daddy didn’t love you, gotta burn it all down
There is something that changes as she turns, her steps light, her posture surely wretched as fatigue courses through every muscle and vein. Perhaps it is simply a figment of Israfel’s lethargic imagination, a placebo effect fueled by days of nonstop travel to return home... A brush of a lilac petal caresses her cheek like an old friend and vermilion eyes close, slowly blinking once before they open and shift, focusing upon a golden form. Familiar, yet it has been so long that the Sun Daughter feels as though she is looking upon a stranger.
The statue of Vespera was beautiful in its own right, but that beauty pales beneath the splendor that is Florentine.
The citadel and her bed of silks forgotten, the Regent turns to fully face Terrastella’s former queen. “Florentine.” There is no longer a preamble, no longer a ‘my queen’, no longer a little head tilt in a lazy acknowledgement that once was so very frequent.
Thoughts run rampant in the Sun Daughter’s head as her eyes rooted upon the woman’s golden, matronly features, memories long buried, fleeting and delicate like a butterfly wing. To grasp them would surely be to ruin them, so Israfel let them pass without possessiveness, recalling them as they came and appreciating them as they left. She could build cathedrals with the words left unsaid between them and yet it would never be enough.
They had not always agreed, she and Florentine. They had not always seen eye to eye, but Israfel had always respected the Golden Lady of Terrastella. Florentine, with her lavender eyes far too wise for her years, hardened and shaped and molded by the greatest artists of all; Time and Experience. Perhaps those hands had touched them both.
A tired smile pulls at the corner of rose-kissed lips and she chuckles, the sound raspy and faint. Casting a glance to the bottle of amber whiskey, the Regent spoke. “Seems she and I have something in common, then. Who would have thought.”
Sucking in a deep breath of the frigid night air, Israfel allowed the prolonged silence to settle between them both for a few moments longer before daring a step closer. Not too close, of course, but the ivory dun rolled a shoulder and glanced sidelong at the guards still on duty. A reunion long overdue beneath the opal eyes of a stone goddess? Who would have known.
“I’ve missed you, too. It’s good to see you again Florentine.” The final inquiry, a loaded question. What, indeed, had changed? ’Everything’, she wanted to say, feeling the words bubble up and rise in the back of her throat, collecting on her tongue and dying to be spilt, ’I feel so lost, so trapped, so confused. Ulric is gone and I think my daughter hates me. I’ve failed as a mother and a soldier and I fear as though there is no redemption from this. I’m trying to move on, but my duty is unclear and I no longer understand what is expected of me. I feel like I’m drowning, Flora. Do you know what that’s like? Do you understand?’
Instead, she simply says; “Oh, you know; the usual.” Maybe Florentine would understand. Israfel wanted to believe that she would. Life had not exactly been kind to either of them, after all. Frowning a little and glancing away, blinking hard for a moment, she exhaled. “... Where have you been, Flora?”
There was no emotion for what Israfel was feeling, and so she simply resigned herself to feeling them all and knowing not what to call them.
