☼ 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
She watches his expression as she speaks, and she takes note of the curiosity as she speaks of the fate of the nobles; the implication seems to sink in quickly, though. “I see.” She’s not entirely sure what to make of his tone. "Cannot really fault those who felt the whip the most, for seizing the whip and making them pay ten fold.” Barely more than a mutter, but enough to be audible.
“No, not at all.” She agrees, with a slight nod of her head. “I was in the Capitol, at the time of the revolt. All our sins were lain bare – I had seen war before, but never…never anything so horrifying as that, back then. Much of it was deserved, but…no one walked away unscathed.” She grimaces, expression darkening momentarily. War was a controlled chaos – the flames in the capitol burnt out of control, destroying anything and everything in their way. The revolts, on the other hand, were nothing but chaos, uncontrolled and purposeless violence bred by years of hatred and disconnection. Could she blame them for their rage? No. It was probably necessary, if the court was ever to recover from the violence of the nobility that brought it so close to its doom. If it had not ended in flames, it might have died a quieter death, but it would have died nevertheless, little more than another empire brought to its slow, creeping end by greed and luxury. Burning had given it a chance to be made anew.
He seems to consider his answer to her question of Viceroy, brows creasing, but finally offers, “Then you must reforge it into something that is yours. Reforge it, thrice fold if you have to. It is an unfair trade, but you can forge what was given into something that is worth more than what was taken. Make this Viceroy rue the day he gave you the name Seraphina. Make him regret ever giving you the tools to be great, burn him from the history books in the magnificence that is you and you alone.” Flattery, she thinks, with a hint of amusement – but she also thinks that he’s being sincere.
“I often wonder what of me was not made by Viceroy.” A hint of quiet bitterness enters her tone, but it is quick to recede as she continues to speak. “But you are right. There is little use to be found in lingering on what is already done, only what is yet to be.” Her physique and form crafted by his violence; her personality warped and ripped to shreds by his touch; her name; her posture; her every waking thought and dream; the collar around her throat. In all of that, where is she? Seraphina still isn’t sure – she isn’t sure where Viceroy ends and where she begins. Now, Viceroy is dead. Whatever control he had over her was gone with him, and now, wherever or whatever she is, she moves forward alone. The truth of the matter is, had she never met Viceroy, she would be dead. What he did to her was monstrous, and it was painful, even though she spent many years trying to tell herself that it was not; however, it is also Viceroy’s influence that brought her to where she now stands. Like it or not, Renwick is right. She is who she is because of Viceroy. However, he has no control over who she will yet be.
His expression warms at her condolences, and she’s a bit surprised – it isn’t as though the subject is pleasant. “He was a good man, I may miss him terribly, but I honor his sacrifice. I only hope I live up to the expectations he set forward, and the legacy he left behind." She fixes him with a thoughtful expression.
“You sound so genuine when you speak of your order that I cannot imagine that you could fail to do so.” There is no uncertainty in her tone. He is something of a hero, or so she thinks from her preliminary observations – the sort of man she expected to walk from a fable, not to live and breathe in front of her. He is something of a hero, she thinks, or at least he has the demeanor of one – the sort of man who looked at chivalrous beliefs and morals and believed in them. “They are lucky to have you.” She means that, too; any group beloved by their leader was more fortunate than they might know. And, she thinks, from what little she knows of Renwick, he too is a good man.
As she tells her stories, she notices him leaning in closer and closer with a hint of something that feels like fond amusement. It’s a bit, she thinks, like a child sitting around a campfire, listening to tales told by the scholars and elders in the capitol – there’s a certain eagerness to the gesture. (She imagines that she was much the same when he was talking about Denocte, though.) As she finishes her explanation of the history, he seems to notice how close he has gotten, and draws back. "I know, in Denocte's own terms. About Zolin's ascension, and his father." She nods, slightly. "Though I imagine what we were told doesn't hold a candle to the reality of what happened. I cannot blame them for them striking off their chains and taking their payment in blood."
