I do not know many things. Least of all my own tendency to see stars and think first of dying.
Once, her hooves sunk into the sand when she walked on the beach. Now, out of habit – learned behavior, cultivated over months of work as a revolutionary, traveler, desert ghost -, her hooves hover a few inches above the sandbank. There is a difference in how she inhabits the world, nowadays; she seems to feel like less and less a part of it all the time, like she is watching it slip away from her like sand carried out by the tides. There is a difference in how she inhabits the world, and, by extension, a difference to how she inhabits her own skin. Her body hasn’t felt like something that belongs to her in a long, long time.
(It makes her unchanged appearance somehow grotesque. (She resents mirrors, or water clear enough to reflect; she often finds them shattered in her wake, or muddied and disturbed.) Save for the golden scar ripped across her cheek, she looks the same as she did in her youth, as a queen – but when she moves, she does not move the same way at all, and, though she is not sure what you might find if you look at her too closely, she is sure that it is something darker than any darkness she used to possess.)
It is cold on the coast, during the winter – colder still for the wind, which buffets her, but does not seem to disturb her trailing white hair, which rushes and dances behind her in the opposite direction entirely of each passing gust. Her telekinesis has become more unhinged, lately, and, paradoxically, far stronger. She does not want to think of the implications; she is trying not to think of the implications. She does not want to think of a lot of things, all of those responsibilities and people that she knows that she is running from, but she is doing a poor job of thinking of anything else. She is not even sure that she is willing to admit that she is alive. Most of the time, she doesn’t feel like she woke up, after he killed her – most of the time she feels like she shouldn’t have woken up. (It is hardly fair to the dead.)
Ereshkigal trails behind her in lazy spirals, a dark speck against a tumultuous and grey sky. Occasionally, she dips down low over the sea, talons outstretched, and catches the squirming, silver shape of a fish; the demon is always ravenous. Seraphina’s gaze is turned out towards the waves, which are especially choppy and foam-strewn, suggestive of a coming storm. She is not sure what draws her out to the coast so often nowadays, though, if she had to guess, she would guess that it is some misguided fatalism. To Seraphina, drowning is a very particular kind of death. She remembers her delusions of being swallowed by great waves of black water as she was bleeding out just as sharply as she remembers the flowers, and the moon; and sometimes she still wakes up at night drowning, her mouth choked with water, unsure if she is on the Steppe or in a maze that no longer exists.
Needless to say – she has long given up ambitions of learning to swim.
She is picking her way across a black and rocky stretch of beach when the winds shift, bringing with them the abrupt revelation that she is not alone. The realization is not alarming; she recognizes him, though, until she turns her head to look back at him over the curve of her shoulder, she doubts her senses, but there he is, in the flesh. “I thought,” she says, slowly – her voice raised above the howl of the wind, “that you’d left, Asterion.” She suspects he could say the same of her. (Disappeared, dead, swallowed by the dunes; in any case, lost.)
Perhaps that is why she speaks with no condemnation. Her voice is subdued, and, though her tone is inscrutable (if vaguely, strangely empathetic), it lacks any pretense of the mechanical apathy she used to hold up like a shield.
(Rather than the steel she is meant to be, she more often feels that she acts the part of a gaping wound.)
tags | @Asterion notes | sad immortals that ran away from their lives meetup? I wrote this in the middle of the night yesterday & I keep noticing Problems, please forgive me for any incoherence
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
08-16-2020, 11:27 AM - This post was last modified: 08-20-2020, 03:24 PM by Seraphina
Unlike the once-queen, Asterion leaves tracks on the beach, but each hoof print fills up with saltwater in his wake, no matter how far he walks from the foam of the surf. Out over the water there is the ceaseless call of gulls and other birds, but none are calling for him, and he tries not to listen.
Surely it is better to hear no voices at all than to imagine ones that aren’t there.
Another difference from Seraphina - it is no surprise that the bay stallion turns endlessly to the beach. There is a void in him, lately, a blackness that sometimes howls and sometimes moves in silence (and oh, the latter is worse). There is little that quiets it, but at least the sea drowns it out, the way it has always soothed his worries. When he rages, it does too; when he is contemplative it is placid. When he is lonely it speaks to him, in murmurs and in shouts, the oldest friend he has. By now he’s so used to the dreams of dark water closing over his head that he doesn’t even wake. (They used to spur a kind of terror in him - now it feels more like peace.)
