[Worship] and those who hunt monsters --

[Seraphina]

She didn’t notice the boy until he spoke – perhaps she was too engrossed in her own worship to notice the world around her, or perhaps his steps, labored with something heavy though they were, were quiet enough to avoid her perception. In any case, his voice sends her head whipping, mismatched eyes widening fractionally for a shocked second as she stares him down. Bay, with frantic, fearful copper eyes and a shaggy coat. He looked far too pitiful to be a viable threat, however, and she was quick to settle, allowing his words to linger in the back of her mind like a lump of steel tied to a flailing limb, dragging her down beneath the surface of some deep, dark pool. Seraphina looked away, averting her gaze to stare at her hooves because she couldn’t stand to meet something in his eyes, in his choked, frail tone. Lonely? That would imply that she needed someone, and the first thing that Viceroy had taught her, and perhaps the most important, was that the worst liability of them all was to need absolutely anyone, because then you would become reliant. (An almost imperceptible, vicious curve of her lips, then gone as though it had never appeared to begin with.) If it did not imply need, it implied want, and want was nearly as bad. Want - or so she had been told – interfered with need and responsibility, so she had tried to choke the want from herself, too. It was easier that way, better that way. And yet…


Sometimes she was sure that she felt its creeping influence on her heels again.


“I…” She started, grasping for the right words, “I’m-“ A sound from nearby her sent her gaze behind them, and any vulnerability was gone from her features like light from a flipped switch. Seraphina was cold again, practically frozen over, as she beheld Inkheart, an expression of stiff apathy working its way into her silver features and settling, discontent to remove itself again. “Inkheart.” Seraphina greeted her with the same stiffness that the mare offered her, taking a mental inventory of the wounds that mar the mare’s sleek obsidian coat; it seemed that even her devotion hadn’t saved her from the worst of the teryr’s offenses, and she wondered if she would be so quick to bite at her advice in hindsight. She kept herself curt, however, and stiffly polite, stiffly courteous - perhaps falsely so, because she hears the disdain dripping from Inkheart’s tone like rain from a metal gutter. (This was a sacred place. She had no anger towards her, per say, but, if she did, now would hardly be the time to express it.) “You assume correctly – it has been too long since I have brought an offering. I suspect that you are here to do the same?” She would hardly phrase it with such a flourish, but, then, she was not a prophet or a soothsayer, not a priestess and hardly a devotee – she was, however, born and raised in Solis’s light, and the foreign mare’s holier-than-thou attitude towards their religion sent something of an instinctual prick up her spine. Her gaze flitted again to the stranger in their midst, and she silently hoped that he would simply agree that he was here to worship Solis– lest they both, presumably, become subject to one of the diatribes that she could only imagine ran through Inkheart’s head.

@Auru @Inkheart - sorry this took forever lovelies <3