PUT ANOTHER WAY, I WAS ALMOST
on empty, and though no one / believed it or cared to see, I was just another / animal, and like all animals / desired, we would suffer.
When she asks him if he’s heard of Solterra, the dark corners of his lips shift into something of a smirk. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I haven't quite left these plains. He clears his throat, and the sound of it makes him seem the part; but her stare on his face is not judgmental. (It is probably more accurate to say that her mismatched stare reveals nothing at all.) I uh, traveled a fair distance from the lands I called home in search of an opportunity to learn more about the less primitive means of medicine. So he is a doctor, of some sort or another. She wouldn’t have guessed it – but, then, Solterra does not have many doctors in the first place, and she has known even fewer personally.
(She supposes that it would explain the persistent way that his eyes seem to twitch to her sides. It almost makes her feel like she should apologize, or insist that she is doing her best; but she knows better, and she is tired of defending herself besides.)
She nods, half-thoughtfully. She does not know much of medicine, beyond the rudimentary sort that she picked up through necessity on the battlefield and in the desert, which is nearly as dangerous regardless, but she has heard many things from strangers that came from lands that were unlike Novus; it does not surprise her that he might have come looking. (For a moment, she thinks of herself years ago, in the library with Eik.)
As she stumbles over her stilted response to his congratulations, he manages to change the subject, to her silent relief. She does not want to think about her children; she wants to think of them even less in front of a perfect stranger. Does this...Solterra, have a doctor? She only knows the political state of her country vaguely, and its inhabitants have grown even more mysterious to her; most of the ones that she knew and – and loved had long disappeared into the dunes, or for distant lands. She knows that there are doctors in the court, however, and so she nods. (The Ieshan daughter, if no others, but she knows that they do have a hospital in the court. What she is not so sure of is the skill of its practitioners.)
(In the back of her mind, Ereshkigal grins, and she prods at the way that she still finds herself guiding strangers across the dunes. Seraphina ignores her.)
“There are a few,” she says, carefully, “but there is always a need for more – the desert is dangerous.” She doesn’t make the offer explicitly, but she does leave it hanging in the air between them, unspoken: if you want to go there, I can guide you.
@
"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
