She had intended to spend some time in isolation; and she did, for quite some time. (It is not so difficult to disappear in Solterra – particularly when so much of the world already thought her dead.) But Seraphina had discovered years ago now that life had a way of never quite going the way that she intended. It is perhaps morose and unfair of her to say that her life had more often taken unexpected turns for the worse than for the better, but not every unexpected twist was a terrible one.
Case in point: when welll into her self-imposed isolation, she had been contacted by a familiar face, though not one that she had ever anticipated seeing again.
--
She steps out and into the salt-and-murk air of Terrastella, and she takes a deep breath of the wind. Ereshkigal is quick behind her – a beat of dark-feathered wings and a rush of red-yellow eyes and she is there, coming to roost on the leather armor that protects her shoulders. It is early winter, now, and, though the cold is not biting, it sets Seraphina’s teeth on edge; she is used to the scalding warmth of Solterra, which rarely cools too substantially, even on winter nights. The rest of Novus is different.
The last time she was here, she thinks that it was winter. She recalls – in a soft, gauzy blur – lighting candles for her dead. (There are so many.)
Winter kills like a desert summer. Dry, browned grass crunches beneath her hooves; the trees on the border of the fields have lost their leaves, and their branches have darkened, as though smudged with ash. That said, the rest of the world is still alive. Birdsong emanates from the fields, abrupt and lyrical, and small insects hop from blade to blade in the grass below. If she looks up, she can spot the white belly of a dove, swooping pirouettes in the sky. She feels Ereshkigal shift on her shoulders, dragging her worm-tongue across the curve of her beak and her blade-sharp teeth, and, before she can leap into the air after the dove, she thinks a harsh, Stop in her direction.
Of course – it is no good to try and persuade the demon to stop. Ereshkigal does as she wishes, whether Seraphina wants her to or not, and, besides: she knows better than to try and stop a hungry predator from seeking prey. (It might be crueler to do otherwise.) The vulture is off her shoulders in a flap of massive wings that stir the grass and ground below. Above them, the dove lets out a sound of panic, and Seraphina watches, for a moment, as she tries to escape into the woods.
She gives a soft sigh, then looks back over her shoulder – back towards the tear in reality that brought her here. The creator of the tear had not been slow to follow her, and her gaze steadies on her golden form, rather than the gory scene playing out in the trees. It is strange to see her, almost, but perhaps stranger to see her here, all honey and lilac.
Seraphina has never been an avid conversationalist. Fortunately, her current companion is far less reserved with her thoughts – else she is not sure what she would have done in the time they’d spent together. “How does it feel to be back in Novus, Florentine?”
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
08-13-2020, 06:47 PM - This post was last modified: 08-16-2020, 10:38 AM by Seraphina
i'm a pretty flower girl
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A petal chases Seraphina into the new world. It has never been here before. It shivers in the frigid wind and dances in swirling loops as it rides upon the tide of air. Flitting like a bird it surveys all before it signals to its brethren. They come, as they always do, petals raining from golden hair into the wind and upon the ground. They float like silk, like ribbon upon an invisible string that reaches through the glowing window.
Suddenly wary, as if she might not come through, the leaves swirl back towards the rift window, but already Florentine is there. The Novus air sweeps in to meet her, twining itself through the snarls of her long hair. Elegant, balletic she steps through, a woman used to time travel. Terrastella’s soil is cold beneath her foot, but oh how it smells of home!
Florentine has left Novus still rounded with residual baby fat, but Time and worry had gnawed at her curves until she is just as slim and elven as she had always been. There is an emptiness within Florentine that nothing had been able to fill. Her womb still felt it’s loss, it whispered to her heart and her heart whispered back that it knew. It understood there was a vacancy, a whole where children should be and yet… were not. Her babies were lost, somewhere in Novus. Florentine had lost them.
Even though her emptiness is a yawning chasm that hollows her, still she smiles as she steps through. The Dusk court sings to the returning fae-girl, it limbs her in winter light. Seraphina is tight beside her, the cold gnawing into her thin skin and down, down into her bones. Not even the birdsong voice of Terrastella’s welcome would warm the cold from her desert core.
Her magic hisses, the cut between worlds bleeds light. Its ripped edges are an open wound, the other world blinks and peers in and Florentine’s magic begins to heal the rift it has made. No worlds should look upon each other for long. Slowly the cut heals until all the remains of the girls’ time travel is little more than a hiss of static that tastes of metal and dances like electric flees along their spines.
