The canyon walls glow a hungry shade of red-orange in the light of the setting sun. Veins of quartz scissor across the sandstone in a fashion that almost seems to mirror the grey man and his scars. As he walks he touches the walls and imagines how they were formed (slowly and under immense pressure) and then gradually shaped. Would a man be shaped in the same way, if he were to live for centuries? Against his cheek the air is dry and cool, almost like that of a crypt as it rises from the shadowed canyon floor.
It seems fitting, for someone on his way to see a ghost.
Even if she never really died, he believed her dead, and what are other people if not a flesh-colored vessel to hold all we think of them? He mourned her, and long after the time for mourning had passed he kept his grief close to heart. The only chance he had of escaping that grief was to leave Solterra, but that was the also only thing he could not do. There was too much work to be done, and far less willing to do it. Anyway, he had done enough running from the past for one lifetime.
The strange thing was, to learn his queen was alive provided only the most marginal relief. He had to see her for himself, he had to know it was truth and not an elaborate illusion, a trick of the light buoyed by hope or magic. Would she be the same? (of course she wouldn’t, he thinks– what they don’t say about phoenixes is that they never rise from the ashes the same bird that kneeled to the flame) Would she be disappointed in him? Well that too was a foolish question. Of course she would.
He ran off to love (which is easy to mistake for happiness. It is not– it’s much better) and in his absence everything crumbled. It all fell apart so quickly, everything he worked for– everything she worked for. Everything the two of them, and Bexley Briar, strove to accomplish together, all those carefully laid plans and unspoken dreams.
In the end, the fruits of their labor tasted of iron and ash.
Of course, it was foolish of him to expect anything else. Anything more. Life was a struggle, a fight to the very last breath. He knew that. But he was a drowning man who did not know how to die, and so he grasped at hope-- stubborn, persistent hope. He wanted their kingdom to be beautiful. We don’t need to explain where hope got him.
His thoughts narrow as the canyon widens to a sandy clearing. The last of the day’s light streams down, carving the still air into chunks of light and shadow. He steps into the sunlight. Before him, in a place he cannot see, something stirs. “Is it true that the burning one has returned?” As he calls to the darkness, his heart quickens against his will. He never learned how not to hope.
E I K
grief can be a kind of music
that knows how to rise like the sea
SORROW WILL HAVE AN END No don't think what the songs think. Just think how they sound.
When she sees Eik, the soft greys of his coat broken into sunlight and shadow, Seraphina wants to cry; she wants to reach out and touch him, to reassure herself that he is solid. (She did not know, in the time they were apart, if he was alive or dead.) But she does not cry. The corners of her weary eyes burn with pent-up tears, but she has forgotten how to cry.
If she cries, Raum wins. She knows this. She knows, too, that he has already won – that she is already a broken, discarded husk of the silver queen who died on the Steppe, a snakeskin shed and left behind by the snake.
But there is still a sob that grows in her throat and presses against her teeth when he steps into the clearing. There is still a sob that begs to be let out – and, with it, the image in the back of her mind of herself, kicking up sand in her wake, cascading across the clearing and pressing her forehead to his shoulder, where his mane meets his skin, and letting herself mourn in the way that the twisted-up residue of Seraphina that lingers inside of her chest longs to.
She does not move from her place in the shadows. She feels like she is dead.
If there is any part of her that is still queen or any part of her that wants to win this war, she knows that she cannot let herself grieve. Oh, but she wishes that she could. She aches for the touch of a friend, for something softer, for some warmth – that thing inside of her, ravenous and burning, devours every little kindness she receives. She wishes that she could mourn her dead. Instead, they build up inside of her, her ribcage a little sepulcher, but she does not cry. She cannot cry. In her mind’s eye, she cannot shake the image of Rhoswen, her spine illuminated by the peach-gold glow of flames; in her mind’s eye, she cannot shake the fragile image of her newborn girl, a daughter that she will orphan. She wonders what daughters she has already orphaned, in her raids on Raum’s guards and soldiers. She wonders what daughters she has orphaned through her indifference, or her cruelty, or her failure. The dead and the dying still watch her, glass-eyed, wherever she goes, and she is not sure if she has become revenant or reaper.
