’d love it even more, when, inevitably, she faltered, when she could not do it.
And as for the names – she is trying not to think of them.
She knows what Viceroy named her, once, so many years ago; she knows because it is Seraphina, it is burning one, it is a cruel irony and a skin that she tries to shed whenever she meets some new stranger. Burning one, with her empty-eyed stare, with her perpetual frostbite, with her skin like a trail of ash and smoke. Burning one, unable to ever set herself ablaze. The name doesn’t suit her at all – and it probably wasn’t meant to. She’s sure that he meant for it to be unattainable, and a disappointment.
She is only like a fire in that she fears drowning.
Whatever her name was before that, she is sure that it was more beloved. She doesn’t recall her mother much, anymore, and she can’t remember when she could remember her last – at least in more than broken shards, pieces that didn’t quite fit together. She has the distinct feeling that she was loved, though she cannot remember it, and she is sure that she was given a loving name in kind.
Even if she remembered it, it would no longer be hers; but here is the question. Can she love these children, even knowing that she never, ever-
She has spent most of her life wondering if she could love anything. Unfortunately, she knows that she can, because there is this aching burn inside of her where all the things and the people that she used to love and lost used to be – but she is still not so sure that she can love anything right. She has tried to console herself. She has tried to tell herself that she can take care of them, at least, even if she doesn’t know how to love them like she should. That would be something, at least, more than what she’d seen granted to so many children who grew up in the sands of the Mors-
-but it would not be enough, and she knows it, but, if she thinks about it for very long at all, she finds herself overwhelmed again. Hopeless, or maybe helpless, if there is any real distinction between the two.
She shoulders it. Licks salt off her lips.
(Ereshkigal is probably right – she can’t put off thinking about it forever.)
The sky is clear and winter-grey, and the waves are frothy and darker than she remembers, swirled with grit and kelp; it almost reminds her of ink, and that of a maze she stepped into so long ago that it feels like she lived it in another life. (It probably was; she does not need Ereshkigal’s insistence to tell her that she should have died, after her fight with Raum.) It is cold, but she doesn’t want to be in Solterra right now, and she hasn’t in weeks. She does not want to think of the sun, or of the sun god, or of the kingdom left in ashes and stone in her wake. She does not want to consider if this is meant to be some twisted blessing or some belated punishment. Most of all, she does not want to be seen by anyone who might recognize her, and the world outside of the desert knows her less.
She pulls the yellow fabric of her scarf tighter about her throat, shields her face; pulls it over her eyes so she cannot find herself looking again, disbelievingly, at her sides, and the way that she can barely recognize them as her own.
@Eik || <3 <3 <3 || june jordan, "what great grief has made the empress mute?" ; title from "eurydice," h.d.
Sera || Eresh
Because the privilege of her misery was something she could not disgrace / Because no one could imagine reasons for her grief / Because her grief required no imagination / Because it was raining outside the palace / Because there was no rain in her vicinity.☼
“So,” Ereshkigal says, and laughs in a sound like the waves, “have you decided what you’re going to name them?”
It takes every ounce of Seraphina’s self-control not to reach for the bird – and, while reaching, to curve the sickle-shape of it around the slender curve of her throat and press down, hard. The violence of the impulse nearly shocks her, but it doesn’t; she has spent most of her life violent. What surprises her instead is the suddenness, the way that she can normally tolerate the demon’s prodding without batting an eye, the way that she nearly wears her bruises like they are begging to be disturbed, the way that she has the distinct feeling that she is standing on the edge of something precipitous, and any wrong move will send her falling somewhere sharp and dark, into some abyss even deeper and emptier than the ones she has tried to claw her way out of before.
She looks at the bird – the demon – for a moment, sharp glints of eyes alight with ill-contained loathing. (Ereshkigal laughs, again. She is always laughing, and it is never at anything good.) And then she looks away, towards the black, churning waves beating up against the shoreline, and she sets her jaw in a line and refuses to let any words out of her mouth, or to allow any of her wayward thoughts to leak out to her companion. Ereshkigal would only find them hysterical, she is sure. She would only encourage them. She would love to see her try to kill her – and she’d love it even more, when, inevitably, she faltered, when she could not do it.
And as for the names – she is trying not to think of them.
She knows what Viceroy named her, once, so many years ago; she knows because it is Seraphina, it is burning one, it is a cruel irony and a skin that she tries to shed whenever she meets some new stranger. Burning one, with her empty-eyed stare, with her perpetual frostbite, with her skin like a trail of ash and smoke. Burning one, unable to ever set herself ablaze. The name doesn’t suit her at all – and it probably wasn’t meant to. She’s sure that he meant for it to be unattainable, and a disappointment.
She is only like a fire in that she fears drowning.
Whatever her name was before that, she is sure that it was more beloved. She doesn’t recall her mother much, anymore, and she can’t remember when she could remember her last – at least in more than broken shards, pieces that didn’t quite fit together. She has the distinct feeling that she was loved, though she cannot remember it, and she is sure that she was given a loving name in kind.
Even if she remembered it, it would no longer be hers; but here is the question. Can she love these children, even knowing that she never, ever-
She has spent most of her life wondering if she could love anything. Unfortunately, she knows that she can, because there is this aching burn inside of her where all the things and the people that she used to love and lost used to be – but she is still not so sure that she can love anything right. She has tried to console herself. She has tried to tell herself that she can take care of them, at least, even if she doesn’t know how to love them like she should. That would be something, at least, more than what she’d seen granted to so many children who grew up in the sands of the Mors-
-but it would not be enough, and she knows it, but, if she thinks about it for very long at all, she finds herself overwhelmed again. Hopeless, or maybe helpless, if there is any real distinction between the two.
She shoulders it. Licks salt off her lips.
(Ereshkigal is probably right – she can’t put off thinking about it forever.)
The sky is clear and winter-grey, and the waves are frothy and darker than she remembers, swirled with grit and kelp; it almost reminds her of ink, and that of a maze she stepped into so long ago that it feels like she lived it in another life. (It probably was; she does not need Ereshkigal’s insistence to tell her that she should have died, after her fight with Raum.) It is cold, but she doesn’t want to be in Solterra right now, and she hasn’t in weeks. She does not want to think of the sun, or of the sun god, or of the kingdom left in ashes and stone in her wake. She does not want to consider if this is meant to be some twisted blessing or some belated punishment. Most of all, she does not want to be seen by anyone who might recognize her, and the world outside of the desert knows her less.
She pulls the yellow fabric of her scarf tighter about her throat, shields her face; pulls it over her eyes so she cannot find herself looking again, disbelievingly, at her sides, and the way that she can barely recognize them as her own.
@
Sera || Eresh
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