“No. It was necessary.” Seraphina rarely says that of violence, but, once something had grown so twisted as the capitol she had seen in her youth, she knew that it must be broken to piece itself together again. In a city, or a nation, she sees it like a scar. Sometimes, they were necessary, and, quite often, they meant something. Solterra had made its mistakes, and it had paid its crimes; now came the troubled, painful process of healing. “I have heard some of the rumors. Some true, some exaggerated…and some far too light for the ugly truth that lies beneath.” Solterra has become something of a fable for most of Novus, a desert land full of monsters where, for many years, few but criminals had entered or left. The desert nation had crumbled in upon itself, receded into a tight little ball and closed out the rest of the world – the nobility, in their palaces, and all the others sweltering in the suffocating heat of the sun god above. “It is difficult for many in Solterra to even understand the magnitude of what occurred. By virtue of my…positions, I have met people of every rank in Solterran society. Nobles that have seen their families destroyed and still think nothing of their own crimes, and nobles – younger ones, especially – horrified by the crimes of their forbearers, and yet still so sheltered…slaves with their wings ripped off and their horns sliced away, kept in cages as entertainment…common men and women who are still half-starved because they cannot recover from the prolonged emaciation. And, of course, there are those who are…like me. We have lived in vastly different worlds.” So many stories had gone unwritten. So many people had been forgotten, so much potential left to waste away in a society that had become so constrictive that it had no room for anyone to so much as breathe. When the world became so small, full of people who could see no further than themselves, for one reason or another, it ceased to be a world at all. That was what Solterra had felt like to her when she was younger – impossibly vast and claustrophobic all at once. Now, when she walks through the city streets, the weight of a gaping history left in tatters bearing down on her shoulders, she wonders what Solterra feels like to her. “Reconciling them…will be difficult, but I do not think that it is impossible.”
She wonders, sometimes, if she isn’t being too optimistic. Seraphina has seen evil, after all. She has seen people so amoral and incomprehensible that she wonders how they could have sprung from the same soil and bled the same red as people like Eik and Florentine and Cyrene and Renwick, and she wonders, sometimes, if that evil does not outweigh the good. With the capitol in ashes and her path forward engulfed in a hungry, hungry darkness, it has been easy to fall into stretches of hopelessness, with nothing but necessity to drag her forward, nothing but responsibility. However, if nothing else, the silver has always been determined. She has never been entirely convinced of her own direction, but she has never had anything but forward momentum, and, sometimes, she wonders if it’s a little like hope. The path was dark, but she hasn’t lost her way just yet – she tells herself that this is just a misstep. (But then she remembers the bodies the Davke had left littering her streets. How could she ever forgive herself for all that blood?) She aches for her people. She aches for what they have lost, and she fears for what they more they might still lose if she makes a mistake. A part of her wants to turn tail and run into the deserts from which she came, bury herself so deep in the sands that no one will ever find her again. However, a part of her needs the responsibility. A part of her wants the chance to change, if not people, if not her nation, herself.
Seraphina refuses to believe that there is anything that is broken beyond repair.
She slips back into her explanation, and he slips back into silence. When she finally reaches her conclusion, he speaks again, an easy, genuine smile slipping across his lips – she isn’t accustomed to smiles, she thinks, much less ones that seem real. "With you as their Queen, I can believe that. You are everything that the people need, and the very thing the Nobles fear." Seraphina straightens, as though startled. "The Nobles do not want to consider a future without slaves and chains, where gold speaks. It would make them obsolete, make them wrong. It would mean that equines would not have to learn to love their chains, and the ones who pulled them. It would make them equals, and they have no place in that world, where equines can think and speak for themselves. The Solterra you want to build does not sound like such a bad place." Ears twitch directly up, a look of surprise stretching across her charcoal features. In the wake of the Davke attack, and even before it, Seraphina never felt like she was right for Solterra. She didn’t have Avdotya’s viciousness or her flame, nor Viceroy’s cold indifference, nor Maxence’s reactivity and pride. Where they burned, she remained cold, or something like it – but every day she felt a little bit warmer. "The Capital may be in ashes now, but I do not think it will stay that way for long. Solterra won't know what hit them, with you as their Sovereign. The ground will even out beneath your hooves, in time, change is a drastic thing even for those who have benefited from it the most. The nobles will either change, or perish. After all...what does not bend..." She felt so constantly like she was running out of time, and even more often that she had failed her people. After all, she is not the sun god’s chosen. She isn’t highbred, and she isn’t a great warrior. She is a simple soldier, another body thrown to the war effort, a queen who had ended up in power only through the whim of chance. However, as Renwick spoke, she finds herself thinking of the Eiks and the Bexleys and the Arihels and the Nariahs and even the Rhoswens; she finds herself thinking of those that still remains, of what is left of her nation rather than what has been lost. She would keep trying. For them.