He has lost track of how long he’s been alone. In a way, all his time in the rift lands has prepared him for this; he doesn’t miss the comforts of the city, all the trappings that were so strange to him when he first arrived in Novus and have taken on a discomfort once again. He always preferred to sleep beneath the stars, with the wind in the leaves his music; now he avoids civilization intentionally, and his hair is long and wild, and he appears as feral as Leonidas. If he looks like he was ever a king, then it is only Nebudchadnezzar.
There is something in him that is yawning, hungry, dark. It first stirred when Marisol rebuked him, when he banished himself from his own country. It opened its eyes when Moira turned him away like an errant dog come home too late after too long away. (It was with him before that, before he crossed back over to Novus and the wild island, but Asterion doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know what lives in him wasn’t always a part of himself).
It likes the sea. It likes the power he holds over it, the way he can flex his mind and the waves roll up, eager as dogs. It likes the way it turns black and dangerous with a storm, and crashes against the cliffside like a symphony. It likes the way it glistens in the moonlight.
Oh, but he doesn’t realize that, either, because so does he.
Today there is not a storm, but the wind has teeth, and the cold is the kind that sets in your bones. Still he appears immune to it, wandering, searching for the same nameless thing he’s always looked for. Maybe one day he can find it, if he only can decide what it is.
He spots Ereshkigal and it is like a memory. Like the beach on the island, only the sand underfoot has turned to rock. He smiles a smile that looks strange on his face until he sees her, the figure the huge bird portended like a psychopomp. Even from here she looks wild, too, and something in him is savagely glad - that he is not alone, the only outcast, a city fallen to ruin. But deeper, truer, he is only sorry.
Her voice is a thing he must catch over the wind. But he does (simultaneously quieting the waves by habit), even as he finishes eating up the space between them, close enough to see again that scar. (There is a part of him that wishes he bore something like that, a marker of when things changed. Perhaps his was a more gradual fall.)
“Maybe I’m a ghost,” he says, only half joking, and his mouth makes a skeleton grin.
my body, the quiet grave it's the difference between drowning & burning
Maybe I’m a ghost.
The curve of his lips is horrible, almost.
(She does not mind.)
Asterion is worn-ragged. That is what she thinks, first. Flotsam. She sees it in every unkempt inch of him, in the black and utterly careless curls of his mane – in the way that he moves across the sand, or, perhaps worst of all, in the unsoft darkness of his eyes.
It is ambitious (and untrue) to say that they know each other at all. They have barely met; they have barely spoken. (It has been something like five years since their first encounter, but she tries not to think about it. Her memories are in tatters – she scarcely recalls it – and she has lost her sense of time altogether. It is unbearably slow and terrifyingly fast, all at once. She can barely believe that it has been so long. She can barely believe that she had ever been so young, and she can barely believe that she thought him soft and self-pitying. She could laugh at the irony. Or cry. They’ve changed terribly, haven’t they?)
She feels a palpable wrongness when she looks at him, and she loathes that she takes some strange comfort in it.
Seraphina regards him for a moment, her froth-white hair twisting and bobbing like she is suspended in the sea, not standing in front of it. And then – she moves.
But for the steady, metallic click of Alshamtueur at her hip, when Seraphina bridges the remaining space between them, her approach is silent.
She brushes up against him, the faintest ghost-touch of her side against his. It resembles, barely, the press of his muzzle to her shoulder when they’d met on the island; she still isn’t sure what touch means to her, but she no longer runs from it. (Some foreign, gaping part of her even longs for it, the part that begs for any assurance that this any of this is real and that any part of her is still living.)
It barely lasts a second. She settles into place alongside him, hooves still trailing off the ground; and then her head turns, mismatched eyes shifting to meet his. “We’re both dead, then,” Seraphina says, and her mirthless voice suggests that she is not quite joking, either, her exhale of punctuation the bare echo of dry, cynical laughter.
It occurs to Seraphina that she does not know him well enough to know what to say to him, that they are no longer two sovereigns at work or even two strangers; they are just two once-rulers, ghostly and fleeting as foam on the shoreline.
She turns her stare to the sea, not him, though she wonders if there is any remaining distinction between the two. (She is almost envious. She thinks about what might have happened, were her magic more world-bending and frightening, if it were more a part of her and less some terrible rebellion, more often than she would like to admit, and then she hushes them, because she loathes to think of the past at all.)
A few words catch in her mouth - I saw your sister recently, or what have you been doing with yourself, now that you are no longer a king? or how have you been? (She thinks that she can guess his answer to the third.) They are perfectly polite, cobbled together from the meaningless small talk she became accustomed to during her days in court, as an emissary and a queen alike.
She abandons them, though.
She knows why she left. She died, and she didn’t know how to come back from it. She died, and she might be dead, or she might still be dying – she can never quite say for sure. Her life has seemed like a horrible dream for what must have been years, now, but she forgets that, sometimes, and it barely seems like a moment.