So, see – she is bloody. (When has she not been bloody?) She is bloody, and, if she hopes to put an end to this, she must make her peace with orphans and ghosts.
She takes an unsteady step forward, mouth as dry as desert stand. Not out into the light – not yet. Under the heavy overhang of shadows, she is grey enough to be spectral or disappear entirely. Burning one, Eik calls her, and she thinks back to their conversation in the library, when the world was simpler and a little bit kinder. Her Emissary, one of her only friends, one of the only people she trusted, that she still trusts. (Kind to her, and knowing, in spite of all of her edges.) Burning one, he says, and she wants to tell him yes, that she is still here – that she is still the Seraphina he knew, the Seraphina he met so many years ago. She wants to be that Seraphina, for him.
That is not what comes out of her mouth. “I don’t…” and her voice almost breaks, but she holds it tight to her chest and does not let it fall apart, even as she takes a nervous step forward, out of the shade. The grotesque gnarl of scars – plated pretty, ornamental gold, as though it could guise the violence of them – gleam in the dying sunlight as she allows her hood to fall back against her shoulders. Her eyes drift to the canyon floor; her chest constricts in shame. Even if he dies, she will never be able to escape what he did to her. Even if he dies, and even if she kills him, and even if Solterra is freed, she will have her failure raked into her skin forever. In that way, she will always be possessed. She will always belong to one evil man or another – she will always be the legacy of the Viceroy, or of Zolin, or of Raum.
She has shed her collar, but she will never be free. “I don’t know.”
In a sense – there she is, material and alive, returned from the grave to stand before him.
But in a sense – she is gone. In a sense, those aren’t her eyes, even though they belong to her, and that isn’t her face, even though it should be.
And if she is burning, she is burning alive, like a house on fire – strangled by smoke and heat.
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
SOMETIMES A PIECE OF SUN
BURNED LIKE A COIN IN MY HAND
He knows it is true before she steps into the light. Those two words “I don’t–” That voice– The memories– To hell with what’s happened to her or what she’s seen or the demons in her mind– it is Seraphina before him, she’s alive. She’s alive and that's all that matters. Right? His heart, which had been too afraid to hope, his heart sings.
She steps into the light and the first thing he sees is not her scars or her bare neck but her eyes, blue and gold and full of– some war he could not know. He does not see the unshed tears but maybe, maybe he sees bits and pieces of the grief she tries so hard to conceal, to carry. It becomes hard to meet those heavy eyes but he does, for longer than feels comfortable, looking away only when it almost becomes too much to bear.
The golden scars– Isra’s work– tell a story not everyone knows how to read. So often Eik himself had been misinterpreted, all because of that patchwork of scars, knotted in some places like a burl of a tree, in others slick and black like obsidian. Sunken and bulging, clean and jagged, each with an untold and often assumed story. Scars are secretive things. As much as they may seem to boldly display one tale there is always a second, sometimes a third and a fourth, hidden unseen beneath the surface.
When he looks at the depth and length of Seraphina’s scars, he can picture the great paw and how it sunk into skin. He can see how close it was to tearing her eye out, closer still to spilling her brains. He can almost even feel how the claw would sink into flesh and then– rip away, easily as tired wallpaper, half the pulp of her face.
(Is that how she lost her collar? Or was that removed afterward? Regardless, he’s glad it’s gone. Burning One or no, the piece of steel was never what defined her. He would be happy to never see it or anything like it again.)
“I don’t know.”
He once thought touch had no purpose that was not violent.
Closed fist or open hand, the only intent worth having was to strike.
He once thought many things that seem so childish now. Time, the great teacher, was always putting him to shame (Do you see? Do you see what a fool you made of yourself? Look at who you were–) and there was no end to it. Surely a year from now, or two, or five, he’ll kick himself for the actions of today.