“…will break,” She finishes, though there is an almost hazy quality to her tone. For a moment, she watches him, expression undiscernible; however, her gaze, fire and ice as it might be, holds within it a rare warm. “…thank you, Renwick,” Her voice is soft, even gentle – it lilts over each syllable, thick accent dragging out his name. “Thank you.” There is that ghost of a smile again, the faintest curve of her charcoal lips.
An idea comes to mind, then, and her expression turns thoughtful.
“You know, if you would ever like to see the court for yourself…” Spoken almost hesitantly. “Consider this an invitation to visit, if you ever feel so inclined.” Although Seraphina had no personal quarrel with Denocte, it seemed to her that a good deal of the realm of stars and smoke thought that they had a personal quarrel with her – she recalls Acton, and Bexley Briar, and the crack of Aislinn’s wing against her jaw. With so much open animosity between their kingdoms, Seraphina is not sure how pleasant she should be towards one of Calligo’s children. However…she can’t deny that she enjoys his company. He’s strangely optimistic, she thinks, and genuinely kind, and both of those things are in short supply in her harsh desert kingdom. If there’s any way to bridge the gap between their nations, wide as it seems to be growing each and every day, it’s with people who are still able to see the good in others.
Well, she thinks, that and she does have a few more stories that he might like to hear.
(And, admittedly, she could do with a bit more pleasant in her life.)
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tags | @Renwick
notes | hi my name is jeanne and this post goes on forever
anyways I love renwick
try try your whole life to be righteous and to be good
wind up on your own floor, choking on blood
She watches his expression as she speaks, and she takes note of the curiosity as she speaks of the fate of the nobles; the implication seems to sink in quickly, though. “I see.” She’s not entirely sure what to make of his tone. "Cannot really fault those who felt the whip the most, for seizing the whip and making them pay ten fold.” Barely more than a mutter, but enough to be audible.
“No, not at all.” She agrees, with a slight nod of her head. “I was in the Capitol, at the time of the revolt. All our sins were lain bare – I had seen war before, but never…never anything so horrifying as that, back then. Much of it was deserved, but…no one walked away unscathed.” She grimaces, expression darkening momentarily. War was a controlled chaos – the flames in the capitol burnt out of control, destroying anything and everything in their way. The revolts, on the other hand, were nothing but chaos, uncontrolled and purposeless violence bred by years of hatred and disconnection. Could she blame them for their rage? No. It was probably necessary, if the court was ever to recover from the violence of the nobility that brought it so close to its doom. If it had not ended in flames, it might have died a quieter death, but it would have died nevertheless, little more than another empire brought to its slow, creeping end by greed and luxury. Burning had given it a chance to be made anew.
He seems to consider his answer to her question of Viceroy, brows creasing, but finally offers, “Then you must reforge it into something that is yours. Reforge it, thrice fold if you have to. It is an unfair trade, but you can forge what was given into something that is worth more than what was taken. Make this Viceroy rue the day he gave you the name Seraphina. Make him regret ever giving you the tools to be great, burn him from the history books in the magnificence that is you and you alone.” Flattery, she thinks, with a hint of amusement – but she also thinks that he’s being sincere.
