I'M NOT CRAZY,
but when the sun split / him wide, he left me this, look, / my body veined in soot.☼
Seraphina listens to his story in silence. It could almost be pitying, but it is not quite. (There is some part of her, the child who used to listen to romantic folktales by the fireside, who still wishes for the estranged, star-crossed lovers to find their way back to each other, and to happiness, in the end; but she knows well enough, in her age, that such things rarely happen in reality.) “And what of the woman you fell for?” She tilts her head, white hair falling between her eyes. “What happened to her?” She isn’t sure if she wants to know, because she is sure that it ends in heartache. Still, as she looks at the blurry image of the red-striped woman in the mirror, she can’t help but feel that there is something familiar about her, though she cannot imagine when or where she has seen her before.
She leaves other questions unsaid, ones like why does your goddess ask that of you, that love is no finite resource – she knows that it is probably useless to ask them. Besides, she cares little for Caligo, and for her laughing moon, and for her moonflowers, so, instead of dwelling on his words, when he finally says that there is no such easier world, she nods.
“No, there isn’t.” And here is where she closes her eyes, a soft sigh lighting on her lips. “Regretting the past is useless. All that we can do is keep pressing forward in spite of it.” That is what she tells herself, anyways. Her regret is almost insultingly useless. It will not bring back the dead – there will never be any consolation for the victims of her uselessness and failure. No amount of penance can undo a sin.
Regret implies, besides, that it was ever about her. (It wasn’t.) Most days, she finds herself longing to have died on the Steppe, so she might have died with her dignity intact, so that she would have died for her dead and her nation in the way that she should have, as a kind of atonement – but, instead, she was dragged back, a different kind of hell.
The man seems to put his own struggles aside, and he turns his gaze instead to hers. She studies his face, her lips falling half-open, and considers her words carefully. “I am looking for someone who I’ve for-“ And she pauses, cutting herself off, because that isn’t quite right, and she is trying to force herself to be honest, lately. “…I’m looking for someone whose memories were stolen from me.” She pauses again, her lips twitching into the raw and wry uptick of a not-quite-smile, and she looks at the silver monk ruefully. “I don’t think that I’ll find her here, or anywhere, ever again.” Did that matter? She wasn’t even sure, anymore. No matter how well you remembered your dead, they would stay in the ground, never to return to you.
(What she did not learn, she thinks, from her mother’s fireside fairytales was that sometimes love came crashing to a terrible end, met a sudden and knife-edged fate – and there was no closure for it, and there never would be.)
@Tenebrae || <3 <3 <3 || rebecca dunham, "elegy for the eleven" ; title "Notname," Lyd Havens
Sera || Eresh
but when the sun split / him wide, he left me this, look, / my body veined in soot.☼
Seraphina listens to his story in silence. It could almost be pitying, but it is not quite. (There is some part of her, the child who used to listen to romantic folktales by the fireside, who still wishes for the estranged, star-crossed lovers to find their way back to each other, and to happiness, in the end; but she knows well enough, in her age, that such things rarely happen in reality.) “And what of the woman you fell for?” She tilts her head, white hair falling between her eyes. “What happened to her?” She isn’t sure if she wants to know, because she is sure that it ends in heartache. Still, as she looks at the blurry image of the red-striped woman in the mirror, she can’t help but feel that there is something familiar about her, though she cannot imagine when or where she has seen her before.
She leaves other questions unsaid, ones like why does your goddess ask that of you, that love is no finite resource – she knows that it is probably useless to ask them. Besides, she cares little for Caligo, and for her laughing moon, and for her moonflowers, so, instead of dwelling on his words, when he finally says that there is no such easier world, she nods.
“No, there isn’t.” And here is where she closes her eyes, a soft sigh lighting on her lips. “Regretting the past is useless. All that we can do is keep pressing forward in spite of it.” That is what she tells herself, anyways. Her regret is almost insultingly useless. It will not bring back the dead – there will never be any consolation for the victims of her uselessness and failure. No amount of penance can undo a sin.
Regret implies, besides, that it was ever about her. (It wasn’t.) Most days, she finds herself longing to have died on the Steppe, so she might have died with her dignity intact, so that she would have died for her dead and her nation in the way that she should have, as a kind of atonement – but, instead, she was dragged back, a different kind of hell.
The man seems to put his own struggles aside, and he turns his gaze instead to hers. She studies his face, her lips falling half-open, and considers her words carefully. “I am looking for someone who I’ve for-“ And she pauses, cutting herself off, because that isn’t quite right, and she is trying to force herself to be honest, lately. “…I’m looking for someone whose memories were stolen from me.” She pauses again, her lips twitching into the raw and wry uptick of a not-quite-smile, and she looks at the silver monk ruefully. “I don’t think that I’ll find her here, or anywhere, ever again.” Did that matter? She wasn’t even sure, anymore. No matter how well you remembered your dead, they would stay in the ground, never to return to you.
(What she did not learn, she thinks, from her mother’s fireside fairytales was that sometimes love came crashing to a terrible end, met a sudden and knife-edged fate – and there was no closure for it, and there never would be.)
@Tenebrae || <3 <3 <3 || rebecca dunham, "elegy for the eleven" ; title "Notname," Lyd Havens
Sera || Eresh
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
