Here you can praise the light, having so little of it: it's the death you carry in you, red and captured, that makes the world shine for you as it never did before. This is how you learn prayer. LOVE IS CHOOSING, the snake said. The kingdom of god is within you because you ate it.
☼
I watch him the entire time.
I watch every twitch of his expression, of his lips; I watch the cold, reptilian glare of his eyes, and, somehow, I find myself coming to a decision. Even when he is done speaking, I do not look away from his face.
I am silent. There is nothing but the waves on the shore, the whispering rush of wind. Then my expression shifts ever so slightly, jaw setting, and I find myself saying: “No, there isn’t.”
“As a girl, I was…taken.” I breathe in, sharply, but, when I continue, my voice is perfectly even, as though I am disaffected by the story that I am beginning to tell. “They put a collar around my throat. Chained me. Taught me to fight. The man who made me a soldier – he had this magic. It allowed him to reach into your mind and pull things out, if he didn’t like them. Memories. Thoughts. Feelings. By the time he was done with me, I had lost my name, and all the time I’d had before. I didn’t even care about the collar. They made sure that they were uncomfortable, you know? But I’d forgotten how to feel it, or I thought that it didn’t matter – or that it was right.”
The strangest thing is, I think, that I’ve nearly forgotten the viceroy, now. It’s only his eyes that linger, those empty pits of molten gold. I still see them, sometimes, in my nightmares. I wonder if there will ever be a day when they are gone, too.
“He tortured me, and I rewarded him by killing for him. I rewarded him by doing just as he asked. I think that some part of me knew that it was wrong all along. It just didn’t matter.” It didn’t matter. And – for years and years, it didn’t. I didn’t care who lived or died. I cared for no one and nothing but a Solterra that didn’t exist. “I know that I killed good men, fighting in an unjust war. I served a monstrous regime, one hell-bent on conquest and genocide, one that never should have existed. People were starving in the streets, and I would follow him into the palaces and the manors of the noblemen, and I would see…their gold and their silks and their satins, their beautiful artwork, and the concubines.” The words come out of my mouth strangely languid, though not entirely void of passion; occasionally, my voice dips in carefully-contained anger, or disappointment, or something of the kind, but I keep them steady.
In my mind’s eye, I am thinking of those golden eyes, cold and dead as twin marbles. I don’t mention that detail. “I didn’t kill him – that was someone else. I never even fought back.” Here is where I inhale again, the sound somehow rattling, and here is where I reach the worst part of the story, because there was no one there to mitigate it, to make me someone else. “And then I – became something else. I was a slave, and then I was a queen. I was not much good at it, although I thought that I could make things better, and I was struck down by a man who took my kingdom, and he was…no different from the king that I had served as a child. It was like dying. I was sure that I would die, but he was the sadistic kind – left me to bleed out instead of finishing the job. I was saved by coincidence.” My lips twitch into something that is the echo, I think, of a cynical smile, and it is only here that there is a quiet edge of pain in my voice, though I try my hardest to suppress it. “I fought back, that time. It wasn’t enough. He did die, eventually, but it took…so long, and he did so much damage in the meantime. Everything that I had worked to create was reduced to dust.”
Well – Solterra had been rebuilt from her ashes again, now. But everything I had worked for, everything I had tried to create, everything that I had poured my life into for years…it was gone. I was dead, and it was gone. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. It wasn’t even that I died unmourned, that no one cared for my passing. The worst of it-
“If anything in the world were fair, I would have died when he struck me down. Other people died for my failure, instead.”
The words hang in the air between us – clinical and sharp and plain as a knife. I can’t embellish them. I can’t make them better. I tried. I used to try.
I will have to live with that forever; and that is the more selfish crime.
I look at the odd twitch of his too-long mouth, the contours of his face, the tips of his horns. “There is nothing you can do about what has already been done to you. The past is immutable. There is no denying that change.” I keep my eyes locked on his, unrelenting. “You will never be the same, and maybe that means that you will never be yourself again. But you – you can still choose what happens to you now.”
It is only then that I look away, back out towards the black, rippling mass of the sea.
“You don’t have to know how to go forward yet. You'll have time enough to figure it out…and sometimes it is a long, vicious process.”
