[AW] Where There's Smoke

[Seraphina]

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.

She can’t quite understand him, because she has never had the courage to leave anything, however much she might like to. Whenever she thinks that she will be finally free of the desert, when she is almost brave enough to break free of the chains which have bound her, she finds herself again crawling back to Solterra. And now-

Now, with the sun god’s touch in her womb, she does not think that she will ever be free of it.

When he speaks of his homeland, Seraphina cannot help but think of Eik again, her mind stumbling again to the grey stallion. He never spoke much of his homeland, but in bits and pieces; she finds herself wishing that she asked about it more often, but she supposes that it is useless to think about all the ways that she didn’t let herself get to know her – friends now. (She wonders, too, if she lingers in the peripheral vision of the minds of the people she used to know in the same way that they linger in hers.) “It seems,” she says, with a nod of her head, “that you’ll have quite a bit of adjusting to do, then.” He’ll be fine, though. Surely. If he had ambition enough to leave, she’s sure that he can handle whatever Solterra throws his way, cruel as the desert can be.

Or, rather – he’ll handle it or he won’t. There is no other truth but that.

She watches the contemplative glint of his expression in patient silence, waiting to see if he would take her implied offer. (Solterra is not for everyone, after all; it is not a kind landscape, and it is only beautiful to those who know how to look at it in the right way.) His stare is still on the snow-covered plains when he concedes that Solterra sounds interesting, and he asks her, if she is not busy with anything else, if she would show him the way. She does not tell him that she has been aimless since Raum’s death. She does not tell him that a quiet dread curls like a vine in her throat when she thinks of returning, too.

“I’ll show you the way,” she says, with a dip of her head, and she reaches the thorny tendrils of her mind out to Ereshkigal, where she is crunching on a bone in the bloodied snow; yards away, the vulture shakes her feathers and stretches out into flight, her beak still dripping with blood. “Follow me. I’ll answer any questions that you have as we go.”

She turns, then, and strides across the snow, ignoring the way that her steps feel too-heavy with the added weight of her growing twins; and, if he follows behind her, she does not look back his way.

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@Torin || <3 || nickole brown, "wild thing

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@