“I often wonder what of me was not made by Viceroy.” A hint of quiet bitterness enters her tone, but it is quick to recede as she continues to speak. “But you are right. There is little use to be found in lingering on what is already done, only what is yet to be.” Her physique and form crafted by his violence; her personality warped and ripped to shreds by his touch; her name; her posture; her every waking thought and dream; the collar around her throat. In all of that, where is she? Seraphina still isn’t sure – she isn’t sure where Viceroy ends and where she begins. Now, Viceroy is dead. Whatever control he had over her was gone with him, and now, wherever or whatever she is, she moves forward alone. The truth of the matter is, had she never met Viceroy, she would be dead. What he did to her was monstrous, and it was painful, even though she spent many years trying to tell herself that it was not; however, it is also Viceroy’s influence that brought her to where she now stands. Like it or not, Renwick is right. She is who she is because of Viceroy. However, he has no control over who she will yet be.
His expression warms at her condolences, and she’s a bit surprised – it isn’t as though the subject is pleasant. “He was a good man, I may miss him terribly, but I honor his sacrifice. I only hope I live up to the expectations he set forward, and the legacy he left behind." She fixes him with a thoughtful expression.
“You sound so genuine when you speak of your order that I cannot imagine that you could fail to do so.” There is no uncertainty in her tone. He is something of a hero, or so she thinks from her preliminary observations – the sort of man she expected to walk from a fable, not to live and breathe in front of her. He is something of a hero, she thinks, or at least he has the demeanor of one – the sort of man who looked at chivalrous beliefs and morals and believed in them. “They are lucky to have you.” She means that, too; any group beloved by their leader was more fortunate than they might know. And, she thinks, from what little she knows of Renwick, he too is a good man.
As she tells her stories, she notices him leaning in closer and closer with a hint of something that feels like fond amusement. It’s a bit, she thinks, like a child sitting around a campfire, listening to tales told by the scholars and elders in the capitol – there’s a certain eagerness to the gesture. (She imagines that she was much the same when he was talking about Denocte, though.) As she finishes her explanation of the history, he seems to notice how close he has gotten, and draws back. "I know, in Denocte's own terms. About Zolin's ascension, and his father." She nods, slightly. "Though I imagine what we were told doesn't hold a candle to the reality of what happened. I cannot blame them for them striking off their chains and taking their payment in blood."
“No. It was necessary.” Seraphina rarely says that of violence, but, once something had grown so twisted as the capitol she had seen in her youth, she knew that it must be broken to piece itself together again. In a city, or a nation, she sees it like a scar. Sometimes, they were necessary, and, quite often, they meant something. Solterra had made its mistakes, and it had paid its crimes; now came the troubled, painful process of healing. “I have heard some of the rumors. Some true, some exaggerated…and some far too light for the ugly truth that lies beneath.” Solterra has become something of a fable for most of Novus, a desert land full of monsters where, for many years, few but criminals had entered or left. The desert nation had crumbled in upon itself, receded into a tight little ball and closed out the rest of the world – the nobility, in their palaces, and all the others sweltering in the suffocating heat of the sun god above. “It is difficult for many in Solterra to even understand the magnitude of what occurred. By virtue of my…positions, I have met people of every rank in Solterran society. Nobles that have seen their families destroyed and still think nothing of their own crimes, and nobles – younger ones, especially – horrified by the crimes of their forbearers, and yet still so sheltered…slaves with their wings ripped off and their horns sliced away, kept in cages as entertainment…common men and women who are still half-starved because they cannot recover from the prolonged emaciation. And, of course, there are those who are…like me. We have lived in vastly different worlds.” So many stories had gone unwritten. So many people had been forgotten, so much potential left to waste away in a society that had become so constrictive that it had no room for anyone to so much as breathe. When the world became so small, full of people who could see no further than themselves, for one reason or another, it ceased to be a world at all. That was what Solterra had felt like to her when she was younger – impossibly vast and claustrophobic all at once. Now, when she walks through the city streets, the weight of a gaping history left in tatters bearing down on her shoulders, she wonders what Solterra feels like to her. “Reconciling them…will be difficult, but I do not think that it is impossible.”