Asterion left. He left his crown behind, where she was torn from the position. She will acquiesce that she has run, lately, but only because she was already tattered; she is not so sure that she has ever chosen to walk away from something in her life. She longs to, sometimes – to leave this land behind, to leave Solterra and its god and all of the people that dwell within it. She never quite has the fortitude.
She is still looking out at the waves when she asks, “Why did you leave?”
tags | @Asterion notes | my rambling skills are on full display here <3 <3 <3
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
It is not only her hair, or the way she hovers above the sand (does she even notice? Can she control it?). It is the expression in her heterochromatic eyes. It is the way that she, like him, hasn’t aged, not really, not in the places where it shows. Asterion wonders what it is they are haunting, or whether they only want to be found. Maybe he, like a spirit, will only keep walking the same path again and again, performing the same actions, falling in love and falling short. Again, again, again.
When she nears, it strikes him how similar their scents are - sand, wind, cold. Nothing of hearth or a true home, no mingled scent of loved ones. Had Reichenbach come to this point, too? Had Rannvieg? Did any rulers die with their families surrounding them, or were their failures just particularly damning?
He, too, has never taken easily to touch - not like Florentine, or Moira, or any of the others who so effortlessly embrace. But when Seraphina brushes against him an urge swells up inside him like a wave, a compulsion to strike, to sink his teeth into her shoulder or neck. It is strong enough, sudden enough, that he recoils from it (and her), startling back and twisting his head away.
For the first time he wonders what is happening to him, specifically, instead of generally. And he isn’t sure how to recover; he licks his teeth as they itch with that violent want, still facing away, pretending to watch Ereshkigal circle overhead. “The pressure’s off, at least,” he replies, making light the same way she had, and only meets her eye glancingly when he carefully turns toward her again.
His gaze falls to the sword, but he doesn’t ask about it. He doesn’t ask about anything, only lets the questions toss within his mind the same way they do in hers, and wishes there was more comfort in their solidarity. Where before he’d been at relieved to see her, and a little curious, now he only feels unsettled. Strange in his own skin.
Her question, expected as it is, does nothing to help.
Still, he is quick to answer; he’s told the story enough times, and he gives her the abbreviated version now, tight-lipped. “Florentine convinced me to go with her to meet my father. But the island’s magic was stronger than hers.” It should have been a good thing - but of course the moment the dagger shattered, the moment the twins were left behind, the moment they knew they couldn’t get back, it shifted like a dream turned inside-out. Like the island.
Softer, less defensive than it might have been, he adds, “It was only meant to be a moment.”I would never leave them, he might have told her once; and anyone who’d known him would know that truth, too. But now he says nothing more, only bares his teeth in a brief flash of pearl while she’s still facing the sea, and then his expression is placid again, a still deep lake at midnight. Until he says, “I think the better question is - why did you come back?”
And is is not hard to imagine that he’s asking himself the same thing.
my body, the quiet grave it's the difference between drowning & burning
He jolts away from her touch.
There is a certain way that the wild roll of his eyes sends a chill up her spine. She tells herself that it is likely simple paranoia, the product of years spent in constant fear for her life, and, when she looks at him, her gaze turns apologetic. She edges a step further away from him, biting back an uncomfortable sigh. She had transgressed, judging by the way he startled like a frightened deer; but, then, perhaps that was to be expected. She has never been much good at this, whatever it is. The pressure’s off, at least, he says.
Seraphina puts a bit more space between them.
She might have cringed at the defensive note in his answer, but she doesn’t; instead, as he recounts a story she half-knows from Florentine already, Seraphina berates herself, somewhat, for the question. (It certainly is not one that she would have wanted to hear.) She trains her stare on the waves and bites her tongue, wholly unsure of what to say, if anything at all. It was only meant to be a moment. She’s not quite sure what she feels, when his voice quiets. It might be pity, or something less toxic, like mere sympathy; but neither option is useful, so she dismisses it entirely.
Seraphina nearly apologizes, though she is not sure if her apology would have been for the question or the touch or the circumstances of his disappearance; at any rate, the words never make it past her lips. She finally looks back to him and finds him perfectly serene. It occurs to her that it doesn’t seem quite right, but, still, she says nothing at all. He asks her why she came back. Her expression darkens with shame – but only for a moment.
Seraphina is trying to be honest, lately.
She has found that she does not like it at all; more often than not, it is viscerally uncomfortable, requiring parts of herself that she would rather not admit to possessing, and, perhaps more damningly, it forces her to reconsider things that she would rather leave in the distant past. It would be ridiculous to say that she owes him any particular sincerity – they barely know each other -, but she spends a moment considering the honest answer regardless.
