OH PITY THE DAMNED
Seraphina watches dawn rise over the Elatus with red-rimmed, shadowed eyes. Her hair has fallen from its braids, or she didn’t put it up yesterday; she doesn’t remember. Her scarf whips around her, buffeted by the winter wind, – which holds just the barest hint of a chill – and she doesn’t feel it. It is a red dawn, a sailor’s warning. She wonders what that means for a desert creature. (She can barely call herself a girl, anymore.) Above her, Ereshkigal flies in slow spirals, a speck of darkness against the otherwise bloody sunrise. (Bloody, bloody, bloody, why can’t she think of any other descriptor for red?) She used to see hope in the sunrise. She used to see god in the sunrise, making his slow arc across the sky. And where was her god now?
She’d been abandoned again – by everything. By everyone. It was the loneliness that was the worst of it, punctuated by the sporadic appearances of her agents. But friends were gone. People were gone. What she thought she’d built – that was all gone. There is no one who remains, not for long, and, the moment that they leave, she cannot be sure that they will return, for one reason or another. (No one is trustworthy. No one is immortal.) There is only Seraphina and the dark, drifting, inevitable figure of Ereshkigal, watching the dawn.
Where is Solis now? She doesn’t know. Off, out there, doing something more important while his people suffer all over again, just as he had when Zolin ruled; swanning about on high. She can’t believe she forgave him. She can’t believe she trusted him. (He’s hardly the only person she can say that about – which only leaves Seraphina to ask herself when will she learn her lesson? She’s been taken for a fool again. And again. And again.)
She wonders if any of this is worth it – the nightmares, the blood, the hurt. She wishes that she could stop.
“You could stop, little girly-girly-girl,” Ereshkigal whispers, the lilt of her voice bordering on a hum. “I can take your soul, you just have to let me pull it out…It won’t even hurtmuch, I promise.”
She does not respond.
The vulture swoops down, her movements unnaturally swift, and lands on her back; she is grateful for her armor, though she can still feel her curling talons through the thick leather. Her great wings remain outstretched and then, abruptly, tuck in at her sides with a sharp, sharp snap. She laughs, harsh and raucous, and it is not in Seraphina’s head this time. The sound echoes through the canyon, distorting in waves until it barely sounds like a laugh at all – rather, it resembles the brittle swish of wind through the sands, like a swarm of locusts or a serpent’s hiss.
“She says that she wants it over,” the vulture observes, her voice fluttering as though she is struggling to hold in another laugh, “but the little girly-girly-girl won’t let it end, will she? Willshe? No, no, no - the little girly-girly-whirly-girly likes to hurt.”
“I don’t like it,” Seraphina says, finally, baited into speech, “and you don’t want to leave this realm yet, anyways.” Ereshkigal moves forward, her talons catching in Seraphina’s scarf, and moves to bend, peering down into Seraphina’s eyes. The bird tilts her head at an odd angle. Seraphina frowns.
“Strangeling little mortals,” she agrees, finally. “They writhe. Littlewormthings. I like to watch them.” Seraphina narrows her eyes at the vulture, who stares at her innocently. “I see deadlings, onlydeadlings. Nothing can be done with them, so they aren’t fun.” She smiles, then, her beak pulling open to reveal rows of sharp, sharklike teeth. “But the little girly-curly-whirly-girly-girl is wrong. Doesn’t she ask herself what she will do if she doesn’t hurt? She knows, little-girly, that she will not be anything without her hurt to drag around-“
“I have a name. You could use it.” Seraphina interjects blandly.
“Mortal,” Ereshkigal snipes back.
Seraphina sighs, and, with the vulture still perched between her shoulders, steps back into the cave. “I have a job for you,” she says, although she regrets that she has to send her. Ereshkigal giggles. “Stop laughing. I want you to go to Delumine and deliver this letter to Somnus, the king – and, if possible, do it politely, then bring back his reply.” She pulls the letter out from the mess of tattered blankets that she has made her bedplace; she does not sleep much lately anyways. Ereshkigal swoops off her back and onto the ground, her talons leaving long scratches in the sandstone.
Ereshkigal examines it, tilting her head this way and that. “I will take the letter to the kingy-wingy,” she decides, smiling again. “I have seen many kingy-singy-wingys. I have not seen this one. But they did. They thought of the kingy-singy-wingy-dingy before they went red. The kingy-singy-wingy-dingy-ringy and other faces, other names. A sister. A child. A mother.” She tilts her head again. “I did not condemn them, but they were not happy. I don’t understand it.”
“They didn’t want to die,” Seraphina says. Ereshkigal turns to stare at her, bloodred eyes dull and thoughtless.
“Pointless,”, she says, with a chatter of her teeth.
Seraphina is quiet, for a moment. “Would you condemn me, Ereshkigal?”
Ereshkigal considers her, bouncing from one talon to another. Her head bobs, and her eyes dart. She snickers, then laughs, uproariously. It soon descends into a raucous howling, and it takes her a long moment to regain control of herself, before she looks at the silver woman, completely serious. “No,” she decides, with a wicked smile curving the very edges of her beak, “not yet. But maybe, maybe…”
She snatches the letter and then, abruptly, sweeps out of the room.
Seraphina watches her go, and perhaps she sighs.
Ereshkigal likes this place in winter. It reminds her of the realms of the dead – the meadows are withered and covered in frost. She does not think that she would like it in spring. It would be too green, and she does not like the green. Better the gold of desert sands or the white of winter, but never the green.
(Some realms are, of course, green, because the mortals like it so, but she is not from those realms. She is from chalk-white and ink-black, a realm leeched of all color. There are only two roads out. She thinks that is right.)
She likes the court itself much less. It is stone, which is always preferable to flowers, but it is brighter, especially with the sun setting, and she does not like that. She circles the palace lazily, the letter clutched neatly in her talons. It had not wrinkled much, and she was pleased with herself for it. If it had, the message might have been obscured, and she would not want to have had to make this trip twice.
She circles low, swooping past the windows. Occasionally, she lights on one and peers inside; passerby scatter at the sight of her, and it makes her laugh. This only seems to upset them further, the strange little mortalthings. They weren’t meant for a beast, were they? (But there was one on the doorstep, and one with a crown. It was poetic. The thought made her snicker.)
Night falls before she finds him.
She lands on a window. A golden man is inside, and Ereshkigal decides that he – with his great wings and spiraling horn – looks right. The window is just cracked open, so she shoves it the rest of the way and swoops into the room, wings tucked at odd angles to allow her to fit through the frame. She drops the letter on the ground in front of her, and then she lands with a resounding click, tilting her head at the man. “Are you the kingy-wingy?” she inquires, with a voice that is odd and discordant, as though it creaks, bloodred eyes twitching to stare directly into his; they are pretty jewelgreen, and Ereshkigal decides that she would like to keep him.
Her beak pries open in the faintest, pulling the facsimile of a smile. Below its sharp curves, her teeth are barely visible, like little knife-rows.
@Somnus || ereshkigal sure is a,,, gem, isn't she | "okay, ophelia," jeannine hall gailey
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
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
