[P] and death is the love of what hurts you the most

[Seraphina]

I say : if the heart is a muscle I will train it to be sinew.
I say : the heart is a muscle and it will resist. / I say : because I am master of myself, I will not be weak.

Winter is as grey as she is.

She is a few inches above each black outcropping of rock and bone-bleach sand; try as she might, she cannot keep her hooves to the ground, anymore. Her magic is wild and hungry, and it spends most days scraping at the inside of her chest, begging to be let out like some starving animal. She doesn’t know what it wants. Sometimes, she is afraid of what it wants.

(Whatever it wants, it isn’t what she wants. It is a second heart beating inside of her. She wonders if it had always been there, even before that night on Veneror; she wonders if Raum gave it to her, violent as the scar on her cheek, or if it has always been a part of her, and he simply brought it out, tooth and claw.

Her magic tells her to grow stronger, from all of this; her magic tells her to become powerful and angry, to become feral and hungry as a sandwyrm. It tells her that she has earned the right, after everything that she has seen, and that it is the only way forward. Her magic tells her that it would be better to seethe than to weep. Her magic tells her that she has nothing left to lose, anyways.

She doesn’t want that. All that Seraphina has ever wanted is-)

The water is grey, and, with it, the sky. Where the sea meets the rocks, where it should be most shallow, where it crashes up on the basalt like an open, foam-toothed mouth, it is nearly black. She doesn’t bother to examine the paradox; it isn’t as though she understands the sea, anyways. Ereshkigal is above her, circling.

The sight is so ordinary that she cannot remember the day. She can barely remember where she is – she presses against the wind like she is walking through water, white hair twisting and coiling in a way that is not quite due to the wind. Her hooves don’t touch the sand. She moves like a ghost. She feels like a ghost. She wonders how long it will take for her to feel like a living thing again.

There were moments – where she did. When Raum was still alive, she still had direction. She still had purpose. Briefly, after his death, she managed to pull herself together. Briefly, after his death, she thought that she might get better.

But there were the nightmares. Every night. There was the backslide, and the guilt. There was the way that she stepped into the capitol one morning and found that she could not look down the streets without wanting to vomit; there is the way that it’s only gotten worse, that she can’t even look towards the city now without feeling nauseas. Every time she thinks that she has managed to pull herself together, she falls apart again.

She hasn’t felt like herself. Not since he killed her.

She wonders if she will ever feel right again. (She wonders if she has ever felt right to begin with.)

She stops when she is hovered above a gnarly outgrowth of basalt, hovering like a specter above the stone; her unbound hair flows behind her, movements in defiance of the wind, and she stares out at the sea, solitary and monochromatic. Ereshkigal’s talons clamp down on her shoulders like a vice as she circles down for a slow landing, though they only pierce her skin at the tips. She doesn’t notice; or, if she does, she doesn’t flinch.

Fine lines of red drip down her legs like small rivers, washing out to the tide.

---

@Elena || sorry for the secondhand depression, elena babe || venetta octavia, "sit, stay, heel"

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

It had been like a punch to the gut and she had felt dizzy with disappointment, with regret, with the pained way her heart threatened to punch clean through her chest. At times, she had wondered if she had made him up, if she had some how dreamt of him. She wondered if she had carved out the sharpness of his jawline from the ache in her heart and if she had imagined the way that he had told her that she was in his soul, the way he had held her like it mattered, like she mattered.

But the longer she wondered, the more it hurt and the feeling grates down her spine like a knife in her back. (Though Elena now knows betrayal sings its way deeper, far deeper than any knife could).

The more she felt the vicious loss of him as a tangible thing.

Finally, she did the only thing she knew how: she built a wall around her agony. She lifted herself up from the cold ground and shook herself off and she went on living because it’s the only thing. The only thing.

There is a simplicity in the ocean, for all that it can be so wild and unpredictable. Perhaps that is why Elena had found herself a clifftop home that stares across the crashing waves. And why she finds herself by its shores today. Elli is sitting with Nic as she teaches her daughter what it means to be a knight and Elliana imagines herself discovering new places, new lands, new friends.

