[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.

She knows why Isra made her scars golden, when she pulled her from her grave of upturned dirt and moonflowers.

She knows – though sometimes she would rather not think of it. She knows that she would have been unable to forget them – or what they meant – even if they were not metallic, and she knows that she would likely have resented them more if they were plain and bare, because then they would have been nothing more than a product of Raum; but instead they were filled in with the touch of the night queen, enchanted into something else. She knows what she meant then. There is nothing especially beautiful about her pain, or any other pains that came about because of it, but perhaps, eventually-

Perhaps, eventually, she can be something else. Perhaps, eventually, the scars on her cheek can mean something else, she can be made and remade and be something more than a tortured child or a failed emissary or a dead queen. Perhaps, eventually, she can be something more than a gaping hole, a weeping wound, an empty space, a ghost. Perhaps, eventually-

She has given up on happy endings.

Seraphina stands perfectly still as he takes the brush, retrieves the paint; she has never worn copper before, or indigo, and she is not sure what to expect of him. She is not sure what she expected, when she spoke. (There is always the preemptive expectation of condemnation, of course – but she must remind herself that he is a perfect stranger, and he knows nothing of what it meant when she fell.) She stands still, too, when he begins to paint; her eyes flicker closed as he touches the feather-light tip of the brush to her face, white lashes dipping low over her eyes. My people, he says, in a voice as soft as the press of the brush, give this paint to those who fell in battle and have the courage to return. Ardu o luaithreach. ‘To rise from ashes.’”

She has given up on happy endings. Unblemished ones, like the kind in stories – ones where finally, in the end, the hero is incandescently happy, in spite of everything they have been through. They fall in love, and they have children, and the story ends.

She has given up on happy endings.

(She has given up on endings at all.)

The paint takes the form of branches that spread like new growth across her cheek, spreads into the budding form of vine after vine; nothing, she thinks, that befits a desert creature, a Solterran. She cannot find it in her, however, to reject the paint taking form across the canvas of her face, to dislike it or to find it unbearable. She will always be Solterran, always desert-born, always more at home in the cruelty of the Mors than a field of roses – but, she thinks, perhaps it is not such a bad thing to wear vines instead of dunes, the spreading roots of a tree in the place of a rising sun.

The difference is that she has never been anything but Solterran – and lately, drifting through crowd after crowd, chasing her wayward children across the dunes (Solis-blessed though they may be), and lost, lost, lost, so terribly lost and unrecognizable and lonely, she thinks that she might be able to become something else.

“The paint, and what it symbolizes, is meaningless without action. Or so my people believe. The action ignites the magic within the symbols; It gives them power they might not otherwise have.”

His voice is quiet as an oracle’s. She wonders how long it has been since she spoke with a stranger like this, owing and knowing nothing. His words make something catch in her throat, and, if she were speaking, she is sure that she might have choked on it trying to swallow it down.

In Solterra, the paint is the action. Or – it represents the action, something past and gone. Her eyes flicker open, equal parts fire and ice, and, without moving, she studies his face. She thinks that she might prefer what his people think of the paint to hers; she thinks that the motion might be better than simple memory. Still, she remains silent, and she remains still as a statue, even as he draws the cold strips of paint along her ribs, in ornate pattern and ornate pattern up her legs; and if she knew all the ways that they grew from leaves to stars, if she could see her own reflection from where she was standing, she might have laughed at the irony of it, or she might have simply smiled in some quiet and not-quite-cynical way, aware, as it were, that she could not resent the crescent mouth of the night sky forever. If she could see her own reflection, she might have asked him what the runic symbols, drawn across her ribcage like flecks of ember and ash, meant. Instead, she must trust him. She barely knows him, and this is intimate in a way that she has forgotten how to feel (or feel properly), but she must trust him, and the work of his brush.

He lines her eyes, the tips of her ears. And then, he draws back-

Her gaze settles on the sharp green of his eyes, and she finds that her mouth feels – empty. Strange. “Those who wear scars as you do ought to have the opportunity to rise.”

His words settle on her chest like a heavy weight, and somehow – somehow she finds herself wondering how long she has been wanting to hear them, how long she has been silently and desperately begging for someone, anyone to tell her that she could try again. That she could put the world down, and the scars down, and Raum and the statues and all her murdered and mournful dead into the grave where they belong, that she was alive, still alive, and that she could still be – something, not a collection of parts and people that were already long gone. She is tired of being nothing but grief and guilt and ash, a trail of smoke in the aftermath of some terrible destruction.

She is tired of feeling like she deserves to be dead, like she should be dead, like she owes it to her people to die.

Perhaps – perhaps she owes something else.

When her lips settle into some sort of motion, it isn’t quite a smile. It isn’t quite anything; she doesn’t know how to feel. She settles on the bright green of his eyes, and the paint drying on her skin, and she says, “Thank you.” There is something profoundly genuine in the softness of her tone, something not-quite-tender; something with a hard edge, but not a sharp one. She remains close to him for a moment, not entirely sure what to say, or how to find the words to say it. (For once, it does not quite bother her that she cannot think of how to put it.) But there is the press of Ereshkigal in the back of her mind, and her children, and there is so much to do – and she would like to be home before dawn.

She holds his stare for just a moment longer. “I hope,” she says, “that you can find what you’re looking for.” What, not who, because she knows there is no sense in looking for those who are already lost; because there is something to him that makes her think that perhaps he needs to rise, too. Something in the lonely beckoning of his eyes when he called out to her, or the solitary air of his posture. Something to the way that he wears his own scars, carries his own, horn-crowned head.

She is gone, then, like a serpent shed free of her skin, something inside the soul gone free; and for a moment, she is a blade dancing on the edge of the crowd, disappearing into it like a shade.

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

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

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