☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼
try try your whole life to be righteous and to be good
wind up on your own floor, choking on blood
He’s still not quite comfortable – nor does she expect him to be. Even without the use of her title, Seraphina is the Queen of a kingdom that might tomorrow be his enemy, and she with it. It isn’t as though she is entirely relaxed, either, though she can’t tell if the tension that lines her frame is intentional or the result of years of training for diligence, to seek out danger wherever she looked. It takes him a moment to reply."The cocky ones are the most gratifying, when you knock their ass into the dirt." A faint laugh."You've got that to look forward to.” She doesn’t quite understand that, either. In spite of her violence, Seraphina dislikes fighting, and she tries to avoid it when she can. (Unfortunately, it seems that, all too often, she cannot.) She doesn’t think about that for long, though – her ears twitch forward as he responds to her comment on the nobility. "Solterran Nobles, last I heard they were all far too concerned about their legs giving out underneath their girth. Have they finally gotten off of their piles of gold?"
“If they didn’t, they’re long dead by now.” Something like disdain lingers in her voice. They were the first slaughtered when Solterra rebelled after Zolin’s death; for all their power, they had no fight in them. However, it was dangerous to underestimate the nobility – though most all of them gained their power by blood, the ones that rose to prominence were most always dangerous, if only secondhand.
He looks rather pleased with himself at her surprise. "There is power in owning a name. This Viceroy might have given you it, but he doesn't own it. A name can mean many things, depending on who hears it, or what they see from it's meaning or who it belongs to." This Viceroy, she thinks, at first. This Viceroy. This Viceroy might have somehow come out of the war and the rebellion as an enigma, barely a footnote to Zolin’s horrors, but he was a monster unlike any other that Seraphina has seen, and she has seen monsters. (Even the Child King himself, once. A little presentation, to prove that Viceroy’s plans were working.) It was Zolin’s Warden that came up with all of the mechanisms for the war, the child soldiers, their brutal training, the traps lain bare across the sands, their plans of attack – it was this Viceroy that was largely responsible for the horrors of the war with Denocte, and yet, he remained unnoticed, unknown, at least outside of Solterra.
“And what if it is given by stealing something else?” A faint, inquisitive arch of her brow. The name, as she sees it, is no more a gift than the collar around her throat – they have the same innate purpose of control and change, a way to overwrite who she was and would have grown into with who she was made to be. He is right, though. Viceroy is dead. The name – and everything that it has come to mean – is hers now.
He talks about the Brotherhood, then; his tone shifts to a gentle lilt, like a storyteller, and she listens eagerly, expression hinting at a curiosity that is almost childlike in its innocence. (The one upside of her time under Viceroy was the education that her parents would never have been able to afford for her; if ever there was proof of Viceroy’s sinister intentions, it was that he wanted an educated and mindlessly obedient group of soldiers beneath him.) An ancient order, from just before the Night Court – one that kept the peace between the nobility and the commonfolk of Denocte. She wonders if things might have turned out differently in Solterra if they had something like that, particularly headed by a Noble that was willing to give up his nobility.
As he speaks of past Commanders, and she finds herself thinking of how much her mother would love stories of these characters, night kingdom or no, and then – then he trails off, expression darkening. She looks momentarily concerned, before he continues. “"...He died during the Solterra and Denocte War. He didn't want to march, but he understood duty, there wasn't much choice. So now there's me, Renwick Theron." Alavin. A mentor, she can only assume, and another casualty of a thoughtless war waged by thoughtful people. He smiles as punctuation, but it isn’t really a smile.
“…I’m sorry.” Her voice is soft, surprisingly uncertain. Seraphina can see the pain in his eyes, though she can’t really understand it – she has lost her mother, but she barely remembers her. She has lost so many of her citizens, but none of them close. Even the grief, or something like it, that she felt at Maxence’s passing was closer to dull shock. It feels strange, sometimes, knowing that she should understand something, that it should be easy to understand something, but not truly understanding at all. Pain, though, she understands, and she can sympathize with that, at least to some extent. “He sounds like a good man, from what little you said of him.” And she means that. War, she knows, is awful and ugly, and it brings out the worst people have to offer – those that know the horrors and fight anyways, for some cause or duty that they believe in are brave in a way that she is not sure that she can understand, with her engineered sense of loyalty.
