but oh, my heart was flawed, I knew my weakness so hold my hand - consign me not to darkness
They say that a person who steps out of a room is never the same person who stepped in.
The Queen of Solterra prowls in front of the sun god’s golden statue like a lurking tiger, albeit without any trace of hungering subtlety; each fluid stride clatters, vicious as a thunderclap, against the marble dais. Hours have passed – a day, perhaps – since the Regimes clawed their way free of the wreckage that Tempus had trapped them within, haloed by rubble and sunlit grit. Dust and debris still clings to her coat like a second skin, dulling the silver beneath. Only the collar around her throat is left to shine. She had believed in them.
As a child, stiff as a soldier on Viceroy’s heels, she had been taken to the peaks of Veneror time and time again to offer her devotions to the god she served. Part of her induction into their particular brand of nationalism – they wanted her to know that she was doing god’s work. In her desperation, she cried to the gods to save her; in the depths of the night, nursing wounds that kept her awake for countless hours, she whispered to them, if only to create the illusion of company. They all did - she saw the starving, in the streets, wailing to the gods. When chaos and fire reigned supreme after Zolin’s death, people took shelter in the shrines; she remembers the crescendo of crying, sobbing, begging. As she grew older, as she was finally freed, she made the trek herself; she offered proper respect to all of the gods, with little offerings, though her worship (and the finest trinkets she could find) was reserved for Solis. Before each battle, she spoke his name in prayer. Even as her work – and rank – increased and she had less and less time to devote to her personal desires, she made her way to Veneror with some degree of regularity. She had taken comfort in the atmosphere, in the knowledge that the gods were watching; the divinity that now felt so suffocating was a shield from an outside world that was tumultuous and painful. Seraphina had been softer there - knowledge of their celestial presence peeled away the rugged layers she built up and left her barer than she wished to admit. They didn’t have to do anything, or so she thought. They would simply watch, and watching – no, listening - was enough.
But now they had shown themselves, and the only intention or explanation they had offered was that they intended to intervene in the quarrels between the courts, and it was as good as a slap to the face; unlike the one she had been given by the Stormsinger, however, this one hit its mark, and she was left bloody and raw and clawing. In the rubble, she had been like a caged animal, but now, the loathing was left free and festering, a sandstorm set to swallow the face of the desert whole. She had always told herself that she was just, not vengeful, but maybe she was – the weight of Solterra’s screaming had yet to be paid, and, for their indifference, the gods were compliant in her nation’s suffering.
She does not know how, but she will make them answer for it or die trying -- some part of her tells herself that this thought, this knowledge, is rash and foolhardy, that they have not explained themselves yet, but their silence is a crime, too. Her expression remains stiff and cold, utterly contained, but her movements are as fluid and rippling as in the heat of combat, and her eyes still burn like twin suns, fueled by fury enough to guide her path with or without the god of day. She was unblessed in the gathering, and surrounded by the favored, – with magic, or company – but she wants no blessing, no obligation, nothing from them; she has the sweat of her brow.
Seraphina is not alone.
Suddenly aware of another, familiar presence, she whirls. With a soft prickle of something akin to shame, she meets the gaze of her advisor, her left hand, her head diplomat, and – and her dear, dear friend. “Eik…”
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
Eik had been raised in a world with a much larger pantheon. He used to believe that just as a mother or father has an obligation to their children (to protect, to teach, to guide) the gods have an obligation to their people. But no matter how they prayed or behaved, there was no response except violence, endless violence.
(He used to believe a lot of things that he does not anymore, but he wouldn't have it any other way-- you can't trust those who don't question their own beliefs.)
The gods have never had answers for him-- so he had given up asking even before they lost interest in his people like a child outgrows a toy. This most recent encounter with them has done nothing to sweeten his opinion of their divine rulers, but he hadn't expected it to. His heart hurts for everyone who had, knowing that the disappointment and anger must be so much worse for those who thought better of Tempus and his children.