The day is windy, it whips against flaxen locks of hair, letting it circle about her head like an undeserved halo. She pushes against the wind, it is cold, so cold against her skin, but Elena has always been a glutton for punishment.

Elena sees so many, at least once, beside the sea. There is something about the sea breeze in their hair, the smell of salt that makes a meeting so much more intimate, meaningful. She has seen Michael, Tenebrae, Azrael, Torrin, and Anandi. So many of them. The sea has broken her heart and rebuilt her so many times already while in Novus, and Elena, the foolish lover she is, keeps coming back for it.

She finds Seraphina, and she will join the list of others she has seen with crashing white caps dancing as wolf and fawn in the background. Elena finds her, grey like storm clouds, there are pieces of her, of her coloring that remind her of Elliana, remind her that she really should be going home, should leave all this behind. But Elena stands there, hanging between speaking and staying silent as she looks at her with eyes of glacial blue. “You are bleeding,” she says finally, quietly, voice sad and silver, molten when it spills over such soft, sweet lips. Elena walks towards her, her chance to leave, unnoticed, unmet, leaving her with every step she takes towards the mare. “I am Elena,” she says. Her eyes rove to the cut, superficial, but a cut all the same. “We should clean that.”

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them

[Seraphina]

YOU SAY: SOFT.
You say: tender. / I say: there is a hole in me that needs tearing open.

When she realizes that she is not alone, she does not quite react. There is the backwards flick of one of her ears towards the sound of hooves, but otherwise – she is nearly statuesque, perfectly still, unconcerned. (At her hip, Alshamtueur gives a soft sizzle, but she never pulls it from its scabbard.) There is a beat of wings, and then Ereshkigal is in the air again, having, evidently, done enough; Seraphina does not flinch away from her, and she does not watch as her dark shape goes circling up and up, then sweeps out to sea, perhaps to hunt. She is always hunting, always ravenous. Sometimes Seraphina understands her hunger more than she would like to admit.

And she is still hovering – quite like a ghost, in the way that she does not touch the ground, in the way her white hair swirls in spectral, suspended tangles, in the way that she is not quite present, in every way save for the trickle of blood on her shoulder – when the golden mare approaches her, and when she whispers in a soft and sweet voice, tells her that she is bleeding, that they should see to her wound, that her name is Elena. Her head turns, ever so slowly, and her gaze slowly turns to the golden mare, the golden scar on her cheek catching like a dash of flame in the low, storm-swept light. The look in her eyes is strangely vacant, and strangely cold; she is angular, and there is a dark sallowness to her features that betrays her sleeplessness, her near-starvation, how she has spent the better part of two years wishing that she could disappear entirely.

There is something about her worry that burns her. There is something that she wants that she cannot find words for.

In the end – she was never quite strong enough to save herself. She was never quite strong enough to play the hero either; it was always someone else, and she was always, at best, collateral damage. (In the end – it seemed like everyone around her scattered like ashes or smoke, and somehow she had found herself isolated, only half-meaning to. Maybe she’d hoped that someone would catch her, or find her, or stop her. Thought that someone would catch her, or find her, or stop her. Maybe she didn’t want them to. Maybe she wanted to disappear entirely, never be seen again. She craves both; she is shame and loneliness, two kinds of agony, perpetually torn. And then there is that part of herself that knows that all of this is deserved, a kind of useless punishment that serves no one (least of all the dead), that she should stop longing for things that she knows she cannot have and will never, ever deserve.) And now she has this golden girl, so like Bexley Briar, so unlike Bexley Briar, so like the sun, and so unlike the sun god, worrying over a scratch on her shoulder.

Her concern stings like a slap to the jaw. It doesn’t show on Seraphina’s face.

The scene reminds her of, in some twisted and unpleasant way, the night she’d met Caine. She could laugh; she could cry. She does not do either. Instead, she dips her head, and says, softly, “It’s superficial – you don’t need to trouble yourself.”