"So, what about Solterra?" He’s curious about them, too. She sees it in his eyes. “"I don't know much about you and your culture either. What was it like? I doubt the Nobles really shat gold, like the rumors said they did."
“Only in their dreams.” A hint of amusement. “Solterra is…well. A hundred years ago, there was no Day Court proper, only a collection of tribes. Now, only the Davke seem to remain, and, for a time, we thought that even they had faded away into the dunes.” At the mention of the Davke, her lips curl; she is quick to move on. “Our first Sovereign was Queen Sol of the Hajakha. At the time she rose to prominence, Solterra faced some foreign enemy – most of the records from that period were lost long ago, but we know that, whatever this enemy was, it has no correlation to the modern courts. Denocte would be the easiest guess, but…” She trails off, shaking her head. “…no. Whatever they faced, if you believe the legends, was something monstrous and vile that threatened all of Novus, not only Solterra. Some writings say that this mysterious…force…still slumbers somewhere beneath the sea; those are troubling, but likely fictional. Even if they are not, nothing that might help us to understand what happened now remains.” This is not just because most of the royal archives lie in ashes; no, all of their records of Queen Sol’s war have long been lost to the Solterrans. She exists as half-history and half-myth, suspended in a strange state of not-quite reality. “In any case, Queen Sol rallied the tribes against this great evil, and, with their combined forces, they drove the enemy from Solterra – we have no records of what happened to this enemy afterwards.” Save for the idea that they slumbered beneath the sea, anyways. It did not seem so strange that a desert-dwelling people would fear the ocean depths, although they bordered their nation on all sides.
“Queen Sol was vicious and bloodthirsty, and never known for her mercy, but she was good to her people; even when the threat dissipated, she remained in power. For a time, Solterran society was…different. The tribal leadership was generally hereditary, and so it was the same for the monarchy, but there was not so wide a gap between the nobles and the common folk – they often intermarried, and the most capable would always find a way to rise to the highest echelons of society.” Her expression darkens, and her eyes narrow as she continues. “Of course, they also kept slaves.” For a moment, her disgust is audible, but then she is on to the next comment. “Over the next twenty years or so, Solterra began to grow. The capitol was built, and, with it came a system of formal education and a flourishing marketplace that was said to have supplied anything you might ever desire. This was not to last.” She pauses, as though considering, then: “You can trace Solterra’s decline directly to the reign of King Havieel the first. He eliminated our system of education, and, soon, knowledge became a resource hoarded by the wealthy and powerful. Solterran nobility and commoners had been growing distant for many years, but, with no system of education, they began to write in two different languages. The noble language is called Sahvahn, and the common language Eibet. Only Savahn was recognized under Solterran law, and the common people, who could not speak it, were considered illiterate – their legal rights were stripped from them completely.” A cunning, cunning plan, and likely the intention from the start. Solterra valued brute force above most all other things, but they did recognize the power of knowledge, as well. “I suspect you know how the story goes from there. The nobles became more powerful, and many fell into greed and gluttony, hoarding gold and jewels while their people starved in the streets. It was only so long before the nation’s anger reached a boiling point.”