“It feels like home.” Flora says as her eyes close. She listens to the whispers of Novus before the flutter of Ereshkigal's wings in the cold draws her attention back. “Let’s go and get you some warm drinks and furs for your travels back to Solterra. My home is nearby.” Florentine steps forward, offering her friend and the bird upon her back a light smile. Idly she wonders if Ereshkigal ever gave anyone anything more than a wild, wicked glare. Or whether the bird just had an aversion to her in particular. She probably didn’t really want to know the answer. But before she can think much more on the matter, the bird leaps from her friend’s slim back. Its wings unfurl as it sweeps up to pursue a dove. The bird flies faster and faster until its prey is lost into the vulture’s impaling grip with a flurry of feathers and a final, startled cry. Silence hangs after the bird’s demise. Only the grasses dare whisper of the surprising spectacle. For a moment Florentine stares at the place where the bird was only seconds before, until she adds lightly, “Well, that was unfortunate.”
“Come, Florentine beckons to her friend as she leads on through the gossiping grasses. Her gilt lashes press down again upon the curve of her cheek as she inhales the fields and the salt of the sea beyond. Even with her eyes closed the fae-girl knows her homeland, with its swamps, its fields and its cliffs. A moment passes before the flower-girl’s eyes suddenly pop open, “Gods, Sera, It has been over a year… what if someone has moved in to my home? That is going to make for one awkward conversation when we get there…” Florentine’s eyebrows raise as she walks, the stems of grasses brushing again the bend of her fine knees. “Or... if no one has moved in, then who knows what state the place is going to be in… There could be all sorts of creatures that have moved in. I think there will be evictions.You don’t mind cobwebs and spiders do you? I usually get Lysander to deal with the spiders, but I left him snoring in the other world. He is cute when he snores.”
She knows the petals without seeing them – all it requires is a gentle breeze. They smell sugary to her, almost candied, but perhaps she is simply not accustomed to the smell of sweet things. (The flowers that bloom in the desert are rare, and she can’t remember the last time she stopped to look at them. She can’t remember the last time that she paused to take a – good, careful - look at anything.) Still, she notices the way they drift at her hooves, catching in the long strands of sharp green grass – skewered on the tips.
Florentine appears behind her, somehow all the same and different from how she remembers her. She watches in silence as her magic heals the rift they walked through. She has seen plenty of Florentine’s work recently, but there is still something about it that makes her feel a way she struggles to put words to. It isn’t inadequate, exactly – but her magic is like a god. Like Tempus. Nearly divine. It feels like home, Florentine says, and, although she doesn’t smile, like a kinder (or more sociable) creature might, she offers a nod, which nevertheless appears solemn. “I’m glad,” Seraphina says, and wishes that she could still feel the same way. Regardless: she means it. (She might mean it all the more because she longs for something to return to, for her home to feel like home again, not some half-waking nightmare.) Florentine offers her warm drinks and furs, and, although her stubborn pride would not usually allow her to admit that she is cold (or to any other perceived weakness), she dips her head, slightly; there is little use in trying to hide the way that she is shivering. “Thank you.”
Ereshkigal catches the bird in her talons in a spray of red and white. Seraphina can hear her laughing venomously, but, at the very least, the demon has manners enough to contain her laughter to their mental link; and all the better for it. She doesn’t want to subject Florentine to her many-voiced hacking, the way that each venomous chuckle rakes the inside of her ears like a blade against a whetstone. “She never listens,” she says, with a grimace. She’s sure that Florentine has realized that by now, but it bears repeating – Ereshkigal is exactly as troublesome as she is useful, and their bond has always been frayed, at best. (At worst, it has been a violent tug-of-war, a battle between their conflicting wills. “It will keep her occupied for a while, regardless.” What Seraphina means is that it will keep Ereshkigal from bothering them for a while. It is a mixed blessing.
It seems to occur to Florentine, then, that her home might no longer be vacant. Seraphina listens to her in silence, mostly expressionless; though a hint of something lighter, possibly softer, seems to flicker in her stare when she hears the fond way that Florentine speaks of her lover. “You have been gone a while – but we’ll hope that it’s still empty.” She has no such problem, anymore. When she was still queen, she made her home in the palace, as she was meant to; she had lived there since she held the position of Emissary. (It still feels strange to look at it, sometimes, from a distance – sprawled out above the sands. She is no longer brave enough to enter the city.) “Spiders don't bother me at all.” Seraphina is, faintly amused. She has spent months alone in the desert, with little company save Ereshkigal and scorpions and snakes and tarantulas. “I can help you clean, if you’d like.” Her telekinetic magic is far from awe-inspiring, but it is functional, and she supposes that she will have to be content with that.
