I CAN'T TELL IF IT'S WORSE TO WALK THROUGH
a forest with a path or without (a path). / damage done and damage made. / can I be gentle? / I mean / can I be gentle☼
There is something disquieting to the way that he is kneeled before her. Disquieting like her scar, like something that couldn’t quite be forgotten, no matter how much she would rather it was. It felt like a bone caught in her throat, something that couldn’t quite be coughed up. Still, who would tell a sick man to rise? She simply averts her gaze.
Seraphina is not entirely prepared for the chiding tone he takes with her. It makes her stiffen by fractions, rolling her tongue in her mouth, and what strikes her most about it is that it implies some degree of concern. (She has never been well-accustomed to it.) She is quiet, visibly uncomfortable, but finally she breathes out a long, white sigh, and she speaks.
“It was always,” she says, and there is a way that she is speaking of much more than just her time as a monarch, “the least important thing.” It was the least important thing when she was a child, a soldier shackled with a collar around her throat; it was the least important thing when she was an Emissary, meant to keep her people from war. It was the least important thing as a monarch, pouring over book after book after book as she struggled to find ways to pull her nation from the ashes, to make it the Solterra that she knew might exist, not the one that did. In fact – and here is the crooked, terrible amusement of it -, her own health only became an important thing, and the most important thing, when Raum struck her down. Before then, it hadn’t mattered. It hadn’t mattered if she lived or died, and, even as a queen, if she had died any other way-
(if only she had died any other way.)
He doesn’t seem surprised by her next remark, exactly. Yet you outdo me, my queen. Close as I have come to death, I am not yet a ghost. His smile is thin. When her lips turn up at the end of his sentence, her smile is wry – and morbid, run-through with a bitter aftertaste that might have come from the grave. What she wants to say is yes, I am a ghost. What she wants to do is allow her telekinesis to buoy her, just as it is begging to, to run rivers through the snow-white of her hair and suspend her above the dry, half-frozen ground like the specter that she should be. (That she is. That Ereshkigal insists that she is meant to be; because she was meant to die, supposed to die, but she didn’t, and every moment after that has been some quiet defiance of fate and god and the natural order entire.) But she does not move. She stands perfectly still, but for that upward twitch of her lips, and, much as she wants to be a ghost, she reminds herself that she no longer has the option.
“I haven’t stopped listening, in my absence,” Seraphina says, her voice a half-murmur, and turns her head so that he can see the gold glint of the scar that runs her cheek like sheet metal, or a fire, or something more fitting on the face of a burning woman, “and I’ve only ever been a ghost to some.” There were certainly people who knew that she didn’t die (though whether they thought she still lived now was an entirely different matter), though she did not count the Solterran nobility among them. Better, she thought, to stay dead to them – most of them couldn’t roll over for Raum quickly enough regardless.
And then there is Ereshkigal. And then there is Ereshkigal, harassing a dying man, some sick amusement burning in her bloodred eyes at the stumble in Adonai’s tone. Seraphina’s own roll with frustration, even as the bird clicks her tongue and laughs again, shorter this time, more predatory. A deerlike huff. “Even if I tell you, little bird,” Ereshkigal says, her voice an airy sing-song, “it wouldn’t change a single thing.”
(If she were close enough to bite her, she might. Lately, offenses that she would have simply taken when she were younger had a way of tugging at her impulses, begging at her inclination to do something that didn’t feel quite like herself.)
“Don’t listen to her,” Seraphina says, her neck arching as she gazes up at the branches at the vulture, glaring viciously. “She doesn’t see time in the same way that we do – soon could be tomorrow or a thousand years from now. All she wishes to do is lead you astray.” What she means is all she wishes to do is make you miserable.
There is the slow outstretch of his wing, not quite towards the bird, and then, when he speaks, it is with quiet and nearly disbelieving horror. His question only seems to further amuse the vulture. She tilts her head, skipping forward down the branch, and she leans down towards him, her razor-like talons leaving long gashes in the bare branch. “I’ll see-e-e-e-e you…” She drags out each syllable, croaks over them, speaks with the ugly undertone of mocking laughter, “…if you want.”
Seraphina swallows another sigh, lingering on her own phrasing. Companion. The bird is less of companion than she is a curse, though they’ve settled, most often, into something of an uneasy truce. “She claims to judge the worth of souls – to condemn them or…send them elsewhere. I can’t be rid of her.” She shakes her head, frowning. “But she could always be lying.”
It is here where the bird seems to take offense, her toothy maw splitting open in a vicious snarl. “I never lie.” Her voice is a knife-edge; a threat.
Seraphina doesn’t even look at her.
Here is where she makes a decision. There is something that she knows, and she has never told it to anyone. It might mean – something here, but she doesn’t want to say it. Saying it is as good as admitting that she is a ghost, something she already believes but still wishes to deny. Saying it means speaking of that cold and dark night – actually, she doesn’t remember the weather, but that the clouds were not thick enough to cover the moon, and all that cold could have come from blood loss -, of the gashes on her cheek, of those horrible, blood-sucking moonflowers.
She speaks.
“She says that I should have died,” she continues, softly – it is a reassurance (if a cold one), but she has always been bad at those, “but I didn’t, and now she won’t leave until she’s taken my soul.”
In the branches above her head, Ereshkigal smiles, and her white teeth are like a crescent moon.