“Zolin was that boiling point. He committed more atrocities than I can recount – I imagine that there are many that I do not even know of. He destroyed entire families, continued a war that we could not win, collected slaves and concubines to use as trophies, had many of his rivals executed publicly…” Her expression is cool. “His worst mistake was the Davke. Avdotya killed Zolin. His death sparked the kingdom to revolution. The capitol went up in flames, all of Zolin’s inner circle and much of his family were murdered, and Solterra succumbed to chaos and violence. The remaining nobles went into hiding, slaves broke free of their bonds, and enraged citizens ransacked the city.” For a moment, she can remember it – she can remember bloody streets and flames, death all around her. For a moment, it is all that she can see, and she’s not sure if she is looking at the capitol in rebellion or the capitol under siege. In the back of her mind, she can hear Viceroy screaming. She doesn’t feel anything at all at the strangled, gurgling sound. (In her mind’s eye, she watches him as he chokes on his own blood, a smile that knows far, far too much still curled across his lips. “Don’t be ridiculous, apprentice. I cannot die.” More than a year later and he is still dead – not so immortal as he believed, or so it seems.)
“Eventually, Solterra fell into something of a…calm. Maxence was the first to attempt to bring order back to the kingdom. In some regards he succeeded – he is the reason why the Day Court exists again. In some regards…he was a foreigner, and he did not have all the knowledge that would have been required to lead the court.” Those days seem far away from her now, the memory of the man who had set her on this path too distant and too faraway for such a short time. “At the moment, we are going through a period of…considerable change. Slavery has been outlawed, and we are attempting to fight the black market that provided them. We are also attempting to reinstate a system of education, but that is…difficult, with the capitol all but in ashes.” She sighs, softly. “The nobility, of course, have not taken kindly to power in the hands of a commoner, much less a child soldier, and the common folk…do not trust those in power. The situation remains volatile.” At this, she looks up, something akin to thorough determination spreading across her features – and when she speaks, her voice is relentless. Mismatched eyes meet chips of moonstone with a cool defiance - she knows how her people’s history sounds, and she knows how the world would like to paint them. “Nevertheless, we are a hardy people – we survive in a desert full of teryrs and sandwyrms, and struggle each and every day just to find food and water. We can do far better than what we allowed ourselves to become.”
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tags | @Renwick
notes | whoops I skipped a day. hope the loredump (ft. some info from fables & folk tales I'm working on) makes up for it?
try try your whole life to be righteous and to be good
wind up on your own floor, choking on blood
He’s still not quite comfortable – nor does she expect him to be. Even without the use of her title, Seraphina is the Queen of a kingdom that might tomorrow be his enemy, and she with it. It isn’t as though she is entirely relaxed, either, though she can’t tell if the tension that lines her frame is intentional or the result of years of training for diligence, to seek out danger wherever she looked. It takes him a moment to reply."The cocky ones are the most gratifying, when you knock their ass into the dirt." A faint laugh."You've got that to look forward to.” She doesn’t quite understand that, either. In spite of her violence, Seraphina dislikes fighting, and she tries to avoid it when she can. (Unfortunately, it seems that, all too often, she cannot.) She doesn’t think about that for long, though – her ears twitch forward as he responds to her comment on the nobility. "Solterran Nobles, last I heard they were all far too concerned about their legs giving out underneath their girth. Have they finally gotten off of their piles of gold?"
“If they didn’t, they’re long dead by now.” Something like disdain lingers in her voice. They were the first slaughtered when Solterra rebelled after Zolin’s death; for all their power, they had no fight in them. However, it was dangerous to underestimate the nobility – though most all of them gained their power by blood, the ones that rose to prominence were most always dangerous, if only secondhand.
He looks rather pleased with himself at her surprise. "There is power in owning a name. This Viceroy might have given you it, but he doesn't own it. A name can mean many things, depending on who hears it, or what they see from it's meaning or who it belongs to." This Viceroy, she thinks, at first. This Viceroy. This Viceroy might have somehow come out of the war and the rebellion as an enigma, barely a footnote to Zolin’s horrors, but he was a monster unlike any other that Seraphina has seen, and she has seen monsters. (Even the Child King himself, once. A little presentation, to prove that Viceroy’s plans were working.) It was Zolin’s Warden that came up with all of the mechanisms for the war, the child soldiers, their brutal training, the traps lain bare across the sands, their plans of attack – it was this Viceroy that was largely responsible for the horrors of the war with Denocte, and yet, he remained unnoticed, unknown, at least outside of Solterra.