She probably doesn’t belong in Solterra anymore. How could she, after what she has done? (More aptly: after what she had failed to do?) She probably doesn’t belong anywhere - save, perhaps, in a grave. “I don’t think I know how to leave.” Her voice comes out soft and flat – not quite hesitant, but paper-thin. “My entire life has been Solterra-“ she pauses, her lips twisting a grimace, as though she is considering something unpleasant, “-as a slave, or a soldier, or an emissary, or a queen.” She has left. In moments, in brief instants; she left for a while, when Raum died, and then when Florentine found her amidst her self-imposed exile. They have never lasted for long.
The idea of leaving forever is overwhelming, and probably impossible to grapple with. Besides-
She exhales sharply. “And – I….failed my people, terribly. I don’t know if it would have changed anything, but I know that I am not the same as I was-“ because now she is unchanging, because her mind can shatter mirrors and snap necks, because, if she listens carefully, she can hear the hum of sparks where Alshamtueur sits at her hip, because the sun god gave her all these things and told her to repent,“-and I know that, so long as I am still alive, I…must do what I can to ensure that something like that never happens again.” The idea that she could do something in the face of another tyrant seems arrogant, even laughable in the face of her previous failure. Regardless, it is something.
(At least that means she still has use.)
Slowly, she turns her head, odd eyes shifting back to linger on Asterion. “…It seems strange to ask,” she concedes, still so softly, “since it was not your intention to leave, but why did you come back?”
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
He pretends not to notice when she deliberately steps away, but in truth Asterion is relieved. Even so a thought cuts through, unbidden, sleek and quick as a shark through a shaft of light in the water: That’s not far enough to be safe.
Safe from what?
The truth is, there is nothing Seraphina could say that could hurt him. Not her pity or her empathy or her blame; they simply hadn’t known one another that well. He was never at his best, the few times they met - always his heart was freshly bruised, or some new catastrophe was on the horizon (or at the heart of the island). Now, especially, her opinions are nothing more to him than rain on the surface of the sea. After Marisol cut him deep and Moira cut him loose, he feels impenetrable. Not as much like stone as sand, but still.
When she gives her reason - in a tone he well knows, having used it enough himself of late - he tucks his chin toward his chest in a knowing nod. Maybe they are ghosts after all, tied to this place well past time for them to leave. Before, he might have tried to comfort her as she goes on - slave to queen - but now he only watches through dark eyes, studying the gold scars on her cheek and the way her silver hair drifts around her, disregarding gravity and wind.
He thinks, And what has Solterra given you? But he knows that is the wrong question for any monarch.
He thinks, I feel like we are the gods now. And when she claims to have failed her people (even as her own thoughts turn to Solis), he shakes his head. “Do you still claim religion, Seraphina?” he asks.
He does not. But he thinks - oh, he thinks he would like to meet Vespera again.
Because Asterion has seen worlds beyond this one. He has seen a place that could be the island’s mother and maker, and it is no place of gods or piety. He knows there are horses in Novus that would understand this, but he isn’t sure that any of its natives are among them.
Yet there are still other things to talk of along this dark stretch of sea than vanished gods. And when she turns back toward him, that careful distance still between them, he pulls his own gaze from the curve of her sword and back to her mismatched eyes.
“Those I love are here,” he says, simply. Of the irony of it, that these loves may no longer be mutual, Asterion says nothing. Neither does he mention the other part, not after the memory of Raum was invoked (the only true ghost among them) - the other world had monsters, too.
my body, the quiet grave it's the difference between drowning & burning
Seraphina catches herself picking apart all the way that this conversation feels just a bit wrong to her, all the ways that it grates against her in a way that makes her skin – not quite crawl, but shift, like it is being rubbed down with sandpaper. She catches herself doing it, and then she forces her thoughts to settle and forces her stare back out to the white-foam crest of coming waves. There is one thing that comes to rest in her mind, sure as the shaft of an arrow; neither of them are the same as they were when they met, years ago. She is sure that it was at a festival. (She cannot remember what was said.)
A shake of his head. Do you still claim religion, Seraphina?
It isn’t a question that she knows how to answer. “I suppose that depends on what you mean by religion.” Her lips twitch into something of a wry smile. “It’s hard to deny the existence of the gods, I suppose, now that I’ve seen them – and that’s half the battle of faith. But for all the rest…” She trails off, then, a hint of something that is almost-sadness in the tapering of her voice, and there is a pause before she manages to come to an answer. “If I am,” Seraphina says, feeling strangely unsure of the words as they settle in her mouth, “I think that it’s mostly a matter of habit.”
