YOU SAY: THAT ISN'T HOW HEALING WORKS.
I say: I know.
Try as she might – Seraphina can only think, as she looks at this golden creature, bright as the sun in all the ways that Bexley Briar and Solis are not, that she is enviable.
Because, no matter how she might try, she knows that she could never approach anyone with the unrestrained warmth that shows on the woman’s face when she approaches her – she knows that she could never show such easy compassion, not to friend or stranger alike. It doesn’t matter, really, if she cares. No matter how much she does, the right words can never quite make it out of her mouth; her lips can never twist their way into the right expression. She has always been clumsy, horribly and fatally mortal; she has never been good at capturing the heart of anyone, and, whenever she has managed to do it, she has never deserved what has come from it. Respect – or loyalty – or affection, or maybe even-
She doesn’t want to think of love. (She never does.)
So, when the woman approaches her in spite of her quiet resistance, soft-eyed, warm as sunlight (but not on the Mors; it is scalding, there, but never warm), and she tells her that she would like to see to her wounds regardless, she feels envy like a hot jab between the ribs. Nearly like a sword. She forces it out of her almost immediately, because she does not wish to be as bitter as she is, and she meets the woman’s sky-blue eyes (and even her one blue eye is more like ice than the sky-), offering the slowest nod of consent.
“If you wish,” Seraphina murmurs, “then thank you.” She isn’t quite thankful; she isn’t ungrateful, either. She is taking her time to heal a scratch, which is something she might have bothered to do herself (even for a stranger, but she is trying not to think of the time that she did), before she had grown so apathetic.
When had she become so utterly hopeless, she wonders? She trails after the golden girl like a ghost. Like smoke. Surely, even when she was a soldier, she hadn’t been like this – she had still been devoted to something. Now she is worldless. Sometimes she feels like nothing at all, and not quite in the useless, embodied way that she did when she was younger-
No. Sometimes she feels like nothing at all because she finds herself feeling lonely, nauseatingly lonely, and she can never find the right words.
The woman asks her if she knows any stories.
She snaps her mind to the question – relieved, as it is, for anything else to cling to.
“I might,” she says, and she tries to think of Solterra as she knew it as a girl, of the stories that she learned by the fire at night, the ones that she read, as the Emissary, as the Queen, before her world collapsed in on itself over and over again. She tries to think of a Solterra that is not burning, the rise and fall of dunes unmarked by blood or bone or time-frozen statue. Of course, she can’t. Trying to deny the past is as good as trying to deny reality – and Solterra, she knows, no matter how much she might have loved it, no matter how much she might have longed to nurture it, will never be good, or kind, or loving. “What kind of story would you like to hear?”
She thinks that she might still have some, buried like a seed somewhere in her breast, waiting for spring.
(It is winter, regardless.)
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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