The hours since their release have flown by in a flurry of words and explanations and no small amount of frustration. There is no rest for anyone, although everyone at the summit is exhausted and filthy with sweat and dust- the regime especially. From time to time he has caught the eyes of Bexley and Seraphina across the crowd and he has wondered, each time, when will they get a moment of peace? A moment to reflect together on the dreamlike events of late?
(Selfishly, he needs to be reassured that what happened really happened, that his ghosts aren't wandering his mind again, distorting his memories as they so like to do.)
So when an exhausted calm settles over everyone and the crowd thins, when Seraphina slips away to where the statue of her god lies in pieces, he gives her a moment alone.
And then he follows. He is concerned for her, as his queen and more importantly as his friend. He had not meant to startle her, but apologizing for it now seems unnecessary, even rude. "Sera..." He steps forward with a soft nicker, nose extended to offer his breath in greeting. The still air is rife with silent communication as they both settle into each other's presence.
Eik isn't sure what it is he wants to say-- where to start, after what they've just been through? "How are you." He asks this very seriously and looks at her very closely as she answers. Seraphina is a world of subtleties he is slowly, slowly learning to read.
but oh, my heart was flawed, I knew my weakness so hold my hand - consign me not to darkness
He reaches out his muzzle, and she feels the faint tickle of his breath against her skin. Sera. Her name is so rarely shortened aloud; a Sera is a girl, and a Seraphina is a burning one. (But she feels more like a Sera right now.) He asks her how she is, his gaze as surgical and piercing as hers so often feels, and she can’t quite find it in her to meet his gaze. It’s nothing of him and everything of her. She doesn’t feel like herself. “I…” She hesitates. She doesn’t know what to say – she doesn’t know how she feels. (It’s something she thought she’d forgotten, or given up on.) She doesn’t want to falter, in front of him. Seraphina doesn’t wish to appear weak, as though the succumbing would be a sort of admission. (It might open the floodgates, untwine the little bits of her that remain all tangled up and defensive and certain. She needs to be certain.) In truth, she’s not familiar enough with the landscape of her own emotions to know exactly what she’s experiencing. “I think that I am…disappointed. I thought that it would be different,” She admits, but she doesn’t know how - in some intangible, inexplicable way, she supposes, “but it wasn’t. I thought that they would give us answers, but I only have more questions.” And she needs answers. If change is coming to Novus, change that could endanger her nation so soon after the Davke attack, she needs to be able to prepare for it. (But that isn’t the only question she wants answered, is it? If they wanted to interfere now, why couldn’t they have interfered during Zolin’s reign of terror? Why did they let her people suffer? Why were they silent? Why-) They will have to remain, she knows, until they find some semblance of an answer on the sacred peak; Caligo’s statue is gone, and, having seen Tempus’s, she can only assume what that means. For now, she waits. “How are you? It cannot be easy to…stumble into the conflicts of our pantheon.” She’s never asked him about his land’s gods, she thinks, if he has any at all; she knows that his people didn’t read or write, and they didn’t have great structures and walls, but she doesn’t think that any of those markers have anything to do with religion. She realizes, sometimes, that she doesn’t know the people around her – now matter how close she considers them – much at all. It was only during her promotion to Regent that she learned anything of Bexley’s background, and Eik…
She has gathered that his past is painful, but she hasn’t asked. He hasn’t asked about hers, either, but she doesn’t know what she’d tell him if he did, so she thinks that she’s been grateful for the silence. It isn’t something that you really want to know, just something that you think that you want to know - and it isn’t something that you can forget once you know it. It’s a history that defines her, after all; she doesn’t like letting others know it. It’s confining, like being stuffed into a box. However, her thoughts aren’t on her own story – they are on Eik’s. Much like the Regimes of Dusk and Night, Eik seems to have accepted the gods’ behavior with a bizarre sense of calm. She knows that they can’t mean to him what they mean to her, but she would have expected Divinity itself to be unexpected, particularly to a man so prone to questioning.
Apparently, she is wrong.
Apparently, she doesn’t know him as well as she once thought.
(But, then, she feels a fire still raging inside of her, all teeth and ready to bite. Perhaps she doesn't know anything as well as she once thought.)
