☼ S E R A P H I N A ☼
my body, the quiet grave
it's the difference between drowning & burning
Seraphina catches herself picking apart all the way that this conversation feels just a bit wrong to her, all the ways that it grates against her in a way that makes her skin – not quite crawl, but shift, like it is being rubbed down with sandpaper. She catches herself doing it, and then she forces her thoughts to settle and forces her stare back out to the white-foam crest of coming waves. There is one thing that comes to rest in her mind, sure as the shaft of an arrow; neither of them are the same as they were when they met, years ago. She is sure that it was at a festival. (She cannot remember what was said.)
A shake of his head. Do you still claim religion, Seraphina?
It isn’t a question that she knows how to answer.
“I suppose that depends on what you mean by religion.” Her lips twitch into something of a wry smile. “It’s hard to deny the existence of the gods, I suppose, now that I’ve seen them – and that’s half the battle of faith. But for all the rest…” She trails off, then, a hint of something that is almost-sadness in the tapering of her voice, and there is a pause before she manages to come to an answer. “If I am,” Seraphina says, feeling strangely unsure of the words as they settle in her mouth, “I think that it’s mostly a matter of habit.”
(Did religion mean believing in salvation from a god that she knows is caught halfway between cruel and apathetic? She had already abandoned all hope of him saving her. What she hopes for now, the only thing that she longs for from him, is to be heard. To be not-forgotten. To be something other than ghost, to have anyone listen to her, to know how she feels from the inside out. What she wants from Solis, she knows, is closer to intimacy than salvation; it is to feel like there is one person, just one, who knows her as she is, without all of her clumsy attempts at explaining.
She knows – in the same way that she knows gravity, the turn of the sun in the sky, the way waves crash on the shore - that he won’t grant her that, either. It does little to quell all her quiet longings. At least, she thinks, some omnipotent god surely knows that they exist.)
She wonders if he will understand that at all. She wonders if he will understand the way that she catches herself praying even though she knows that her prayers will go unanswered, all because it is familiar, it is routine, it was all but beaten into her. She wonders if he would understand how letting go of Solis would mean letting one last part of her be stolen away, how it would be a dead man’s one last act of taking from her. She wonders if it matters if he will understand or not, before she settles for the truth of the matter, which is that it doesn’t.
He tells her that those he loves are here, and she nods. Nothing else is necessary; she can understand that well enough, at least, much as she struggles to understand love as anything unlike obligation.
There is something that lingers in her mind, however, on the tail end of his own question. “…are there gods in your homeland, Asterion?” is what she asks, dropping the subject of leave-taking entirely, but she doesn’t think that it’s quite what she means. She is not entirely sure that she can conceive of a land that is godless entire; she struggles to conceive of another land at all. (She has barely strayed from Novus.)
Regardless. His question makes her wonder. (And what she wonders, too, but does not ask (because she knows that her wondering is for reasons more selfish than simple curiosity): what is it like there? What kind of place did you come from? Why did you decide to leave?)
tags | @Asterion
notes | <3
"speech"
my body, the quiet grave
it's the difference between drowning & burning
Seraphina catches herself picking apart all the way that this conversation feels just a bit wrong to her, all the ways that it grates against her in a way that makes her skin – not quite crawl, but shift, like it is being rubbed down with sandpaper. She catches herself doing it, and then she forces her thoughts to settle and forces her stare back out to the white-foam crest of coming waves. There is one thing that comes to rest in her mind, sure as the shaft of an arrow; neither of them are the same as they were when they met, years ago. She is sure that it was at a festival. (She cannot remember what was said.)
A shake of his head. Do you still claim religion, Seraphina?
It isn’t a question that she knows how to answer.
“I suppose that depends on what you mean by religion.” Her lips twitch into something of a wry smile. “It’s hard to deny the existence of the gods, I suppose, now that I’ve seen them – and that’s half the battle of faith. But for all the rest…” She trails off, then, a hint of something that is almost-sadness in the tapering of her voice, and there is a pause before she manages to come to an answer. “If I am,” Seraphina says, feeling strangely unsure of the words as they settle in her mouth, “I think that it’s mostly a matter of habit.”
(Did religion mean believing in salvation from a god that she knows is caught halfway between cruel and apathetic? She had already abandoned all hope of him saving her. What she hopes for now, the only thing that she longs for from him, is to be heard. To be not-forgotten. To be something other than ghost, to have anyone listen to her, to know how she feels from the inside out. What she wants from Solis, she knows, is closer to intimacy than salvation; it is to feel like there is one person, just one, who knows her as she is, without all of her clumsy attempts at explaining.
She knows – in the same way that she knows gravity, the turn of the sun in the sky, the way waves crash on the shore - that he won’t grant her that, either. It does little to quell all her quiet longings. At least, she thinks, some omnipotent god surely knows that they exist.)
She wonders if he will understand that at all. She wonders if he will understand the way that she catches herself praying even though she knows that her prayers will go unanswered, all because it is familiar, it is routine, it was all but beaten into her. She wonders if he would understand how letting go of Solis would mean letting one last part of her be stolen away, how it would be a dead man’s one last act of taking from her. She wonders if it matters if he will understand or not, before she settles for the truth of the matter, which is that it doesn’t.
He tells her that those he loves are here, and she nods. Nothing else is necessary; she can understand that well enough, at least, much as she struggles to understand love as anything unlike obligation.
There is something that lingers in her mind, however, on the tail end of his own question. “…are there gods in your homeland, Asterion?” is what she asks, dropping the subject of leave-taking entirely, but she doesn’t think that it’s quite what she means. She is not entirely sure that she can conceive of a land that is godless entire; she struggles to conceive of another land at all. (She has barely strayed from Novus.)
Regardless. His question makes her wonder. (And what she wonders, too, but does not ask (because she knows that her wondering is for reasons more selfish than simple curiosity): what is it like there? What kind of place did you come from? Why did you decide to leave?)
tags | @Asterion
notes | <3
"speech"
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