She wonders, sometimes, if she isn’t being too optimistic. Seraphina has seen evil, after all. She has seen people so amoral and incomprehensible that she wonders how they could have sprung from the same soil and bled the same red as people like Eik and Florentine and Cyrene and Renwick, and she wonders, sometimes, if that evil does not outweigh the good. With the capitol in ashes and her path forward engulfed in a hungry, hungry darkness, it has been easy to fall into stretches of hopelessness, with nothing but necessity to drag her forward, nothing but responsibility. However, if nothing else, the silver has always been determined. She has never been entirely convinced of her own direction, but she has never had anything but forward momentum, and, sometimes, she wonders if it’s a little like hope. The path was dark, but she hasn’t lost her way just yet – she tells herself that this is just a misstep. (But then she remembers the bodies the Davke had left littering her streets. How could she ever forgive herself for all that blood?) She aches for her people. She aches for what they have lost, and she fears for what they more they might still lose if she makes a mistake. A part of her wants to turn tail and run into the deserts from which she came, bury herself so deep in the sands that no one will ever find her again. However, a part of her needs the responsibility. A part of her wants the chance to change, if not people, if not her nation, herself.
Seraphina refuses to believe that there is anything that is broken beyond repair.
She slips back into her explanation, and he slips back into silence. When she finally reaches her conclusion, he speaks again, an easy, genuine smile slipping across his lips – she isn’t accustomed to smiles, she thinks, much less ones that seem real. "With you as their Queen, I can believe that. You are everything that the people need, and the very thing the Nobles fear." Seraphina straightens, as though startled. "The Nobles do not want to consider a future without slaves and chains, where gold speaks. It would make them obsolete, make them wrong. It would mean that equines would not have to learn to love their chains, and the ones who pulled them. It would make them equals, and they have no place in that world, where equines can think and speak for themselves. The Solterra you want to build does not sound like such a bad place." Ears twitch directly up, a look of surprise stretching across her charcoal features. In the wake of the Davke attack, and even before it, Seraphina never felt like she was right for Solterra. She didn’t have Avdotya’s viciousness or her flame, nor Viceroy’s cold indifference, nor Maxence’s reactivity and pride. Where they burned, she remained cold, or something like it – but every day she felt a little bit warmer. "The Capital may be in ashes now, but I do not think it will stay that way for long. Solterra won't know what hit them, with you as their Sovereign. The ground will even out beneath your hooves, in time, change is a drastic thing even for those who have benefited from it the most. The nobles will either change, or perish. After all...what does not bend..." She felt so constantly like she was running out of time, and even more often that she had failed her people. After all, she is not the sun god’s chosen. She isn’t highbred, and she isn’t a great warrior. She is a simple soldier, another body thrown to the war effort, a queen who had ended up in power only through the whim of chance. However, as Renwick spoke, she finds herself thinking of the Eiks and the Bexleys and the Arihels and the Nariahs and even the Rhoswens; she finds herself thinking of those that still remains, of what is left of her nation rather than what has been lost. She would keep trying. For them.
“…will break,” She finishes, though there is an almost hazy quality to her tone. For a moment, she watches him, expression undiscernible; however, her gaze, fire and ice as it might be, holds within it a rare warm. “…thank you, Renwick,” Her voice is soft, even gentle – it lilts over each syllable, thick accent dragging out his name. “Thank you.” There is that ghost of a smile again, the faintest curve of her charcoal lips.
An idea comes to mind, then, and her expression turns thoughtful.
“You know, if you would ever like to see the court for yourself…” Spoken almost hesitantly. “Consider this an invitation to visit, if you ever feel so inclined.” Although Seraphina had no personal quarrel with Denocte, it seemed to her that a good deal of the realm of stars and smoke thought that they had a personal quarrel with her – she recalls Acton, and Bexley Briar, and the crack of Aislinn’s wing against her jaw. With so much open animosity between their kingdoms, Seraphina is not sure how pleasant she should be towards one of Calligo’s children. However…she can’t deny that she enjoys his company. He’s strangely optimistic, she thinks, and genuinely kind, and both of those things are in short supply in her harsh desert kingdom. If there’s any way to bridge the gap between their nations, wide as it seems to be growing each and every day, it’s with people who are still able to see the good in others.
Well, she thinks, that and she does have a few more stories that he might like to hear.
(And, admittedly, she could do with a bit more pleasant in her life.)
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tags | @
notes | hi my name is jeanne and this post goes on forever
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