The point is– it does not matter that Seraphina does not close the distance between them.
He does.
The details of the movement are lost or blurred– does he walk or run? Make a sound? Does he appear to briefly glow in that dying light, the way the slot canyons drink in the sun and make it their own?– until he draws closer and time slows. He slows, too, carefully searching her eyes– is this okay? – before moving into an embrace. Chest to chest, his head resting gently on her withers.
There are so many things he could say, but nothing he wants to, not yet.
See, to Eik this embrace is not about mourning. It is a celebration, and a reminder. And an apology. “I’m sorry, Seraphina,” he murmurs her name into her spine, like a secret. “I’m so sorry.”
I REMEMBERED YOU WITH MY SOUL CLENCHED
IN THAT SADNESS OF MINE THAT YOU KNOW
STICKS AND STONES STILL ROTTING IN MY HANDS. The story rained so hard, it’s all I had to drink. Hope is the loneliest house on the block. It spends years waiting for a hammer. Forgets it was once a tree.
She is almost afraid, when she steps out into the light.
No – she is afraid. She feels like she is afraid of everything, lately, and, like a man desperate to keep land from being eroded by a rushing river, she is clutching desperately at something she cannot hold. She is scared of everything, and she is scared of everyone. Once, when she was a hollowed-out bowl, or a statue, she had stood in front of Avdotya – shell-shocked from a death, his name burnt like a brand onto the tip of her tongue, her first failure of so, so many – and, illuminated by the hazy glow of the ancient stained glass windows that had hung heavy with the weight of history along the walls of the throne room, she had agreed to take the crown. She hadn’t been afraid, then. Now she is. She is afraid of everything – of more death, of more violence, that a single misstep would cost her what little remains of what she once held dear. All this has led to is one, fundamental truth: the world is a thing with teeth, and, the moment that you show your throat, it always bites. Always. She has never been trusting, and she has never been optimistic.
But she thought the world could change. (It, of course, didn’t; her life ended in dark and blood, as it always does.)
When she does not move, Eik bridges the space between them. She almost jerks back the moment that he steps towards her, that familiar shame burning a pit in her stomach, but she forces herself to still, legs locking beneath her quivering frame. Please don’t, she wants to say, in spite of herself, as he draws closer. Please don’t. I can’t. Please don’t.
But he does.
He meets her gaze, and she doesn’t resist him. (Oh, but she wants to. She wants to run. From him – from this – from everything. Duty keeps her rooted in place, like iron nails screwed to the floorboards of a sinking ship.) She doesn’t resist him when she feels his chest brush against her own, when he rests his head on her withers, when she feels his skin against hers, the press of his mane to her neck; she doesn’t resist, but she doesn’t move. She stands stiff. Trembling.
It is in the silence between them – where he does not speak, and she does not know what to say – that Seraphina feels the press of tears at the corners of her eyes, and she knows that she will not be able to resist them, either. She can count from memory the number of times she has cried in her life. (She knows that she will remember this one, too.) She spends a quiet moment – is it that long? – biting the curve of her lip, silently begging the tears to recede back into the dips of her eyes, but they fall out instead and tumbled down the concave of her cheeks in sticky, wet trails. She grinds her teeth so hard that she tastes copper and salt. It doesn’t take long for her breaths to come out as wet, stuttering sobs, practically gasps, and that is another failure, another shame, but, though she fights with herself over it, she finds herself too weak to hold her sorrow in. She is glad that he is looking away from her, chin pressed to her withers; she would not want him to see her like this. Not in pieces.