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
She does not meet his gaze and he, too, looks away, not wanting to seem demanding or expectant or anything but here for her, with her. Eik tries to record everything to the finest detail in his memory as he waits patiently for her to gather her words, knowing full well how difficult that can be even on a normal day. Certainly, time will warp his memories, but right now everything is sharp and achingly detailed.
“…I thought that they would give us answers, but I only have more questions”
He nods- he words seem to have been the general consensus from the regimes as they threaded through the woods back to their people. Those three big letters, juggled (without much skill) from horse to horse: w h y. Eik, too, had dared to hope for some answers or a bit of guidance—anything but more gods damned (or in this case blessed?) questions. Despite his hopes he had not expected answers, knowing the sting of disappointment that would follow. “At least we’re still alive.” he offers a tentative, humorless smile. “We’ll get our answers one way or another, or we’ll die and it won’t matter anyway.”
He realizes that he hasn’t learned about what the citizens of Novus think of the afterlife or lack thereof, but now doesn’t seem like the right time to bring it up. Another day, maybe. It is his turn to answer now,
his turn to hesitate.
Eik always valued the truth above all other things, yet he was always better at speaking candidly to strangers than friends. You can be anyone to a stranger, but a loved one… sometimes they need you to be something you’re not. Sometimes they just can’t understand the difference between who you are and who you seem to be.
(you don’t mean to keep secrets in your heart-- they keep themselves)
He’s kept face through the trial of the gods, and after as they gathered their people round to share what had happened. But it is just the two of them now, and with a single sigh the mask crumbles to an expression of exhaustion, frustration, and fear, restrained only (barely) by an odd sort of detached calm. "I am afraid of what will happen when the gods become tired of this place and these people." One word- afraid- casts a long, flickering shadow like the half-melted candles at Solis' broken feet. His gaze rests on those candles but his mind is elsewhere- he's thinking of the sun god running rampant across Novus, he's thinking of a fire that would consume all the world.
A breeze picks up and stirs his thoughts like fallen leaves- It never changes, this pattern woven in time-- I want to run, but where could I go that they could not follow? And how could I leave everyone, how could I leave you? He thinks of all the faces he’s come to know and respect here, one by one they parade through his thoughts like a herd of ghosts. When they are gone, all that is left is Eik and Seraphina and the wind gently caressing the broken statue of a god.
But oh, Eik was not built for fear. When it comes, he shoves it away to odd compartments inside of him, wherever it can be hidden, because he does not know what else to do with it- and, forgotten, it festers like an untreated wound. It rots, and the rot grows, and the more he tries to ignore it the worse it gets.
(Calliope had saved him for a time-- oh Calliope, who could bring the gods to their knees-- but faith can only go so far, and the feelings she stirred up in him only grew rotten)
He was not built for fear so it does not last. As soon as he speaks that one word- afraid- it is released, like a breath he did not know he was holding until it is gone. His next words are quiet and tense as a drawn bow. "I am angry." His chest quivers with a rage that he barely understands, the sort of smoldering rage that is born only when sorrow becomes too much to bear.
"I met a god once, dressed in horseflesh." He looks to Seraphina again, trying to catch her mismatched gaze with his of solid, gleaming black.
(they are all different heads on the same body, monsters in the skin of saviors, dreams that we believe into being.)
He remembers being devout, in another lifetime. Back when his legs were too long for his body and every season was winter. He had freed himself from that trap before Seraphina was even born, and he’s been running ever since. There are only a few things he knows for certain, and this is one of them: “Nothing good comes of their meddling.”
- - - - - I am keeping quiet
E I K But one day, the forest will talk about me
@Seraphina <3 Eik's magic was approved, but I didn't really want to explore his telepathy in this thread because there's so much else going on... But if you want you can have seraphina hear/feel snippets of his thoughts and feelings that he is unintentionally sending. Totally up to you!