At any rate: if she can wield multiple weapons, she can certainly handle multiple broomsticks.
tags | @Florentine notes | I really appreciate the tonal difference between them, lmao
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
i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
She never listens.
“Strong women rarely do. Florentine muses as she watches the demon fly off with its catch. Berries of blood appear upon the dove lily white chest. The difference is stark, a reminder of the fragility of life. The demon is wild, her will is her own. She brings death with a flick of her claws and does it only to survive. That is what all strong women do: survive. They just do it bolder and braver than others. Or so Florentine thinks.
“If it’s not…” Already Florentine’s mind has drifted towards her house and the potential for it to be occupied. “... How good are you at evictions? I think I would find the whole situation awkward. It may end up being a night under the stars.” Flora laughs, even as her stomach twists slightly and she peers toward the looming clouds, laden with snow. “A cold snowy night beneath the stars.” She adds with a chirp.
They slowly weave the path to Flora’s home, and though the once-queen smiles, though her eyes close with the bliss of remembering, there is an ache within her breast. In every dark corner she looks for a flash of mahogany or ivory, a glimmer of gold. Anything to let her know her children are still alive. Has Asterion found them already? It is strange to wander with Seraphina here and not to go running off immediately to find her children. But she need rest, she needs a home to bring them back to - if she ever finds them again.
Are they even alive?
Oh, that is a dangerous thought. It is ruin in her chest, it is catastrophic grief that rends her limb from limb and makes everything seem so pointless. What is life without her children living somewhere in existence? She would rather die before them. But maybe it was all too late.
They reach the cottage. It is a dark shadow within the wood. Ivy creeps up around its door. Its windows are dark and dirty. Its thatched roof lacks its one splendid gold. It seems to slumber, waiting for its owner to return. Florentine gazes at her home, still here, still existing.
She leads Sera up to a window and peers in beyond the grime. It is still and quiet. “Definitely cobwebs.” Flora says, her lips curling into a playful smile. The gold of it hides the dark of worry and anxiety. “Do you mean what you said about spiders and helping me clean, Sera?” Florentine asks as she pushes the old door open. It creaks and its base catches across the tiled floor. “I think we have a lot of evictions ahead of us.” She murmurs as she steps beneath the exposed beams of the cottage, where old webs hang and spiders watch.
“Would you like the mop or the duster?” Florentine asks casually, still peering around her home. “We shall need our rubber gloves for this.”
@Seraphina - I have no words with which to defend myself.
Strong women rarely do, Florentine says, and Seraphina wonders if she would call Ereshkigal strong. She certainly, she thinks, wouldn’t say it in such a complimentary tone – she is sadistic and devouring, ruthless and violent. Ereshkigal claims a brutal fairness, a certain equality to her actions, but she is wicked to the bone, no matter how she insists otherwise.
Flornetine speaks, then, of evictions – and the unpleasant potentional of spending the night outdoors in Terrastella’s biting winter chill. She doesn’t really want to think about it. “I’m not sure,” she says, with a half-shrug of her shoulders, “but I don’t think I’d mind spending the night outside.” She has her armor, at least, and the thick cloth of her scarf; and she spends most nights alone in the desert, beneath the moon and stars. She can brave the cold for a single night if she has to - the change of scenery might even be an improvement.
(She will have to return to the desert, soon, and everything that the desert has come to mean to her. It is most everything and everyone that she loves; it is a chain around her neck; it is her perpetual guilt, as physical and unforgettable a reminder of her failings as the gold scar painted across her cheek; it is the only home that she has ever known; it is utterly unrecognizable. Oh, she longs for it. She always longs for it. Whenever she is not there, she feels the longing like a knife lodged in her chest. She loathes it, too. She never wants to see it again. She loathes it so desperately that she’d almost like to set fire to the dunes herself and burn them until there was nothing left, no part of it to ever see again.
She never would, of course. But sometimes she looks at the ridges of dunes, like the gentle curve of a spine, and sometimes she imagines them with a lick of flame coursing their length.)