She should introduce herself, she knows. It would be more – polite.

Lately she does not even want to speak her name aloud.

---

@Elena || immediate reply whoops || venetta octavia, "sit, stay, heel"

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

“Come here Elena. Come here and tell me about your scars…or leave.”

And she stayed.
He asked if she was alone.
And she said yes.

He held her close.
And she told him about her scars.

Sometimes Elena wakes up and she cannot breathe.

The air feels as though it is too tangled, too heavy, too smoky, too thick. No air can come in, and the air in her lungs, just as heavy, just as matted cannot leave. There is panic in her veins, and she cannot move, so she silently screams, her lungs burning. It is the dreams, of empty, dead things. All of it, the whole world, going to ruin around her, decaying in front of her eyes, inside her mind. All of it gone. She is the world, and that world is dying.

Elena dies too.

There is something between them that is bred from a shared sadness—a kinship that comes from having felt the same pain. A pain not caused by the same faces, not caused by the same circumstances, but they have known the weight, have known the agony, and Elena can feel it leap off her skin. It would seem Seraphina’s telekinesis was able to push more than objects towards her. There is something nostalgic about this mare, something dangerous that sends her thoughts drifting back to ruinous homesickness. There is a depth, an awareness to the mare, beneath her eyes, her coat, there is a deep strength, a hidden purpose. Elena studies her for just a moment with dazzled awe. The indescribable want, Elena knows this too, and she is just as useless putting words to it. She came to Novus a women without roots, if only because she so forcefully yanked them out, but Novus brought her new soil, and here, Elena has bloomed, but like the sunflowers, she moves towards the sun, even as it never holds still in that blue sky.

The emotion does not show on her face, but Elena can feel it as clear as a single white cloud on a blue summer’s day. Elena is vaguely aware that the girl smells so much like flowers, that the golden girl could almost believe it to be summer. But the scent passes with her next words, and Elena knows she only imagined it. Elena only then moves towards her with graceful caution, and unrestrained compassion. “I don’t need to, but I think I would like to trouble myself,” she replies thoughtfully. “Come with me to the water,” Elena says then, as if it will offer them both salvation they may or may not seek. The golden girl knows it will not, but there is a beauty in pretending it may. Elena starts to walk before looking over her shoulder at the grey woman. (Grey like ghosts she tries to forget, grey like storm clouds she tries to ignore). And now she wants the grey to follow. Elena has always been a fickle creature.

“Do you have any stories worth telling?” She asks, eyes sparking like blue lightning. “I love a good story.”

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them

[Seraphina]

YOU SAY: THAT ISN'T HOW HEALING WORKS.
I say: I know.

Try as she might – Seraphina can only think, as she looks at this golden creature, bright as the sun in all the ways that Bexley Briar and Solis are not, that she is enviable.

Because, no matter how she might try, she knows that she could never approach anyone with the unrestrained warmth that shows on the woman’s face when she approaches her – she knows that she could never show such easy compassion, not to friend or stranger alike. It doesn’t matter, really, if she cares. No matter how much she does, the right words can never quite make it out of her mouth; her lips can never twist their way into the right expression. She has always been clumsy, horribly and fatally mortal; she has never been good at capturing the heart of anyone, and, whenever she has managed to do it, she has never deserved what has come from it. Respect – or loyalty – or affection, or maybe even-

She doesn’t want to think of love. (She never does.)

So, when the woman approaches her in spite of her quiet resistance, soft-eyed, warm as sunlight (but not on the Mors; it is scalding, there, but never warm), and she tells her that she would like to see to her wounds regardless, she feels envy like a hot jab between the ribs. Nearly like a sword. She forces it out of her almost immediately, because she does not wish to be as bitter as she is, and she meets the woman’s sky-blue eyes (and even her one blue eye is more like ice than the sky-), offering the slowest nod of consent.

“If you wish,” Seraphina murmurs, “then thank you.” She isn’t quite thankful; she isn’t ungrateful, either. She is taking her time to heal a scratch, which is something she might have bothered to do herself (even for a stranger, but she is trying not to think of the time that she did), before she had grown so apathetic.