AND YET I SWEAR I love this earth / that scars and scalds / and burns my feet / and even hell is holy
She doesn’t meet his eyes, and he doesn’t try to force her to; she has the feeling that they’re dancing around something because it’s too painful to touch, but he’s still here, and that’s more than the gods – or anyone else, she thinks, with a slight pang – have ever done for her. She’s stumbling, she thinks, even crumbling. For all of her composure in politics and paperwork, finding the right words to soothe a pain or even describe it, be it her own or someone else’s or her entire nation’s, has never come easily to her. Then again, she isn’t sure that the right words exist to express the things that they’d seen – how do you describe glassy eyes and burning corpses, starving children and cold-eyed gods, and how do you feel like your description does the reality any justice? It doesn’t. Some things are beyond expression.
Her words are met with a wry, twisted-up smile and a nod, and a part of her wonders how he can still smile after everything they’d just seen, but she knows that it isn’t really a smile – just something to fill the space. It feels like an offering. They’re still alive, he tells her, and she knows that he’s right; as long as they’re still alive, there’s still something left to keep fighting for. She still doesn’t meet his gaze, keeping her eyes pinned somewhere a bit lower, around the base of his neck. Out of her peripheral vision, she can still see the curve of his lips, and it seems more and more cynical the longer she stares at it. She wonders if he hoped for answers, like she did, or if he already knew that it would be futile. There’s a little bit of innocence to Eik, – she remembers him nibbling at that scroll so vividly it might as well have happened yesterday – but there’s something else, beneath the surface, and it lingers and bleeds like an unstitched wound. She doesn’t know what it is, and she has a feeling that he doesn’t want her to see it, so she keeps averting her gaze.
He’s quiet, then, and she lets the silence stretch out in-between them in a manner that isn’t exactly uncomfortable but holds an unusual tension. When she’s with him, quiet is usually comfortable, but this quiet feels like an encroaching storm; it looms over her head like a threat, or a promise, something that is ready to break and leave the shards all scattered across the cold marble that used to be a shrine – when god still lived there. It feels heavy, too heavy, and it sticks in her chest. He didn’t press her when she tried to come up with a response, she thinks, and he didn’t seem to begrudge her for hesitating. (She was always hesitating. If it bothered him, he’d never let it show.) However, there was something in his composure and something in his stare and something in that curved crescent-moon of lips that certainly wasn’t a smile that draws her eyes down towards his hooves, towards the ground. Don’t you trust me?
But – as with most things – the quiet cannot last. He sighs, and all of that composure comes crumbling down in a landslide of expression, and, gods, he looks so tired; frightened, too, and perhaps just a bit shocked, but every other emotion is tempered by a heavy coat of exhaust, like a layer of dust on a book. "I am afraid of what will happen when the gods become tired of this place and these people." The words come out stark, and clean, and painful, and she wonders what kind of gods – what kind of leaders - would tire of their own creations. (And then, of course, she remembers that they have been silent for hundreds of years.) Afraid. He’s afraid, and, deep down, she knows that she is too, but some childish part of her is still grasping at the hope that they’re wrong, that her eyes have betrayed her, that her memories have betrayed her, that her own experience was mere misinterpretation; she wants to believe that the gods still care, and that the gods are still good. She can’t really believe it, though, and that word hangs over her head like a noose. Afraid. Oh, she’s terrified.
(A faint buzz, at the back of her mind, that nearly meshes with the swirling breeze: I want to run, but where could I go that they could not follow? And how could I leave everyone, how could I leave you? )
For a moment, she’s sure that she imagined it, and maybe she did, but it doesn’t matter. She feels it. Seraphina steps forward – slow and reluctant, at first – and closes the distance between them, pausing only when she rests her muzzle against his shoulder, where she thinks that she can make out the faint outline of the scrape he’d obtained during the Davke attack. He’s warm and solid and alive, and so is she, and, for the moment, that would have to be enough. “…If the gods abandon us,” She says, and her voice is barely more than a whisper, but certain, “we’ll find another way.”A way to what? Who knows. Maybe her optimism – persistent, in spite of everything – betrays her youth, but- but Seraphina is sure that she has seen the worst that the world has to offer, and she’s seen the sun rise again in the morning in spite of it all.