“And what if it is given by stealing something else?” A faint, inquisitive arch of her brow. The name, as she sees it, is no more a gift than the collar around her throat – they have the same innate purpose of control and change, a way to overwrite who she was and would have grown into with who she was made to be. He is right, though. Viceroy is dead. The name – and everything that it has come to mean – is hers now.
He talks about the Brotherhood, then; his tone shifts to a gentle lilt, like a storyteller, and she listens eagerly, expression hinting at a curiosity that is almost childlike in its innocence. (The one upside of her time under Viceroy was the education that her parents would never have been able to afford for her; if ever there was proof of Viceroy’s sinister intentions, it was that he wanted an educated and mindlessly obedient group of soldiers beneath him.) An ancient order, from just before the Night Court – one that kept the peace between the nobility and the commonfolk of Denocte. She wonders if things might have turned out differently in Solterra if they had something like that, particularly headed by a Noble that was willing to give up his nobility.
As he speaks of past Commanders, and she finds herself thinking of how much her mother would love stories of these characters, night kingdom or no, and then – then he trails off, expression darkening. She looks momentarily concerned, before he continues. “"...He died during the Solterra and Denocte War. He didn't want to march, but he understood duty, there wasn't much choice. So now there's me, Renwick Theron." Alavin. A mentor, she can only assume, and another casualty of a thoughtless war waged by thoughtful people. He smiles as punctuation, but it isn’t really a smile.
“…I’m sorry.” Her voice is soft, surprisingly uncertain. Seraphina can see the pain in his eyes, though she can’t really understand it – she has lost her mother, but she barely remembers her. She has lost so many of her citizens, but none of them close. Even the grief, or something like it, that she felt at Maxence’s passing was closer to dull shock. It feels strange, sometimes, knowing that she should understand something, that it should be easy to understand something, but not truly understanding at all. Pain, though, she understands, and she can sympathize with that, at least to some extent. “He sounds like a good man, from what little you said of him.” And she means that. War, she knows, is awful and ugly, and it brings out the worst people have to offer – those that know the horrors and fight anyways, for some cause or duty that they believe in are brave in a way that she is not sure that she can understand, with her engineered sense of loyalty.
"So, what about Solterra?" He’s curious about them, too. She sees it in his eyes. “"I don't know much about you and your culture either. What was it like? I doubt the Nobles really shat gold, like the rumors said they did."
“Only in their dreams.” A hint of amusement. “Solterra is…well. A hundred years ago, there was no Day Court proper, only a collection of tribes. Now, only the Davke seem to remain, and, for a time, we thought that even they had faded away into the dunes.” At the mention of the Davke, her lips curl; she is quick to move on. “Our first Sovereign was Queen Sol of the Hajakha. At the time she rose to prominence, Solterra faced some foreign enemy – most of the records from that period were lost long ago, but we know that, whatever this enemy was, it has no correlation to the modern courts. Denocte would be the easiest guess, but…” She trails off, shaking her head. “…no. Whatever they faced, if you believe the legends, was something monstrous and vile that threatened all of Novus, not only Solterra. Some writings say that this mysterious…force…still slumbers somewhere beneath the sea; those are troubling, but likely fictional. Even if they are not, nothing that might help us to understand what happened now remains.” This is not just because most of the royal archives lie in ashes; no, all of their records of Queen Sol’s war have long been lost to the Solterrans. She exists as half-history and half-myth, suspended in a strange state of not-quite reality. “In any case, Queen Sol rallied the tribes against this great evil, and, with their combined forces, they drove the enemy from Solterra – we have no records of what happened to this enemy afterwards.” Save for the idea that they slumbered beneath the sea, anyways. It did not seem so strange that a desert-dwelling people would fear the ocean depths, although they bordered their nation on all sides.