When had she become so utterly hopeless, she wonders? She trails after the golden girl like a ghost. Like smoke. Surely, even when she was a soldier, she hadn’t been like this – she had still been devoted to something. Now she is worldless. Sometimes she feels like nothing at all, and not quite in the useless, embodied way that she did when she was younger-

No. Sometimes she feels like nothing at all because she finds herself feeling lonely, nauseatingly lonely, and she can never find the right words.

The woman asks her if she knows any stories.

She snaps her mind to the question – relieved, as it is, for anything else to cling to.

“I might,” she says, and she tries to think of Solterra as she knew it as a girl, of the stories that she learned by the fire at night, the ones that she read, as the Emissary, as the Queen, before her world collapsed in on itself over and over again. She tries to think of a Solterra that is not burning, the rise and fall of dunes unmarked by blood or bone or time-frozen statue. Of course, she can’t. Trying to deny the past is as good as trying to deny reality – and Solterra, she knows, no matter how much she might have loved it, no matter how much she might have longed to nurture it, will never be good, or kind, or loving. “What kind of story would you like to hear?”

She thinks that she might still have some, buried like a seed somewhere in her breast, waiting for spring.

(It is winter, regardless.)

---

@Elena || <3 || venetta octavia, "sit, stay, heel"

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

When she was little, she got lost.

She had not meant to. One moment she was walking through the sunflower field with her mother and the next moment she was all alone, looking in between green stalks of the flowers, trying to find where she might have gone. She called out for her in that small, baby voice, but it felt like ages that she wandered in that field. Flowers that once made her so happy, now a cause for panic. She wondered if she would ever see her mother again.

And then she was there. Appeared before her with a heavenly halo wrapped around her head, at least this what her daughter pictures her to be.

“Elena, never do that again. I don’t know what I would do if I lost you,” her mother had wept into her blonde mane. And Elena wondered what would her mother do without her, but she never stopped to think, what would Elena do without her mother?

Elena feels something tuck beneath her breast bone, an emotion, it is strange enough that Elena knows it is not her own, and so she shakes it off as easily as a leaf blows on an autumn breeze. “I should thank you for the company,” she says and smiles, as she leads the woman to the salt water. Salt water: a healer that Elena could only aspire to be. “I have been trapped in conversations between my daughter and my ward, it is pleasant to speak with someone closer to my age,” she says like Nic and Elli are such a chore, but the way that smile sits on her face says they are anything but. She wonders for a moment though, how old the woman is. If they are close in age, or decades apart. Elena no longer knows what age means. Immortality has made her forgetful.

They reach the water and Elena splashes it against her, cleaning out the wound. It is shallow, superficial, but infection has bound itself to smaller wounds than this. The golden girl wears the woman’s sorrow and loneliness as her own. It doesn't feel as heavy knowing part belongs to someone else. It is better than feeling cold, closed off. Elena knows she still has a heart. It’s in pieces, little bits of shredded and tattered paper that lies in a cavity of her chest. But it’s there, beating feebly.

She thinks for a moment. “Tell me a story that has not happened yet,” she says, craving something new. “If you were brave enough to do anything, what would you do?” She asks her, voice of silver. She pauses, hanging in the silence. “Be brave,” she says, and those blue eyes melt into her own.

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them

[Seraphina]

I SAY: I AM AN OLD DOG LICKING ITS SORES JUST AS THEY SCAB OVER.
I say: I want to be raw flesh and no hurt.

She follows her where she leads, her chest knotting with some strange mixture of envy and desperation. Envy at all the ways that she is warm and she knows that she can’t be, and desperation to be – anything but alone. (And then – an equal desperation to be alone and decaying. She is, most often, a mass of ugly turmoil.) The woman tells her that she is glad for company of her own age; she spends most of her time with her daughter and her ward.

For a moment, she wonders what it would feel like to have a family. Children. She has never thought about it.

(She crushes the line of inquiry almost immediately.)

