[AW] lament

[Seraphina]

DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI

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She had descended Veneror Peak whilst the moon still hung high in the sky, casting all the world below in a luminous haze of milky silver; now, as she strode into the ancient fortress that served as the capitol of the Day Court, the first blush of Oriens’ dawn hung gentle and pink on the distant, golden horizon, heralding the slow passage of Solis’s light across the sky. The scent of incense and honey-like primrose still hung thick to her coat as she drifted through the weathered sandstone archways, eyes cast out to linger on the shape of a great pyre built up in the center of the courtyard, crowned by bones that she could only imagine belonged to her fallen sovereign – retrieved by the hot-headed ambition and warlike loyalty of her people from the teryr’s dead offspring, then meticulously cleaned in preparation for the funeral rites. (Viceroy would have carved them with words, even prayers, but she imagined that the Solterrans unfamiliar with his customs would have found that insulting, to further tamper with the remains.) Seraphina stood, gazing up at the great monolith of wood and bone with a sense that something was pricking in her chest. Dead and gone, she’d told herself, on her way back – like tracks in the dunes will disappear overnight.

She reached for the right words in preparation for what was to come, but she didn’t think that there were any. She was no master of sentimental storytelling, no great wordsmith that could spin poetry out of thin air; no, she was simpler than that, and guided by something else entirely. Nor did she really know what she felt, staring up at the jagged tips of branches and the sharp spurs of bone. She wished that Maxence was still alive. That would have to be enough.

Her mind, normally so composed and structured by rigid discipline, found itself tangled into knots, trapped like some wild beast in a hunter’s net. She grasped for words – grasped for something, anything that felt right, but nothing did, and nothing would. (And perhaps there was a prick of guilt, for she knew what would come soon after the funeral. It was only natural, and yet…it felt wrong, like a vulture feasting on raw carrion. There were no words for that, either.) She ran circles around herself, questioning, questioning, questioning; she found the stark white of her sovereign’s – quietly, reluctantly, her friend’s - bones and stared into them, as though she would find the answer that she sought somewhere in their marrow.

None came. Gods could be cruel, she supposed – crueler than most anything else.

Those bones were all of them, the last of him, and they gleamed like the milky fog she remembered on dead eyes (turned up to stare at a sky they couldn’t see) in her childhood. For a moment, when she’d watched the teryr drag Maxence away, Seraphina had clung to the foolish, frantic hope that he would somehow wrestle free of its grasp and return to them, whip crackling like the flames that were soon to consume all that remained of him. For a moment, she had forgotten the taste of death, bitter in her mouth. For a moment, she had thought that they were more, that they existed somewhere outside of its reach, that a moment of progress would mean a necessary continuation. Now, those foolish delusions shattered, she could only recount regrets – and those were just as useless.

She wished that he was still alive.

She remembered, as her eyes finally turned from the pyre to creep along the hazy, rose-tinted outline of dawn, her sharp words on his arrival; she remembered the way he screamed her name when the teryr, the first damned teryr threw her to the ground, a concern that she’d never experienced before in her life; she remembered the way her stomach had lurched into knots when he’d announced her his Emissary; she remembered their last conversation alone, the ghost of a smile on his lips, the sense that they were accomplishing something, that there was finally a meaning to her; she remembered his call from within the library, the way her hooves had felt against the sand, the flurry of motion, the blinding light, the blinding light, the way a scream caught up in her throat-

It had all happened so fast.

It had all happened so fast, and Seraphina was left unsure of how she felt, because she expected to feel empty.

Her gaze, finally, fell back to the pyre. (He’d died a glorious death, a warrior’s death, or so she’d been told; but it was all just death to her, empty and grey as the ocean in a storm.) At her side laid all the tools that she would need to set it ablaze, to burn it white-hot and bright as Solis himself. She only needed a moment, only needed those damned words – but they’d fallen out of her grasp again. She was starting to wonder if they always would.

Seraphina stood in front of the pyre much like someone might stand between worlds, awaiting anyone who might have come to pay their respects – past and present twined, waiting for a spark.

@

open to anyone, regardless of court <3
mildly confusing and extremely rambly because sera is sorta having a weird crisis, so summary : After spending some time at Veneror thinking about things (thread forthcoming), Seraphina arrives at Maxence's funeral pyre, made primarily of wood and crowned by the bones, presumed to belong to Maxence, that will be discovered in this thread. She's basically just waiting around for the others to show up so that she can burn it.