BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS
something wicked this way comes--
Candles cast stark shadows on the silver mare’s face as she lingers at her makeshift desk, somehow more corporeal in the flickering golden light than she ever seems in the day; in the disjointed darkness, she looks tired and far older than she is, worn down by memories she wears as scar tissue hidden beneath the sleek silver exterior of her coat. Seraphina is in the libraries most nights, cast out over a veritable sea of paperwork, devoting what she can of the hundreds – even thousands, a marvel in the desert – of scrolls organized haphazardly on the worn shelves. She sometimes remembers being a small girl, staring into the library from the cold darkness of the hallways outside in the rare moments she was separated from Viceroy. Sometimes she would look up to see the flicker of candles and the promise of light, but she wasn’t allowed inside. Those days seem like a distant dream, now.
(She ignored that every little part of her from before felt like a distant dream – and that even now she wandered as though sleepwalking, still caught up in a great and tangled catastrophe of something that she couldn’t place, no matter how hard she looked-)
Her ears flick upright at a sound from the door, and she glances up to search for the source. Her eyes come to rest on the ghostly coat of one of the warriors – Eik. He offers her something that she wouldn’t quite consider a greeting and lingers in his place, clearly reluctant, before he approaches her. (She supposes that she is still a fearful creature to some among the court, with her dead eyes and vacant stares. She also surmises that it is better – or, at the very least, easier - that way.) “Eik.” Comes her own greeting, soft and subdued as he steps into the candlelight. “Being everywhere is my vocation.” It is supposed to be, anyways; it is the Emissary’s job to travel Novus, though she finds herself spending the majority of her time within Solterra. With her leg still injured from her fight with the inky stallion, she has been largely confined to the library and the fort for the past several days. (She still holds it awkwardly, but she has positioned herself carefully to obscure it behind the table. She does not want the court to see her weakness.)
Eik pronounces his words strangely, foreign tongue stumbling over the syllables, and makes a request of her – she surmises that he has questions for her. She expected as much, after his interaction with Rostislav in the dungeon. Seraphina settles in her place, mismatched eyes resting on him coolly, giving absolutely nothing away. “Certainly,” Seraphina says, then, her tone as cold and even as ever. “What would you know of me?”
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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
