[P] I cannot say for sure where this is going-

[Seraphina]

SOMETIMES YOU CAN GET AWAY COMPLETELY
but [they] / will tell about the howling / and the loss

☼

As a child, Seraphina had conceived of god as something like a watercolor painting. That is to say – the blurred lines of the landscape, and everything in-between.

One thing that she can say about the children is that they have forced her to pay more care to herself than she has in years, now. (When she considers that it has been years - not weeks, or months, or days, but years - it leaves a rotting taste in her mouth. She tries not to think of it too often or too much.) More often than not, when she walks, she has begun to find her hooves on solid ground, though the telekinesis is still apt to buoy her up if she does not pay enough attention. There is a faint, metallic sheen to her coat that nearly reminds of the reason why she was known as the silver queen, once, a lifetime ago – and the white mass of her mane is more often forced into the neat braids she wore in her youth, unallowed the wild freedom that her lack of care had allowed since-

If she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, she can nearly finish the thought without trembling. Since Raum.

She returned to the desert, although she did not want to, because of the cold. She is not accustomed to it, and she doubts that it was good for any of the three of them – so she swallowed down her apprehension, and her quietly-brewing anger, and she returned to the sun god’s domain, although the walk back was miserable and mostly nauseating. It was only when she’d crossed the border and stepped into the Elatus Canyon that she discovered that returning was not as awful as the prickling anticipation that preceded it.

She does not know what she expected. Something awful, certainly; the sands stained red, or statues littered at odd angles throughout the canyon, or the Oasis circled by guards again, determined to kill the citizens by dehydration or starvation or submission. Of course, the sands were plain gold, as usual, and the only stone in the canyons composed the walls, and, when she arrives at the Oasis, slick with midday sweat, there is no one else present on the shoreline at all.

She feels – mercilessly dehydrated. It isn’t an awful sensation, exactly. (If she had to pick a word for it, she might call it familiar, though not quite like this.) Ereshkigal perches on the frond of one of the palm trees, something small and bloody and wholly dead (she hopes) caught in one of her talons; the tree bends, slightly, beneath her weight as she begins to eat.

She has learned to ignore the horrible crunching sound that accompanies her shark-teeth on bones; Ereshkigal claims to like them best.

She finds herself standing at the water’s edge, charcoal hooves half-buried in a fine layer of sand. The water is perfect blue, like a cloudless sky, and as clear as a mirror. If she looks carefully – and she doesn’t – she can see the faint swell of her sides reflected back up at her, and the tired sharpness of her eyes.

She faces her reflection, dips her head to the water, and drinks.

---

@Bexley || we're #suffering, ladies! though less than usual, I think. || june jordan, "you came with shells" // title from "have never been a lonely god," paige ackerson-kiely 
Sera || Eresh

@

[Bexley]

As a child, Bexley had not thought once about god.

If there were any godlike thing at home, it would have been the land itself: not a bleeding watercolor but tempera, the edges clearly defined, each leaf perfectly pointed and carefully veined. Plenty of room for details. None for smudges. When the sun shone down it was not hazy or even translucent but came down thin spears of pure light, gold all the way through; they were so solid might burn you if you tried to step into one. If there were any godlike thing at home, it would have been the land, or it might have been her grandmother. (Who birthed the land, so really it made no difference.)

Things have changed. Things have changed quite a bit.

Now when she thinks of god, she thinks of her homeland and her family dead last. What comes to mind first these days is pain.

Pure pain. Bright-white pain.

The pain of a broken knee. The pain of one long, sharp slice down the length of a face. The pain of losing everything and everyone a woman has ever loved. The pain of her magic draining out of her, cell by cell, that day by the shrine. The pain of that desert-red dust in her lungs, scraping at her from the inside out; the pain of darkness in every direction; the pain of so many tons of rocks pressing down on her, threatening crack her open, threatening to break each and every bone—

God is pain, Bexley thinks resentfully. But by now she’s come to terms with it.

She emerges from the city the day after the Ieshan’s party and strikes out into the desert. She can’t explain why; she doesn’t know what exactly it is that draws her out from the comfort of life in the capitol. But it’s strong. It pulls at a spot deep in her chest. It sinks into her bones, fishhook deep, and drags her into the sand like a ragdoll. She is powerless to stop it, if she cared enough to even try; and anyway, she has never been one to refuse herself anything.

The fishhook yanks her over dune after dune, not caring what injury it inflicts—little scorpion bites on the back of the ankle; the needle-sharp pain of the sun as it beats into her back, like Solis is personally seeing to it that the weather makes her wither as much as it possibly can. By the time Bexley realizes she’s a good few miles from the city, her throat is raggedly dry, and sweat is beginning to drip down the back of her shoulders.

The oasis is still visible on the horizon, a little gem of blue and green. She trudges toward it with a little sigh.

A few minutes later, the oasis rises up above the edge of the world. The palm trees appear first, their fronds swaying high in the wind and making frilly silhouettes against the cloudless sky; but one of them is weighed down by the hunched shoulders of a large, fuck-ugly bird. Bexley realizes with a sharp and sudden grin that it must be Ereshkigal. And sure enough, a few steps later, Seraphina’s graceful form appears like a statue half-planted in the water.

