BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS
something wicked this way comes--
Seraphina watches him with empty eyes flickering in the candlelight, ebbing and flowing with the bob and weave of the small flame; she does not pretend to miss the mischief in his first question, but, if there is offense to be found in his tone, it rolls off her back like water. “If that is what is required of me,” She says simply, voice flat. Seraphina is a creature of deliberation and duty, and she lives her life while running along on mechanical tracts, repeating the same, tired motions that she is meant to do day after smoldering day. Perhaps this is not who she is, but it is certainly who she has become; a mess of chains and crumpled ambitions laid out in her wake, she drifts like she is being tugged along on strings.
His next questions provoke a slight tilt of the mare’s ashen skull. Has he never seen a library before? She has never been outside of Novus, but she supposes that it is entirely possible that some foreign lands don’t have a writing system…strange as it seems to her. There isn’t much writing in Novus, and most of it is kept by the elite. (She’d only learned to read and write herself because of Viceroy’s tutelage – as the Warden, he was privy to such things, though he still wasn’t allowed in the library.) “This is the library – and these are scrolls. They contain our writings, and these specifically…all our recorded history, save for the parts of it that only exist in oral tradition.” Wrapping her mind around the length of thin paper in front of her, Seraphina brushes it towards the ghostly warrior and unrolls it with her mind, revealing the swirling black script of its contents. The letters are neat and crisp, written in a careful hand.
His next question draws her eyes back to him, and she pauses for a moment, as though considering her answer carefully. Her name is the one foreign part of her, bestowed upon her by Viceroy; amongst her people, her name is isolation. “…burning one.” Her voice is soft, even reluctant. Blind loyalty, feathered, divine, seething creatures that bowed to the throne of some foreign god -that is what her name really means, she reminds herself, but she doesn’t think that she can explain that. “It is a foreign name – something from my…mentor’s land.” Her mother might have given her a different name, but, if she did, she can no longer remember it; she is Seraphina now, and whoever she might have been before was lost to her. (Is it supposed to feel so empty to forget, like a gaping hole gnawing at the walls of your stomach, burning like acid? It doesn’t matter.) “And what about you, Eik? What does your name mean?” It is only fair, she thinks, to turn the question back on him.
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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
