[Worship] ashes

[Seraphina]

FROM THE GODS WHO SIT IN GRANDEUR
grace is somehow violent

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Failure stung like poison on her tongue.

She had been so sure of herself, so certain of her capabilities; she was sure that she could fix the glaring problems that leaked through the cracks in the sandstone walls of her great fortress, so sure that she, with her ruthless capability could fix the problems that lay siege to their nation. And what had she done? She had stagnated in the same way all the rulers before her had, so caught up in the politics and the problems and her own foolish, naïve uncertainty. Seraphina was no great queen, no revolutionary who could pull her people free of the problems that had haunted them for her entire life. She was barely a leader at all.

And she’d had more than enough of that stifling quiet, mired and trapped by her own inadequacy, by challenges that she had never imagined, by discord and disorder and factionalism she hadn’t anticipated. She’d failed her people, and, deep down, she knew that she’d broken the promises that she’d made the day she stepped up. Perhaps that was the worst of it. Perhaps that was what stung the most, what burned her.

She had no more time for indecision. There was far too much to be done; the Day Court scarcely held itself together, and the threat of Night still lingers heavy on her mind. The desert encroached further upon them with each passing day, and, with their resources draining, she needed to come up with solutions, establish alliances, develop trade routes…she needed to speak to the leaders of Dawn and Dusk. She needed to develop gardens, an irrigation system, gather inventors and smiths to make some sort of traps to guard trade routes and paths across the desert, reorganize her patrols, recreate her inner court…the tasks ahead seemed daunting. They were unraveling, and she did not know what she could do to soothe the troubled waters that lay ahead.

She stood at the altar of the Sun God, failure bitter and tough on her tongue.

There was nothing she could do to change the past; the time that had already slipped away was gone forever. “I have failed you.” A simple, quiet admission, stark and cold against the bitter chill of the peak; her breath comes out as while fog, trailing behind her like smoke in the wind. “I have failed you, and I can offer you no excuses for that.” Solis was not a god for excuses, after all – he was a god for blood and sweat and vicious resolve. “Now we press on.” No longer would she languish in indecision, suffer insult and uncertainty; the Queen of Day rose up again, as a phoenix from the ashes, and she did so with new resolve. It seemed that she had forgotten herself – well, she would forget who she was and what she desired no longer.

A simple offering of snakeskin and bone was left at the altar to show she’d ever visited at all, and then she began the long descent back to the deserts she has so long called her home.

@


little worship thread to signal a bit of forward momentum - closed and finished.