I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORS
and there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself. and there's no one listening with one ear pressed sacred against the wall to the sound of a girl howling --
She hears Isra before she sees her.
She hears her magic, or she feels it – in the way that the pale expanse of sand becomes a metal so black and dark that it swallows the light of all the bodies in the sky, and the way that the sound of her hooves against it makes her think of the collision of weapons, of the death-music of a bloodied battlefield. Ereshkigal shifts on her shoulder, but she is blessedly silent. Seraphina looks away from the stretch of glowing blue with something that is almost regret, because, for a moment, she saw something beautiful.
But, if there is one thing she knows, it is that nothing beautiful can remain. Nothing kind. Time wears everything down to outlines, even the strongest materials – even stone.
Isra approaches, and, as her hooves make contact with the black rock of the outcropping, her magic fades momentarily. She does not smile, and Seraphina is grateful for it, because she is sure that any smile she forced to her lips would look more like bared teeth. She admires the look of her, the raw strength – the way that the blue glow from the little things in the water catches on the scales on her belly, turns them to the twinkle of distant stars, but sharper. Like fractured light. “Seraphina,” she says, and that is enough.
Beneath her hooves, those ink-black rocks turn to mirrors, strong enough to bear the weight of the both of them, and, for a moment, Seraphina finds herself looking at her own image and Isra’s, suspended upside-down with the star-spangled clarity of the night below them. The blue light catches oddly on the golden scars raked across her cheek, drawing her attention momentarily, but she forces her eyes away from them. She looks into her own face, into her own eyes – grown haggard and red, sunken – and she does not see herself looking back.
For most of her life, Seraphina was impassive. Not in her depths, but externally, and that was enough. She survived by hiding herself; her features showed nothing, nothing, nothing, her eyes became glass marbles, her lips lines so straight and worn that they might have been great cracks in the earth. Now, nothing is hidden, and all of the parts of her that are dripping out, like blood from an open wound (like those horrible, beautiful scars on her face), are vile. Disgusting. She doesn’t want to look at herself. She doesn’t want to know.
She looks back up, at Isra.
She wonders if those eyes of Isra’s, like depths of ocean, can open wide and see all of the horrible things inside of her – the way that she is rotting from the inside out. She wonders if she can see the hollow, hungry space, and she wonders if she knows how ravenous she is. When she looks at her, she feels like she can see right through her, with those eyes; she feels like she is staring at some silent jury. Maybe it is simply because Isra has seen her at her lowest point (though she feels like she has sunk lower), and her pride cannot forgive her for that, but she thinks that it is more likely the jealousy that burns a hole in her stomach whenever she thinks of her.
She saved you. Be grateful. But she still doesn’t know if she’s glad to have been saved. A part of her is sure that she would not have been better in the grave and herself than – this.
“Isra.” The sound of her name on the once-queen’s lips is heavy with an emotion she cannot discern. The worst part, Seraphina thinks, of what he did to her – the worst part – was cutting her into pieces, because she had always known herself, even when her name was taken from her, even when she became something that she should have never been able to, even when Solterra burned because of her, even when she was reduced to pitiful gratitude in the face of someone who might have seen her kingdom burned with dragon-fire, even when her own gods abandoned her. She has always worked for kindness, because she could not be kind. She has always longed for something softer, the capacity to be something more than the war-weapon that she was meant to be – and, when she was emissary, she really thought that she could be. When she became queen, she really thought that she could rule with something other than blood and fire, even when it felt as though she met blood and fire at every turn.
But, for the first time in her life, Seraphina does not long to be kind. She does not want to be loving, or to be loved. She wants to be many things: she wants to be bent like wreckage, like metal torn into shards; she wants to be ugly and full of edges, to be sharp to the touch; she wants to be ruined. She wants to ruin herself, so he can’t say that he did it to her. She wants to be terrible, and ruined, because she has to kill Raum, and he has a daughter. She has to be terrible, because she must kill Raum, and Rhoswen loved him. She has to be terrible, because she has to kill her own people, and she has loved them, and now she doesn’t know if she loves anything, or if she can love anything in a way that is not terrible – and if she wanted to love, the poison would drip into that too, and it wouldn’t be love anymore.
She glances at her reflection, and she knows that she has been driven too far – beyond a precipice, towards an inevitable collapse. Off a cliff. Into an abyss. Somewhere dark and empty, with nothing but the echo of her own voice like a lantern for guidance.
She is not sure if she will ever carve her way out – she is not sure if she wants to.
But she does not speak of that. It’s hardly the time, and she barely knows her, and she has never been especially good at baring her heart. “Are you well?” She knows that she isn’t, not while Raum is still king, not after her land was covered in ash and smoke, and it was god’s doing, and not here. If she were well, Seraphina thinks, wryly, she would not be standing in front of her. Nevertheless, there is something different in the Night Queen, and she does not know what it is – something in the way that she moves, in the way that she is formed.
@Isra ||
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
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