“Queen Sol was vicious and bloodthirsty, and never known for her mercy, but she was good to her people; even when the threat dissipated, she remained in power. For a time, Solterran society was…different. The tribal leadership was generally hereditary, and so it was the same for the monarchy, but there was not so wide a gap between the nobles and the common folk – they often intermarried, and the most capable would always find a way to rise to the highest echelons of society.” Her expression darkens, and her eyes narrow as she continues. “Of course, they also kept slaves.” For a moment, her disgust is audible, but then she is on to the next comment. “Over the next twenty years or so, Solterra began to grow. The capitol was built, and, with it came a system of formal education and a flourishing marketplace that was said to have supplied anything you might ever desire. This was not to last.” She pauses, as though considering, then: “You can trace Solterra’s decline directly to the reign of King Havieel the first. He eliminated our system of education, and, soon, knowledge became a resource hoarded by the wealthy and powerful. Solterran nobility and commoners had been growing distant for many years, but, with no system of education, they began to write in two different languages. The noble language is called Sahvahn, and the common language Eibet. Only Savahn was recognized under Solterran law, and the common people, who could not speak it, were considered illiterate – their legal rights were stripped from them completely.” A cunning, cunning plan, and likely the intention from the start. Solterra valued brute force above most all other things, but they did recognize the power of knowledge, as well. “I suspect you know how the story goes from there. The nobles became more powerful, and many fell into greed and gluttony, hoarding gold and jewels while their people starved in the streets. It was only so long before the nation’s anger reached a boiling point.”
“Zolin was that boiling point. He committed more atrocities than I can recount – I imagine that there are many that I do not even know of. He destroyed entire families, continued a war that we could not win, collected slaves and concubines to use as trophies, had many of his rivals executed publicly…” Her expression is cool. “His worst mistake was the Davke. Avdotya killed Zolin. His death sparked the kingdom to revolution. The capitol went up in flames, all of Zolin’s inner circle and much of his family were murdered, and Solterra succumbed to chaos and violence. The remaining nobles went into hiding, slaves broke free of their bonds, and enraged citizens ransacked the city.” For a moment, she can remember it – she can remember bloody streets and flames, death all around her. For a moment, it is all that she can see, and she’s not sure if she is looking at the capitol in rebellion or the capitol under siege. In the back of her mind, she can hear Viceroy screaming. She doesn’t feel anything at all at the strangled, gurgling sound. (In her mind’s eye, she watches him as he chokes on his own blood, a smile that knows far, far too much still curled across his lips. “Don’t be ridiculous, apprentice. I cannot die.” More than a year later and he is still dead – not so immortal as he believed, or so it seems.)
“Eventually, Solterra fell into something of a…calm. Maxence was the first to attempt to bring order back to the kingdom. In some regards he succeeded – he is the reason why the Day Court exists again. In some regards…he was a foreigner, and he did not have all the knowledge that would have been required to lead the court.” Those days seem far away from her now, the memory of the man who had set her on this path too distant and too faraway for such a short time. “At the moment, we are going through a period of…considerable change. Slavery has been outlawed, and we are attempting to fight the black market that provided them. We are also attempting to reinstate a system of education, but that is…difficult, with the capitol all but in ashes.” She sighs, softly. “The nobility, of course, have not taken kindly to power in the hands of a commoner, much less a child soldier, and the common folk…do not trust those in power. The situation remains volatile.” At this, she looks up, something akin to thorough determination spreading across her features – and when she speaks, her voice is relentless. Mismatched eyes meet chips of moonstone with a cool defiance - she knows how her people’s history sounds, and she knows how the world would like to paint them. “Nevertheless, we are a hardy people – we survive in a desert full of teryrs and sandwyrms, and struggle each and every day just to find food and water. We can do far better than what we allowed ourselves to become.”
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tags | @
notes | whoops I skipped a day. hope the loredump (ft. some info from fables & folk tales I'm working on) makes up for it?
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