“We have got to start meeting on purpose,” Bexley remarks. 

@Seraphina <3 | speaks

[Seraphina]

SOMETIMES YOU CAN GET AWAY COMPLETELY
but [they] / will tell about the howling / and the loss

☼

There is always some part of her that screams: you should have become better from this.

You should not have grown tired and miserable, bent-double beneath the weight of your own memories; you should have become righteously furious and inspiring, willfully and insistently ferocious in the face of every injustice that you encountered. Or, if you had to become miserable - you should have at least become miserable in a way that it was easy to love, miserable in a way that was charming and romantic, miserable in a way that made someone want to save you.

If it had made you compelling - at least it would have been useful.

The water ripples beneath her frame. The Seraphina-in-the-water shifts with each low bump, and her eyes seize on the sharp angles of her cheekbones, and then on her sides, which are only beginning to swell. She can barely bring herself to think about what happened to her, like every other thing that has been done to her body over her past seven - nearly eight - years. It makes her think of a girl with dead, dark eyes, her white hair shorn off at the roots. It makes her think of a ghost, scarred ugly, bright gold. It makes her feel like a passenger in her own skin.

She knows whose doing this is, but he has been - silent. She doesn’t understand why this had to happen, least of all to her, but, then, that has never mattered in any of her personal tragedies. Did she do something wrong? If she did, then why was she never told-?

Bexley Briar is golden, but not like the dunes. She is gold like silk is gold; like sun-rays, but not the sun, are gold. She slips out of the desert and onto the shore of the Oasis, and Seraphina turns to stare at her and her white-toothed grin, and she feels like she is being torn in two.

She is happy to see her, or she should be. She knows that she should be, but she isn’t, quite, and it isn’t because of Bexley, she knows, because she could never not want to see her, but she doesn’t want anyone to see her, and-

We have got to start meeting on purpose.

“Yes,” she says, her voice admirably calm, and composed, and Seraphina-like, “we do,” and if this conversation had happened years ago, she might have been reasonable, queenly, diplomatic - suggested letters, though the thoughts of letters makes her head hurt and her chest constrict, at this point. It isn’t as though Ereshkigal won’t deliver them, though she doesn’t like to, and she isn’t an especially kind messenger.

But, Solis - she isn’t thinking about that, now. She feels nauseous. Lightheaded. Her mouth opens, and she manages to spit out an, “I-” but doesn’t manage to get any further. She doesn’t know how to explain herself. She doesn’t even know exactly what happened to her, much less how to put words to it; and all of the ones that she can muster feel like pitiful excuses. Does she know? Has she noticed, yet? She doesn’t think so, because surely she wouldn’t be looking like that, if she did, and-

She should tell her, she knows, but she can’t find the words. Perhaps it is the disappointment she anticipates, the preemptive prickle of shame it sends arcing up her spine. That is probably it. This feels like another failure, and she-

She is so tired of being shameful.

---

@Bexley || <3|| june jordan, "you came with shells" // title from "have never been a lonely god," paige ackerson-kiely 
Sera || Eresh

@

[Bexley]

Something has changed.

Bexley has been alive nine years. Longer than she ever expected to live, really—and somehow she is still surprised every time the sun sets, the moon rises, the world turns; every change that occurs somehow manages to startle her like the first time. At some point, she knows, she should have learned to accept it. Write things down and let them go instead of leaving claw marks. But things like this are easier said than done; and Bexley knows little about life, but the one thing she does know (besides the nagging insistence of her feelings for the girl in front of her) that she is beholden to fight it all the way down.

Every death is like the first: pure pain down to the raw bone. But every kiss is like the first, too—white-hot electricity spearing out in every direction, full of butterfly wings beating strong enough to lift everyone involved right off the ground.

Something has changed, and she should know better than to expect that it wouldn’t have. But hope is a powerful thing; even as Bexley comes to a stop in the sand and tries to gauge what, exactly, is different, she cannot bring herself to admit it outright. If I am careful not to look too closely, some part of her says, I will see that nothing has changed. If I smile and squint, I will see we are the same as we were, that time has not really passed, and the scars are an illusion—

Seraphina says calmly: Yes. We do. And Bexley smiles—so faint it’s almost sheepish, the curve of her lips somewhere between nostalgia and relief, because it is not a satisfying answer at all, but it is the only one she could have expected. And it is a testament, too, to Seraphina’s very concrete sense of self that Bexley hears yes, we do, and wants to laugh (maybe in relief) at how predictable it is.

Something has changed. Other things—thankfully—haven’t.

“You…” Bexley repeats. The end of the word rises in pitch, an incredulous question. One brow rises with it, instantly turning the expression on Bexley’s scarred face quizzical; and the faint look of confusion remains steadily in place as she glances at Seraphina, gaze flickering up and down as she tries to piece the situation together. “You what, exactly?”

If she has her own suspicions—well, she was raised too polite to ask.

@Seraphina <3 | speaks