“I see,” she says, finally, though she doesn’t really see at all. How could she? “I’m glad that I could provide some company, then.” She wonders where her daughter is, and her ward; but she doesn’t ask after them. She has never been good at things like that. (It barely even crosses her mind that she probably should.)

As they reach the water, she cleans out her wound, and, if it hurts, it does not show on her face. She watches her work in silence, and she does not say a word until the woman asks a question that she has no idea how to answer: “Tell me a story that has not happened yet. If you were brave enough to do anything, what would you do?” There is a pause, and then she adds, “Be brave.” Her eyes are terribly blue. Like a clear sky.

The coast is covered in storm.

She hesitates. When she finally speaks, she stumbles over her words. “I don’t…know,” she admits, still softly, unsure of what to say. If she were brave enough to do anything – if she were brave enough to do anything, she would have tried to escape as a girl, or done Viceroy in herself; she would have been a better queen, she is sure, less tolerant, less hesitant; she would have fought back against every indignity and disgrace, every betrayal by her people, every slap across the jaw (literal or metaphorical); she would have told the people that she loved (in every way that she has ever loved anyone) that she loved them, but the words have never left her mouth, and now they are gone from her; she would have killed Raum herself, run him through to the hilt of Alshamtueur, and she would have felt no remorse for it; she would have replied to so many unopened letters; she would have spat in Solis’s face, refused any paltry consolation a god had ever offered her; she would have returned home, when her work was done, and shown her face again, crawled back from the grave that sought to hold her. But Seraphina has never been very brave, and, even more than that, she has rarely been granted the freedom to choose.

(But maybe that is just a lie that she tells herself because she does not want to admit to the truth of the most painful things that she has done, the worst and most self-imposed losses that she has incurred. She is lonely, and it hurts like a knife in the throat. She wishes-

She just wishes that once, someone had stayed even when she had tried to run. Even when she didn’t want them to, or when she did but felt too guilty to let them. But that is too much to ask of anyone, and she knows it.)

Her gaze steadies on the woman, and she licks a thin coat of salt from the dark curve of her lips. Her mouth tastes unbearably dry. “What would you do?”

Her voice is soft, and uncertain – she doesn’t know what to say, or how to answer.

---

@Elena || <3 || venetta octavia, "sit, stay, heel"

"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"

@

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

If she were made of moments and not atoms, she would be a beautiful kaleidoscope of all the pretty things she never said, and all the times she was too afraid. If she were made of moments and not atoms, then her eyes would reflect all the waters and the sunsets she has known. She would burn like galaxies burn, all fractured light and tangled stars, and the moments instead of atoms would string together a constellation that always drew out the lines of those she loved.

She has wondered what it would be like to disappear. To melt into a sunset like a candle, to lay between the petals in floral wallpapers, to become a single star amongst a constellation. To become the background, the edges of rivers, the peripheral.

You cannot hurt if stay on the edge, she thinks.

If she were made of moments and not atoms all of this might have killed her by now.

Atoms live even if you don’t want too.
Atoms live even if your heart does not.

Atoms live even if all you are is bones.

Elena focuses on the healing, cleaning out the wound. There has always been something so comforting about these healing tasks. She breathes, listens for the sound of the woman’s breath, if it will follow.

“That is okay,” she murmurs in her breathy voice of reassurance, even the syllables of her tongue wispy and soon forgotten on the breeze that winds and wraps between them. Elena is brave, or foolish. Very brave, very foolish. To fall in love again and again. But what is she now when she has another chance and she is so, so terrified? Scared or clever? Very scared, very clever.

Elena wonders what she would have done differently if she were brave. But all she can think of when she thinks of bravery is her father. She smiles. “I would like to be brave enough to swim to the bottom of the ocean, or to fly into the stars,” she says, almost peacefully. “I would never make it,” she says, blinking a moment. “But I would love to be brave enough to try.” And she places her forehead in the crease of Seraphina’s neck before turning away. “I need to get back,” she says, blue eyes darting to her injury. “Take care of that shoulder.”

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them