When he speaks again, she feels him shudder, and the fury that is evident even in the softness of his voice is enough to make her turn to look at him. He’s angry, he admits. Angry. And it’s perfectly reasonable, she thinks, to be angry, after what they had just encountered-
But he isn’t done speaking. “I met a god once, dressed in horseflesh.”
The ink-spills of his eyes go looking for hers, and she lifts her lips from his shoulder to meet his gaze. There’s something in it that she doesn’t recognize.
(And there it comes again, but sharper and clearer this time, fueled by white-hot flame: they are all different heads on the same body, monsters in the skin of saviors, dreams that we believe into being.) “Nothing good comes of their meddling.” And his voice is certain enough to break a little piece of her heart.
She’s quiet, for a moment, staring into the dark, dark depths of those eyes. Seraphina had wondered about Eik, from time to time. Stable as an oak tree, she had told herself, but she’d never been very good at picking away at people until she found what lie beneath. Did he seem so stable now? She felt like they were standing on the edge of some vast, crumbling precipice, and the chasm that threatened was so dark and so deep that you couldn’t even see the ground- “What happened, when you met the god?” She says, finally, and she does not look away.
tags | @Eik notes | did you request a novel? well, you got one anyways, because I have a lot of feelings. anyhow. played around with the telepathy just a bit, because his thoughts are too pretty to keep to himself. ;~;
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
Eik strives to always act according to his values and this is the sturdiness on display to those who do not really know him all that well. This is the man of quiet conviction that most of the world sees- and it is convincing because it is mostly built on truth. Only those close to him (or those rare kindred spirits) see the dark smoke roiling in his eyes, and the very closest might even hear the uncertain quiver of his heart.
On his own for long enough, Eik is not at all stable. Wild thoughts take flight and take him over- away flies his sense of time, away flies his sense of self. He'll beat himself bloody, and call it a bandage. Yet he needs a bit of this instability because there is a certain strength in it too, a foundation in the chaos that is more enduring than anything built on hope and dreams and all that other enticing, fluffy bullshit. It is the endless balancing act of his existence- the need for solitude and the need for society. All this to say that he is stable, in his own way. But that stability is derived from wild instability.
He never promised logic to anyone.
“If the gods abandon us, we’ll find another way.” She speaks with complete and total certainty. Eik does not find her words optimistic or naïve at all. She is strong, they are strong together, and if they die trying their strength will be a torch to be picked up and carried by those who come next. He nods because Calliope told him in the heart of the storm to Have Faith and he took her words to heart even though she didn’t say in what or who.
When Seraphina touches him on the shoulder he feels... nervous. Something is different between them. What before had felt so effortless now is overwrought with so much analyzing, thinking, remembering and dreaming. He supposes the truth of it is that they’re both changing, and change is uncomfortable—but there’s something else there in the way she won’t meet his eyes and the apprehension that grows and growls in the pit of his stomach, like velvet bile, like there’s a dark revelation hiding in wait or a storm about to break… it could be something good too, something golden, but. he was never an optimist. And anyway- has she ever touched him like this before? Outside of the arena?
He reaches to her instinctively in turn. Her scent is different in this proximity, intimate in a way he had not noticed after their spar, with blood pounding in his ears and the both of them slick with sweat. It is better when she looks at him again, even when his words- nothing good comes of their meddling- cast a shadow across her eyes in a way that claws at his stomach. But he stands behind what has been spoken, stubborn even in what may wound a friend, just a little.
“What happened, when you met the god?”
He is grateful she is no longer touching him, so she won’t feel the ripple of uncertainty that clenches and unclenches across his weathered body. As he remembers, he loses track of their surroundings. The sky above them, the ground beneath, the impersonal embrace of the wind, they all fall away to her eyes, blue and gold.
He takes a deep breath. "I don't... I don't remember. I think we spoke for a very long time." It was not really speaking as we think of it. The god was inside his head, showing pictures and thoughts and stories. The feeling could only be described as being ripped out of your body and shoved into someone else's- uncomfortable, nauseating, and yet so very captivating. The awareness of time passing had faded close to nonexistence in that sacred glen- it could have been minutes or it could have been years. Surely it was something in between, but he couldn't say for certain.