@Vercingtorix || <3 || atwood, "quattrocento"
Speech || Ereshkigal
☼
I watch him the entire time.
I watch every twitch of his expression, of his lips; I watch the cold, reptilian glare of his eyes, and, somehow, I find myself coming to a decision. Even when he is done speaking, I do not look away from his face.
I am silent. There is nothing but the waves on the shore, the whispering rush of wind. Then my expression shifts ever so slightly, jaw setting, and I find myself saying: “No, there isn’t.”
“As a girl, I was…taken.” I breathe in, sharply, but, when I continue, my voice is perfectly even, as though I am disaffected by the story that I am beginning to tell. “They put a collar around my throat. Chained me. Taught me to fight. The man who made me a soldier – he had this magic. It allowed him to reach into your mind and pull things out, if he didn’t like them. Memories. Thoughts. Feelings. By the time he was done with me, I had lost my name, and all the time I’d had before. I didn’t even care about the collar. They made sure that they were uncomfortable, you know? But I’d forgotten how to feel it, or I thought that it didn’t matter – or that it was right.”
The strangest thing is, I think, that I’ve nearly forgotten the viceroy, now. It’s only his eyes that linger, those empty pits of molten gold. I still see them, sometimes, in my nightmares. I wonder if there will ever be a day when they are gone, too.
“He tortured me, and I rewarded him by killing for him. I rewarded him by doing just as he asked. I think that some part of me knew that it was wrong all along. It just didn’t matter.” It didn’t matter. And – for years and years, it didn’t. I didn’t care who lived or died. I cared for no one and nothing but a Solterra that didn’t exist. “I know that I killed good men, fighting in an unjust war. I served a monstrous regime, one hell-bent on conquest and genocide, one that never should have existed. People were starving in the streets, and I would follow him into the palaces and the manors of the noblemen, and I would see…their gold and their silks and their satins, their beautiful artwork, and the concubines.” The words come out of my mouth strangely languid, though not entirely void of passion; occasionally, my voice dips in carefully-contained anger, or disappointment, or something of the kind, but I keep them steady.
In my mind’s eye, I am thinking of those golden eyes, cold and dead as twin marbles. I don’t mention that detail. “I didn’t kill him – that was someone else. I never even fought back.” Here is where I inhale again, the sound somehow rattling, and here is where I reach the worst part of the story, because there was no one there to mitigate it, to make me someone else. “And then I – became something else. I was a slave, and then I was a queen. I was not much good at it, although I thought that I could make things better, and I was struck down by a man who took my kingdom, and he was…no different from the king that I had served as a child. It was like dying. I was sure that I would die, but he was the sadistic kind – left me to bleed out instead of finishing the job. I was saved by coincidence.” My lips twitch into something that is the echo, I think, of a cynical smile, and it is only here that there is a quiet edge of pain in my voice, though I try my hardest to suppress it. “I fought back, that time. It wasn’t enough. He did die, eventually, but it took…so long, and he did so much damage in the meantime. Everything that I had worked to create was reduced to dust.”
Well – Solterra had been rebuilt from her ashes again, now. But everything I had worked for, everything I had tried to create, everything that I had poured my life into for years…it was gone. I was dead, and it was gone. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. It wasn’t even that I died unmourned, that no one cared for my passing. The worst of it-
“If anything in the world were fair, I would have died when he struck me down. Other people died for my failure, instead.”
The words hang in the air between us – clinical and sharp and plain as a knife. I can’t embellish them. I can’t make them better. I tried. I used to try.
I will have to live with that forever; and that is the more selfish crime.
I look at the odd twitch of his too-long mouth, the contours of his face, the tips of his horns. “There is nothing you can do about what has already been done to you. The past is immutable. There is no denying that change.” I keep my eyes locked on his, unrelenting. “You will never be the same, and maybe that means that you will never be yourself again. But you – you can still choose what happens to you now.”
It is only then that I look away, back out towards the black, rippling mass of the sea.
“You don’t have to know how to go forward yet. You'll have time enough to figure it out…and sometimes it is a long, vicious process.”
@
Speech || Ereshkigal
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
