I CONFESS, I TOO HAVE DREAMT MYSELF FLOWERED IN DEATH;
annihilation was the easiest history I could write of myself; I immerse myself in refracted rivers, of chalk & blackboard - I construct arcadias to forget myself in every framework;
Her stare, she thinks, could be a storm at sea – with those eyes that are so blue, so horribly blue, and so fathomlessly deep. It occurs to Seraphina that she does not know what to say to her, or know her much at all. She knows what she is heard of her. She knows that she seen her broken, bloodied – and dragged her back from the dark arms of death, and she is not sure that she can imagine a more intimate act between two people. But she does not know her. There are ghosts in her eyes, countless ghosts, but she does not know what form they take, or why they haunt her.
She wonders if she will ever know them – if she will ever know her. All she knows is that she looks at her, and her eyes make her think of a lament when she asks her if they will ever be well again. Her shoulders slump, almost imperceptibly, and she looks out to the water, white tangles of mane fluttering on the salt-thick wind.
For her entire life, she has lived for Solterra. She doesn’t know how to live for anything else – not even herself. Will we ever be well again? Isra asks, and she doesn’t understand the question. It fumbles through her mind in a horrible, tangled way that makes her think of things that she does not want to consider. For example: what will she do when Raum is dead? What does she have, now that he has taken everything from her? Her kingdom is dying. If she lives, she lives dishonored; she had her trial, and she will never be fit to return to the throne, with this great and horrible failure gaping across her shoulders. She isn’t so much as fit to return to the court, even as a guard or a soldier – because she is alive and so many of them are dead, and she is not sure that she can stand to imagine the way that she knows they would look at her for it, like she is no longer one of them, like it would be better if she were dead. (Why is their daughter dead? Husband? Wife? Sister? Brother? Dearest, dearest friend? The man down the street, or grandfather, or that musician who always played in the bar, or mother – her, her, her, always her, because she could have prevented this, and she didn’t.) She can’t leave Solterra (the notion does not so much as cross her mind), but it does not feel like her home anymore. She has no legacy. She has no name. She is a dead thing on stilts, dragging herself forward like lead weight. Who did she love that remains? Her people are scattered like ashes on the wind. What does she love that remains? Can she still love it, now that he has his teeth in it?
She has always been able to love it, even when it has been ugly – but now, even that has been stolen from her. She doesn’t remember how.
“I don’t know,” she admits, finally. There is something fragile in her voice, almost trembling – because she does not know. Seraphina has seen many things. She has watched her kingdom burn twice. When she was nothing more than a girl, she lost the only family she ever had and found herself enslaved and sent to war by a man who wanted nothing more to mold her in his image by snipping out the parts of her that disgusted him – her heart, her thoughts, her memory, her snow-white hair. She has been betrayed, beaten, looked down upon. Scarred. Bloodied. She has been held to account for someone else’s sins – over and over, as leaders always are. And she has seen death – she has seen death so often. She has stared into the pitch-black eyes of the abyss, into the glass-marble stares of those who are already gone. Nothing, she knows, will bring them back. (Nothing, she knows, will bring her back, but what does a solitary life matter, compared to all that has been lost? It seems unfair. Her life should not have been the metric so many of her people had died for.) Will she ever be well again? She has survived every terrible thing that has come her way in the past – but now that she is here, twisted reflection staring up at her from the black mirror below, she wonders if she will weather this, or if it will finally erode her down to nothing.
She has no future to speak of. She is wandering untethered, directionless but for the kill – once he is dead, she hopes that she dies too, because there is nothing left for her here, and she is so, so very tired. She has broken and broken and broken and forced her fragmented pieces back together again, but there was always some way back. In the most cynical way, she was always hopeful. She could always try again.
But she is out of attempts. Perhaps, she thinks, she will let herself disappear, like she should have disappeared when Raum killed her on the Steppe – she will wander into the desert and let herself be carried away by the sands, and she will become a cautionary tale, one of those things that parents tell their children so they don’t wander off at night and get eaten up by a sandwyrm or a stray teryr. A gold-scarred ghost across the dunes, haunting the world from a distance.