"When I try to remember the details, there's... a wall." Not so much a wall but the edge of a cliff, no bottom in sight. The only way to see what lies in the darkness would be to jump, and he's just not ready to do that until he knows he'll be able to come back. Eik is brave in many ways, but he is foremost a survivor, and sometimes that takes cowardice.
Although he doesn't remember the particulars, he has broad-brush memories of what it felt like. He remembers the sensation of his mind being blown wide open. All the thoughts swimming in his head, all the possibilities, all the winding paths before him, amplified and repeated in beautiful, cyclical, pulsing patterns. The most complicated ideas were explained in a matter of letters or a few delicate brushstrokes or even just a single note whistled low and true.
For a moment greater than the trappings of time, he was as omnipotent as a god. all the doors were thrown open.
And the moment ended, and all the doors slammed shut. "He answered all my questions, even the ones I didn’t think to ask. He told me the secrets of the universe. When I opened my eyes." The words catch in his throat and he has that noose-around-the-neck feeling as his muscles tighten in resistance to the memories. Unwavering blue and gold keep him from losing himself. He smells the soot and horseflesh and recalls that day in the library with Seraphina where she had asked with the slightest gentleness, with the greatest effect- “Are you alright, Eik?” Her voice rings out in his mind as clear as if they were there in that candlelit room once more, the moon watching them through the bare window. Had they ever been strangers?
“Are you alright, Eik?”
In a time where everything seemed simpler and pure and painted soft and innocent with retrospective. Memory is a weak and untrustworthy and thing. He clings to it. He pushes it away. Had they ever been children?
“Are you alright, Eik?”
The man who replied is different from the Eik before her now, but his words still echo true- “I- I don't like to remember, sometimes.” And Burning One, how has she changed as her kingdom bled and her gods took form to walk the earth?
Even blue and gold are lost to him now as his mind replays memories. He used to see them every time he closed his eyes, but now they only come to him in dreams. "My memories were gone and the snow turned to ash. Everything was burning." he would discover not just the taiga but the tundra too(-- have you ever seen ice burn?) The fire raged for days consuming earth and beast alike. Once its enormous appetite was sated, it simply sputtered out and left in its wake a cavernous silence beyond description. Not a single sound other than the soft huff of his breath. “Everything. There was nothing I could do.” Eik had been spared only because his curiosity had pushed him to the farthest edges of the forest, where he met the one-eyed god, and his cowardice kept him from diving too deep into the flames in search of friends and family.
For a time in that sacred place he had all the answers and they were ripped away in such a violent way that more questions grew from the scar tissue. Questions innocent as a child’s, mostly, but darker ones too. And the feelings that came afterwards- his mind had been awakened to emotions he had never felt before, but upon opening his eyes he had lost the words to describe what it was he was experiencing. It would not be until later that they all crystalized into different colors of the same thing. Guilt.
(It must have been my fault, I must have done something, said something, thought something. It was me who struck the match that started the fire that burned the world. Me with eyes closed, with infinity in my veins and a fire too big for the heart of one man.)
It should give Eik a sense of relief to tell his story, but he only feels more anxious in the quiet that follows. He is sharply aware there is no real conclusion, no takeaway, no answers to be found in the wake of the gods’ interference. Sometimes he wonders if all his memories, not just those of his divine encounter but all the years before it, are all just the paper-cutout constructs of a madman. What hurts the most is that he’ll never know.
“Change is coming…” He repeats the omen because he doesn’t know what else to say. He is quiet a few seconds more and in this time he’s suddenly aware once again of the mournful sky above them and the breeze tugging at his tail. Where does it come from and where does it go? “Do you ever wish you could just turn away from it all. Start over someplace new.” It may be a poor attempt at deflecting attention from himself, but he thinks she’ll understand. Besides, his thoughts are genuinely on Ravos and the Rift and all the other realms out there. There must be a quiet place where the gods can’t follow. This world is so vast, surely there’s some peace left to find.
It did me good to have a secret,
E I K which I carried within me like a conviction and like a seed.
