god comes to your window &
you're just too tired to open it.
She hates the flowers.
She lingers at the edge of the Steppe, a smudge of shadow barely distinguishable from the treeline; it is nighttime when she arrives, because it is dangerous to travel in the day. She can’t be noticed unless she needs to be seen, and she only feels secure in her ability to navigate Solterra unseen. (She resents him for taking that freedom from her, too – she can’t walk in the sun, only the pale shadow of the moon, and is that fair? She is still alive, but he has made a ghost of her.) When she smells their perfume, she is caught off guard, and, much as she would like to avoid that place, her curiosity is enough to tempt her there. Seraphina wishes it hadn’t, as she stands before the beautiful meadow, because she hates the flowers, loathes the flowers, resents them – she hates the way that they bob and flow in the wind, the way that their radiant petals catch in the moonlight, the way that the wind whistling through their leaves creates a soothing, soft melody. She hates them. She wishes that they were dead.
Right there - right over there, that was where he left her. A throng of lily-like flowers grow in a patch over where her corpse would have rested, gorging themselves on soil soaked red with her blood. Those are the worst, the little leeches. How dare they? How dare the gods – because it has to have been some god, doesn’t it? – do this to her. How dare they. Making something beautiful here – how dare they do that? It feels like some ugly mockery, and she resents it, coating such an ugly, terrible place – the place where she had died, because, oh, she has certainly lost – a – life here – with flowers. A celebration, or some morbid funeral; she wonders if people frolicked through the field of them in the daylight, enjoyed the beauty of the flowers and the music and the warm presence of the sun on their shoulders, and she resents that thought too. It is callous. It is painful. She hates the flowers, hates them.
But maybe it is more than that.
She stands in the lilies that would have coated her corpse, resenting them, biting back fury that is whiter than the moonlight washes the flowers around her hooves – she wants to dig them up and crush them beneath her hooves, but she doesn’t, just stands and seethes. As far as the world is concerned, those lilies swallowed her, and she hates them all the more for it, because she is reminded – painfully – that she was left there, forgotten. (Torstein came looking for her, but no one else – her people did not come to find her body, to burn her remains in accordance to custom. Those that she had considered friends abandoned her. And – she must have been there with Isra for days. Surely it was long enough for Raum to return, but none of them bothered to find her, when they heard of her death. Solterra didn’t care for her alive, and it cared for her even less dead.)
(She’d heard about the meeting that followed, too, that none of them had bothered to raise their voice at Raum, that her death had been met with a crushing national apathy; and she resents Solterra for it, too, for never returning the care she so desperately tried to offer it, for being so quick to accept her murderer as a king in her place. Perhaps it is convenient; it helps her to play dead. But it feels like a knife between her ribs, and she can’t pull it out – it feels like a slow, agonizing death. She used to believe that, if she tried enough, if she was good enough, she would someday be met with good in turn.)
But there she was – there was the dead queen of Solterra, covered in a thick shroud of lilies.
The lilies brush against her heels, bloodthirsty creatures, and she isn’t sure if there is a scream or a sob caught in her throat, isn’t sure if the tears that threaten at the corners of her vision come from rage or a misery that stings more viciously than misery has ever stung her before, because it feels like an absence of - hope.
She turns, choking down air, and she does not look back.
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tags | @
notes | takes place at an entirely different time than the raum/eulalie/anenome encounter; she's in & out. poke me if you want your character to have caught a glimpse of her?
***STAFF EDIT
@Seraphinahas rolled a 5! She has been awarded +1 EXP point for interacting with the flowers.
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