She is tired of her heart. All the things that it begs for. There’s no use, she tells it, in begging now, and then she smothers it down in her chest.
“We’ll never be the same again,” she says, and it feels more right than just not knowing. Acceptance means condemnation; wellness was always something earned. Unfortunately, she is not sure that she has ever earned it – and, as she watches more and more of her people die, Seraphina is not sure that she will ever deserve anything but to ache, to suffer.
But Isra…
She feels unchained, now. Like a tempest wearing skin, some storm at sea. Seraphina does not know if she will ever be tender again; she doubts it. Tenderness can rarely be reclaimed once it is lost. (Doesn’t she know that? How many years did she spend trying to become something softer? All that came from that was foolishness and naivete and the chance to break like a wave against the shore, over and over again; she should have been crueler.) But she does not feel like her, either, and that is why envy threatens to burn a black hole in her stomach whenever she sees her. When she speaks, with her great promises and a war on her tongue, Seraphina knows that she means it. And she knows that she is loved, still loved – and loved even more, perhaps, for the parts of her that are still vulnerable. Solterra would never be so kind.
But she does not speak of the way that she envies her, or the way that she hates herself for it. Instead, she says, “Leadership is a heavy burden, and rarely a kind one. It seems that it is less often about success than survival.” She looks away from their mirror-image, turning her gaze out towards the tide; she thinks that she sees her dragon, out in the distance. There is something more that she wants to say, but the words all die out on her tongue. Once, she would have been reassuring. Now, she simply feels lost.
However, she is not entirely without defiance; if she were, she would not be here. “But – if we are never well again, he’ll win.” The hardest-fought battles, she knows, are the psychological ones. (Denocte was always adept at them, during the war, with their nightmare-king; she never encountered the Night King, but she heard stories of what happened to the soldiers who were caught up in the throes of his magic.)
Raum has ruined. Raum has killed. Raum has done the unthinkable, and there is no way to undo the damage he has caused.
She does not want to give him the satisfaction of ruining her.
When Isra asks her if she is hunting Raum, too, with a voice like blood-stains and sharp spear-tips, Seraphina simply nods, and gives her affirmation as a single word. “Yes.” There is not war in her voice; if anything, it is the frightening chill of inevitability, for Seraphina knows that all tyrants will – must – die, and Raum will too, once they catch him. (She does not say and Tempus, too, but she thinks it. She still has questions, and she knows that only god can answer them.) On her shoulder, Ereshkigal shifts like a changing wind, turning her violent-red eyes on the Night Queen, and she clacks her jaw thoughtfully, but, to Seraphina’s relief, she does not speak.
She thinks of Raum and hunting (and, with it, a teryr in the canyon, Maxence, the tip of Avdotya’s spear-), and she turns to look at Isra again. The gold of her scar darts on the obsidian mirror below their hooves, fragments like a fallen star. Seraphina opens her mouth to speak, a question brimming on the tip of her tongue, but it never passes her lips, because the water moves.
Not the water, she realizes, as she inclines her head to look towards that tantalizing, nebulous blue glow. For a moment, she thinks that the motion is little more than a change in tides – that the wind has simply blown it one strange way or another. However, the simple swirl does not linger long, replaced by familiar shapes – of islands, volcanoes, horses, birds, high castle spires, the gnarled branches of trees, strange creatures so deep below the surface that they have never seen the light of day.
And then they are dark – disappearing. Lost to the bob of the waves, now nothing more magical than a mass of small things clung together. She glances to Isra. “I’ve heard,” she says, somewhat reluctantly – because she does not know how to speak to the Night Queen of things that do not taste like blood and death -, “that you are a storyteller, Isra. Did that feel like a story to you?”
It did to her, in the unstable, intimate design of the runes carved into the Elatus Canyon, cave paintings that had lingered for hundreds of years. A wordless story, lost but for its residue – a story you felt, rather than understood.
@Isra || the theme of me being literally incapable of writing a short reply to Isra continues in full force, I see || “Still Life with the Physicists’ Scarred Forearms" george abraham
"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