She follows Florentine to the cottage, which is in a state of disrepair; the windows are grimy, the building has nearly been overtaken by creeping vines, and the paint has faded. Seraphina can only imagine the creatures that have taken up residence inside. Florentine turns to her, smiling almost-worriedly, and she asks if she meant what she said about spiders. She does not respond verbally, but she does dip her head in agreement, just as the golden woman presses open the creaky, old door.
There are, certainly, cobwebs. Cobwebs and dust, signs of decay. I think we have a lot of evictions ahead of us, Florentine says; she is simply glad that the only residents are insects and spiders and possibly a few mice.
She gives her a choice between a duster and a mop. Seraphina does not give her answer much consideration. “I’ll take the duster,” she says, primarily because she doesn’t want to imagine the horrible splash of water if she lost control of her magic while trying to mop. She very nearly asks what rubber gloves are, but she decides against it – Florentine knows about so many things that she doesn’t, from all her time spent world-hopping, and she isn’t even sure she’d understand the gloves in question if she asked about them.
She wraps her mind around the handle of the duster, and she begins to work at the cobwebs and the rafters, sending terrified spiders scattering this way and that.
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
i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
By the time they are finished, Florentine is sure she has more cobwebs in her hair than outside the cottage. Yet she is grateful as she smiles over at Seraphina who also worked to clean her house.
All unwelcome guests have been evicted and the house resembles the state it was when she left, which was never truly tidy. Florentine was far too relaxed to ever be truly tidy. She would often blush when anyone visited her rooms in the citadel as queen, for they were always a mess. Things to trip over, scattered parchment, an unmade bed…
The worktop now clear florentine makes some food, a simple broth, enough to keep the cold of winter off their bones. She lights a fire too. Its heat permeates the small home, sinking heat into the wooden walls and pillars. Handing Seraphina some food, her lips twitch at the woman, her amour still close, the scars across her cheek seeming so out of place here. “When was the last time you dusted?” Florentine asks with a light smile, playful, always playful.
But the night does not continue light that. As darkness descends and the fire settles into its hearth, Florentine’s mind turns to heavier, more envious things. “What are your plans now you are home, Sera? I think much will have changed.” Her eyes linger upon the woman’s scar reaching down gold and terrible across her cheek. “And i am sure there is much more change to come.”
Even as she asks, her mind drifts to her children. She looks out into the dark and her stomach twists for where they might be this night. Are they cold? Alone? A shudder slips through her. Tears close, panic closer. Tomorrow could not come fast enough.
She isn’t sure that she is much of any good at cleaning – but at least she has grown wieldy with her telekinesis, so she does her best. Once they’ve managed to clean the cabin, she finds herself halfheartedly pulling cobwebs from Florentine’s hair whenever she looks away, her errant telekinesis eagerly attempting to remove the pale and sticky imperfections. (She much preferred her sense of neatness before it became unconscious and grew hands of its own.)
Florentine lights a fire, and she cooks some sort of broth that Seraphina does not recognize. (Winter nights are cold in Solterra, but such things are unusual there.) She takes the bowl as the golden woman turns to her with a spring-like smile on her dainty lips, and she begins to sip at it, moving closer to the fire; it keeps out the cold, and something inside of her warms further, in a strange and twitchy way, when Florentine asks her about dusting. Perhaps it is because it is simple, and friendly, and ordinary, and ordinary is what she has been longing for, above all else, for what feels like a very long time. “I'm not sure,” she says, the faintest implication of a smile lingering on her lips – a sharp contrast, as it were, to her otherwise stony expression. “There’s really no use in trying to get rid of it all, in the desert – sand gets into everything.” (She doesn’t mention that she has spent most of her time, recently, lingering in hollowed-out caverns in the Elatus, where the exercise is even more futile.)
When darkness falls, and their conversation turns to more serious things – Seraphina realizes, quietly, that she has come no closer from their travels to knowing what she wants to do with herself now, half-dead and nearly beyond recognition. She wishes that she remembered how to be herself, or at least how to be more than the scar carved open across her cheek.
(She is not so sure that she ever will again.) “I…don’t know,” she admits, quietly. The world is different, and so many of the people that she used to care for are gone for good. The world is different, and she is not sure that she has any home to return to, although the prospect of starting all over again “So much had changed, even before I left. I’m not sure what I’ll do.” She pauses, then, looking at Florentine as gently as she can. She knows that she is looking for her lost twins – and Novus is vast, and dangerous. “I’ll help you look for your children, though, if I can.” She doesn’t quite speak with the cadence of a question, but her voice makes clear that it is an offer.
