[AW] ashes to ashes, dust to dust | fire

[Seraphina]

GENTLE LADY, DO NOT SING
sad songs about the end of love; / lay aside sadness and sing / how love that passes is enough.

Her brows raise, almost imperceptibly, when he asks for a sun.

A sun between his eyes. She can imagine the symbolism – though, from his foreign accent, she does not know if they truly speak of the same sun. Seraphina dabs the last blots of the brush away, and then she raises the brush to float between his eyes, even as they fall closed. Months ago, when pregnant, she had hated Solis more than she ever thought possible. She had hated him more than she did when she was a girl-soldier, or when she was struck down by Raum, or when her kingdom was made ash or smoke or statue. She had hated him more than she had when the court was consumed by ice and snow, more than she had when she was gathered to speak with him and forced to confront all the ways that he had known about their mortal sufferings and done nothing. She had hated him more than all of her prior hatreds combined.

She had hated him because, though all those other things had been their own small evils, they had never seemed like a game. It had never felt as though he was playing with their lives, only that he was negligent, and then-

Seraphina had wondered if she could love her children, under the circumstances. She had never been good at loving anything. Now she wonders how she could not love them, and that is nearly worse. Every single thing that she has loved – and, worse still, every single thing that has loved her – she has failed, in one terrible way or another. She does not know if there is anything in her that could bear failing them, too. She longs for them to have better than she did, and she longs for them to remain fever-bright for their entire lives-

(Not only, she hopes, because they have become the only bright things in hers.)

So, when she paints the sun, she paints it like her daughter, which is to say she paints it proper Solterran. She does not know if it was the sun he was hoping for, or the one that he was imagining, but it is the only kind of sun that she knows. Each brushstroke is careful, nearly-caring, ornate; each brushstroke crafts one creeping fire after another until it seems to her life-bringer and light-bringer, until the very center of it seems bright enough to glow. It is only then that she is satisfied, and only then that she pulls the brush away, dipping it back into the bucket it came from and swirling it in the paint anew.

(She nearly puts some bright gemstone at the center of it, but she decides that would be too childish for his stern, warlike face.)

She is not quite prepared for him to open his eyes, although she is almost done with it, and she is not quite prepared for the question that he asks. She studies the shape of his face, the look in his eyes; and there is a part of her that does not want to answer, because she is so terribly afraid of the thought of the world getting its teeth into her children, and any mention of them to others means that more people might know of them to bite down. “I’m looking for my daughter,” she says, finally her voice gentling, somehow, around the mention of her child, “though my companion is searching for her, now. She seems to sneak off whenever I look away from her.” She is a wild thing like that. Sometimes it makes her ache.

(Somewhere in the smoke, she can feel the triumphant and half-vicious half-eager flutter of her bonded’s heart; she is probably excited to watch her scold her child. Seraphina only hopes that she hasn’t lost Ambrose while she was looking for Diana – he is too tender-hearted, and he knows nothing of what it means to navigate such a swelling crowd.)

Her eyes drift to meet his own, and she thinks that it is only proper to return his question. “Why are you here?” She wonders if he is on his own, and why - this festival of new-life and fire is not something that should be attended alone, and even she is sure of that.

Between his eyes, she completes the lick of the flames that border the sun, tapering the brush down to the end of each sharpened edge.

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@Vercingtorix || <3 || james joyce, "gentle lady, do not sing"

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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