(Did religion mean believing in salvation from a god that she knows is caught halfway between cruel and apathetic? She had already abandoned all hope of him saving her. What she hopes for now, the only thing that she longs for from him, is to be heard. To be not-forgotten. To be something other than ghost, to have anyone listen to her, to know how she feels from the inside out. What she wants from Solis, she knows, is closer to intimacy than salvation; it is to feel like there is one person, just one, who knows her as she is, without all of her clumsy attempts at explaining.
She knows – in the same way that she knows gravity, the turn of the sun in the sky, the way waves crash on the shore - that he won’t grant her that, either. It does little to quell all her quiet longings. At least, she thinks, some omnipotent god surely knows that they exist.)
She wonders if he will understand that at all. She wonders if he will understand the way that she catches herself praying even though she knows that her prayers will go unanswered, all because it is familiar, it is routine, it was all but beaten into her. She wonders if he would understand how letting go of Solis would mean letting one last part of her be stolen away, how it would be a dead man’s one last act of taking from her. She wonders if it matters if he will understand or not, before she settles for the truth of the matter, which is that it doesn’t.
He tells her that those he loves are here, and she nods. Nothing else is necessary; she can understand that well enough, at least, much as she struggles to understand love as anything unlike obligation.
There is something that lingers in her mind, however, on the tail end of his own question. “…are there gods in your homeland, Asterion?” is what she asks, dropping the subject of leave-taking entirely, but she doesn’t think that it’s quite what she means. She is not entirely sure that she can conceive of a land that is godless entire; she struggles to conceive of another land at all. (She has barely strayed from Novus.)
Regardless. His question makes her wonder. (And what she wonders, too, but does not ask (because she knows that her wondering is for reasons more selfish than simple curiosity): what is it like there? What kind of place did you come from? Why did you decide to leave?)
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
Asterion finds that it is easier, when she speaks, to watch the sea instead of her.
Whatever that urge was, to strike - that peculiar, barbed hunger - it is lessened by the constant motion and sound of the waves. It feels sullen and yet soothed by the endless roll, the dark ceiling of clouds, the distant commotion of cormorants.
Maybe, he thinks (he hopes), it isn’t Seraphina making him feel this way, Seraphina and her sword, and her hair blown by a wind that is not this world’s, and her power. Maybe it is just the talk of gods.
He has nothing to add to her response but understanding, and this he conveys in a dip of his muzzle, a dark-eyed glance her direction. Oh, it had taken him a long time to break his own habits; to stop waiting for someone stronger, better, braver than him to step in and save what needed saving.
The bay wanders a few more steps down the beach, saltwater weeping up the crescents his hooves leave in the sand. At her question he pauses, and turns his face back toward her.
“Yes,” he says, and thinks of Ravos - of standing with Selke beside a surf not so different from this one, and watching No form from mist to man, and Fantome. “Each oversaw a particular element. They walked among us, more often than these gods. And like them, they had their favorites - they’d give little gifts, grant magic.” The surf quiets, as though to better hear him speak; so, too, does that writhing hunger inside him. Maybe all things were hungry to hear of gods.
“But also like here - do you remember that day, trapped with the regimes? - they did not always want the same things. And eventually it came to war. The land began to die - there were terrible fires, monstrous plants. A new magic began to grow, one none of the gods claimed. It opened a rift.” After knowing Florentine and her magic, a tear between worlds did not seem so strange - he can hardly remember what it felt like, all the wonder and the fear. He never should have let Calliope go without him. He never should have remained, and hoped for change. And some of that bitterness hardens his words when he says, “I was one of the last to come through. There was nothing left to stay for.”
A pause; his gaze passes over the dark shape of trees near the horizon, a distant peninsula. It makes him think of something else in the middle of the sea, and there is something urgent in his voice when he speaks again. “That last magic. It was like the island - chaotic, devouring. We should all hope they are not the same.” His heartbeat has become a bird in his chest, at the thought of that feral magic - it feels as though his blood is warming, hot enough to hiss. Asterion licks his lips, calls up a wave to wash over his hooves as though to soothe them. Once again he can’t look at Seraphina, or at Ereshkigal’s shadow. He thinks I have to flee. Before-
Once again he turns his head toward her, though his eyes do not stray from the sea. He makes an effort to smile, but not too much of one. “Goodbye, Seraphina. I hope you find something that makes staying easier.”
And then he is gone, tracking back the way he’d come, swallowing hard and not looking back. Not until the sound of the surf isn’t even a whisper behind him does he begin to run.