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
10-30-2020, 12:31 PM - This post was last modified: 11-07-2020, 05:05 PM by Seraphina
i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
Florentine eyes Seraphina as she brings the broth to her lips. The gaze is wide and nervous - she has never been a good cook. It was almost a relief when she was queen and others cooked for her. As a mother Florentine had needed to learn fast, but it always remained a challenge. It was, in all honesty, a miracle she and her family were all still alive after years of her cooking. Flora liked to think she was attuned to the subtle politeness that people smoothed across their faces when they consumed something that was less than edible from her kitchen. Lysander had refined the art, yet she could still detect it, it was there in the slight pucker of his brow. That small wrinkle of anxiety.
She was not sure what Seraphina’s tell is, but she looks for it and hopes she has not missed it and that her broth is at least okay. She thinks it is. But only the cold light of morning will bring the truth.
It is a simple fact that Florentine is not as self-aware as others might be. It is also a fact that likely comes as no surprise to those who know her well - or maybe even just a little. So it is entirely normal when Flora continues oblivious to the way Seraphina carefully pulls the cobwebs from her tangled hair. In that moment, never have two queens been more different and yet shared so many things; Like coming so close to death they could feel the cool dark of its breath across their lips.
“Enjoy your retirement?” The Dusk woman suggests with a small smile. Despite that smile she knows retirement is only the start for them. Being a Novus monarch changed you. She saw it in her brother, in Ipomoea, in Somnus, in Seraphina, in Reichenbach, in so many of them. She had loved all of them and watched as they changed. Her breath is a small thing within her lungs, it escapes, barely a sigh.
“Thank you.” She says, after so long. Their bowls are empty, the broth cooled upon the side, the fire in the hearth has burned down and glows, now only suggesting warmth. It feels like the end, the culmination of the time before. When she sleeps, she will shed the grief of the last few months and awaken and begin her search for her children. She is grateful Seraphina would help - where she could. Yes, Sera, Novus is dark and so terribly dangerous. But first, before the morning, she will give Seraphina a place to rest and sleep and Florentine will sleep too. When they part at the dawn, Florentine will be ready to find her babies.
@Seraphina - Fin <3 I am wrapping it up here. I hope that is okay? They amuse me a lot - i should like to thread them together again at some point <3
Seraphina has found that she feels strangely at ease with Florentine, most of the time. There is something comfortable about her, and something kind; it is probably what made a good queen of her, for her tenure. For what it is worth – if there is anything to complain about in her broth, she does not have enough of a taste for good cooking to notice. Most of her meals are plucked fruits from the oasis and bits of foraged greens, and, during Raum’s reign, she spent months brought so utterly low that she scarcely ate anything, determined to give what she could find – what little the desert provided that wasn’t taken by the Regime – to the people beneath her. There is little food to complain about when you have been truly hungry; and she does not taste the broth as much as she tastes the way that it settles into her bones warmly, keeps out the chill.
And so – they cook and clean, and she settles into the comfortable simplicity of it. Her life has been many things, she thinks, but it has rarely been allowed to be so quiet. She has never thought of herself (or most of what she has experienced, though, if she thinks of it too much, she finds herself realizing, uncomfortable, that it is more unique than she would like) as special, but this is ordinary in a different way than she is accustomed to. It is ordinary in a way that feels more like life than death, and she isn’t sure what to do with that, yet – but she hopes that she will figure it out eventually.
When Florentine, smiling, suggests that she enjoy her retirement, she does not answer, but she does return an uneasy smile of her own. She doesn’t know what it means to be – idle, or retired. She always assumed that she would die first, but now she is alive, and, though she could return to her homeland, to the court that raised her and built her and broke her to pieces, but she doesn’t know if she wants to. That is the trouble, she thinks. She does not know what she wants.
(There are so many things that she longs for – but it is so hard to believe that she could ever have them. It is so hard to even think of them.)
She can help Florentine, at least; and she studies her expression carefully when she offers, but she cannot read it. Soon after, they are settled for the night, and she tries to force herself to sleep, but, in the unfamiliar space of her cottage, though she does not feel cold (the fire is still burning, after all), she feels a chill. She lies awake for hours, uncertainty gnawing a hole in the pit of her stomach, and, though she is sure that she falls asleep eventually, she swears that she only spends a moment in the empty darkness of slumber.
She has felt aimless for so long, and so much of her still does – but, in the cold light of morning, she is sure that she will find much left to do.
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