(The weight comes rushing in all at once. She is caught in a terrible trap; there is no way back, and there is nothing ahead. The walls are closing in at all sides. Solterra is burning, burning, burning, and she’d only ever wanted to make it beautiful. She feels like she is drowning, like she is pinned down by dark water like she was so many years ago in the maze. It’s heavy on her chest, pulling her down, down, down, down, and she can’t see the surface. Even if she kicks, it just feels like drowning. Is there any way out? What remains for her, once Raum is dead? She is in tatters. Everything she was, everything she ever wanted – tatters.) I’m sorry, Seraphina, he whispers, and she feels his words against her skin; she feels them more than she hears them, with the sound of her own sobs echoing like a hum between her ears. How long has it been since she’s heard her own name? Ereshkigal never uses it. Most of her resistance does not know her, and, even if they do, they uphold the ruse like she does, like their lives depend on it. How long has it been? Days, at least. Weeks. I’m so sorry. His words echo. Roll around her mind. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry; and she feels like she’s been waiting for an apology, from someone or something, but, now that she’s hearing it, she doesn’t know how it makes her feel.
She isn’t sure what his apology is for – some perceived offense, or some expression of sympathy for the situation? She puzzles through it in a haze, and, though she is far from silent – even her breaths are spaced with rattling gasps, which occasionally reach a crescendo and punctuate themselves with cries so sharp and high that they could be howls – it takes her a long moment to calculate a response. Even once she pieces it together, she isn’t sure that it’s the right one. “Why are you sorry?” Her voice comes out weak and stuttering, awkwardly interspaced between sobs, and she struggles to maintain her composure for long enough to force the words past her trembling lips. “This isn’t your fault.” It’s mine, she means. It’s all mine – I was the one who let him in, I was the one who was too weak, I was the one who allowed this to happen. It was her duty to protect Solterra, and she fell.
(It was her duty to protect him, and she didn’t. What was the point in apologies between them now?)
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
In this moment, Eik learns that tear are born in the heart. He can feel them there bubbling, gasping, straining for release from the great unknowable weight forced upon them. And then they slowly make their way to the surface, the sobs so quiet he might not have even heard them at all if the canyon was not silent as a tomb.
It was selfish to embrace her like this. He suspected it as he drew closer, as she looked at him with pleading eyes to stay away, please, don’t make me– but he could not stay away, not when he believed for so long that she was dead. He mourned her. But Eik knows the length of his selfishness now, the cruelty, with her body stiffly pressed to him like a plastic doll, as the sobs begin to shudder through her. He is dumbly silent, unsure if there is anything he can do right now other than offer, quite literally, a shoulder to cry on. He wants to apologize, again, and he is about to when she asks- “why are you sorry?” in a voice he does not recognize. The question shocks him.
Why was he sorry??
… Did she really not understand?
A strange bitterness lodges in his chest. It was admittedly an unfair thing to feel, but there it was, dark-skinned and hardy as a seed that will wait centuries to sprout. He draws away, faces the canyon wall and its rich hues of umber, saffron, gold.
Eik should have found and killed Raum the first time he threatened Isra. And again in the cave on the mountain. He– they– had been so close then! So close to ending everything before it spiraled deeper and darker, prisoner to its own momentum.
But Eik’s sorrow was so much deeper than his failings. Although he was not born and raised here, and on paper his vocation did not saddle him with as much responsibility as she, and for all the other reasons that make him less than her– less responsible, less capable, less Solterran–
(at this point he’s pacing in the shadowed canyon, small circles that echo his eddying thoughts)
This place was his home. Did he need more reason than that to be sorry? To feel culpable?
This place was his home and he had a beautiful dream, and now all he has to show for it is– this. This terrible taste on his tongue. This bitter seed in his chest. But Eik doesn’t say anything. He could not describe it in a way that would make it matter– which was surely just as good as saying it didn’t matter. So why not say nothing at all?
“This isn’t your fault.”
He seethes, a dark ocean roiling behind his eyes. “Neither is it yours.” It doesn’t mean they couldn’t (wouldn’t) feel sorry. Guilty. Loss was never sensible. He had to tell her anyway. “Look, you’re not broken.” No matter that she’s making sounds he’s never heard her make before, or the dramatic scar that reshapes her face– she is not broken– “And Raum is not going to survive us.”
It was fooldhardy to be sentimental with Seraphina. So he swallows his heart, that weak thing which only ever wanted to spill its grief until it was empty. "We have a lot of work to do."