@Adonai || ilu (& him) <3 || lily wang, "prayer"
Sera || Eresh
a forest with a path or without (a path). / damage done and damage made. / can I be gentle? / I mean / can I be gentle☼
There is something disquieting to the way that he is kneeled before her. Disquieting like her scar, like something that couldn’t quite be forgotten, no matter how much she would rather it was. It felt like a bone caught in her throat, something that couldn’t quite be coughed up. Still, who would tell a sick man to rise? She simply averts her gaze.
Seraphina is not entirely prepared for the chiding tone he takes with her. It makes her stiffen by fractions, rolling her tongue in her mouth, and what strikes her most about it is that it implies some degree of concern. (She has never been well-accustomed to it.) She is quiet, visibly uncomfortable, but finally she breathes out a long, white sigh, and she speaks.
“It was always,” she says, and there is a way that she is speaking of much more than just her time as a monarch, “the least important thing.” It was the least important thing when she was a child, a soldier shackled with a collar around her throat; it was the least important thing when she was an Emissary, meant to keep her people from war. It was the least important thing as a monarch, pouring over book after book after book as she struggled to find ways to pull her nation from the ashes, to make it the Solterra that she knew might exist, not the one that did. In fact – and here is the crooked, terrible amusement of it -, her own health only became an important thing, and the most important thing, when Raum struck her down. Before then, it hadn’t mattered. It hadn’t mattered if she lived or died, and, even as a queen, if she had died any other way-
(if only she had died any other way.)
He doesn’t seem surprised by her next remark, exactly. Yet you outdo me, my queen. Close as I have come to death, I am not yet a ghost. His smile is thin. When her lips turn up at the end of his sentence, her smile is wry – and morbid, run-through with a bitter aftertaste that might have come from the grave. What she wants to say is yes, I am a ghost. What she wants to do is allow her telekinesis to buoy her, just as it is begging to, to run rivers through the snow-white of her hair and suspend her above the dry, half-frozen ground like the specter that she should be. (That she is. That Ereshkigal insists that she is meant to be; because she was meant to die, supposed to die, but she didn’t, and every moment after that has been some quiet defiance of fate and god and the natural order entire.) But she does not move. She stands perfectly still, but for that upward twitch of her lips, and, much as she wants to be a ghost, she reminds herself that she no longer has the option.
“I haven’t stopped listening, in my absence,” Seraphina says, her voice a half-murmur, and turns her head so that he can see the gold glint of the scar that runs her cheek like sheet metal, or a fire, or something more fitting on the face of a burning woman, “and I’ve only ever been a ghost to some.” There were certainly people who knew that she didn’t die (though whether they thought she still lived now was an entirely different matter), though she did not count the Solterran nobility among them. Better, she thought, to stay dead to them – most of them couldn’t roll over for Raum quickly enough regardless.
And then there is Ereshkigal. And then there is Ereshkigal, harassing a dying man, some sick amusement burning in her bloodred eyes at the stumble in Adonai’s tone. Seraphina’s own roll with frustration, even as the bird clicks her tongue and laughs again, shorter this time, more predatory. A deerlike huff. “Even if I tell you, little bird,” Ereshkigal says, her voice an airy sing-song, “it wouldn’t change a single thing.”
(If she were close enough to bite her, she might. Lately, offenses that she would have simply taken when she were younger had a way of tugging at her impulses, begging at her inclination to do something that didn’t feel quite like herself.)
“Don’t listen to her,” Seraphina says, her neck arching as she gazes up at the branches at the vulture, glaring viciously. “She doesn’t see time in the same way that we do – soon could be tomorrow or a thousand years from now. All she wishes to do is lead you astray.” What she means is all she wishes to do is make you miserable.
There is the slow outstretch of his wing, not quite towards the bird, and then, when he speaks, it is with quiet and nearly disbelieving horror. His question only seems to further amuse the vulture. She tilts her head, skipping forward down the branch, and she leans down towards him, her razor-like talons leaving long gashes in the bare branch. “I’ll see-e-e-e-e you…” She drags out each syllable, croaks over them, speaks with the ugly undertone of mocking laughter, “…if you want.”
Seraphina swallows another sigh, lingering on her own phrasing. Companion. The bird is less of companion than she is a curse, though they’ve settled, most often, into something of an uneasy truce. “She claims to judge the worth of souls – to condemn them or…send them elsewhere. I can’t be rid of her.” She shakes her head, frowning. “But she could always be lying.”
It is here where the bird seems to take offense, her toothy maw splitting open in a vicious snarl. “I never lie.” Her voice is a knife-edge; a threat.
Seraphina doesn’t even look at her.
Here is where she makes a decision. There is something that she knows, and she has never told it to anyone. It might mean – something here, but she doesn’t want to say it. Saying it is as good as admitting that she is a ghost, something she already believes but still wishes to deny. Saying it means speaking of that cold and dark night – actually, she doesn’t remember the weather, but that the clouds were not thick enough to cover the moon, and all that cold could have come from blood loss -, of the gashes on her cheek, of those horrible, blood-sucking moonflowers.
She speaks.
“She says that I should have died,” she continues, softly – it is a reassurance (if a cold one), but she has always been bad at those, “but I didn’t, and now she won’t leave until she’s taken my soul.”
In the branches above her head, Ereshkigal smiles, and her white teeth are like a crescent moon.
@
Sera || Eresh
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
