I'M NOT CRAZY,
but when the sun split / him wide, he left me this, look, / my body veined in soot.☼
He is grey as she is.
She has always thought that her coloration was better-suited to the night than realms of day. The man who emerges from the realm of mirrors seems proof enough of that notion; he is grey like the desaturated world beneath the light of a full moon, grey like a sky full of stars, grey touched with light. There is a crescent moon on his forehead, and on his shoulder, and he smells, ever so faintly, of Denocte – incense and night-blooming jasmine, a world altogether unlike her own.
She’d held a certain degree of fondness for it, once, and fear later. Now, at that subtle recognition, she feels nothing at all.
Seraphina catches his reflection in the mirror, held in the embrace of a lover whose features she cannot quite make out, and she is not prepared for the sudden strike of envy - bright and hot and sharp as a brand – that it presses up against her chest. She doesn’t think that she has ever been quite so lonely as she feels lately; she doesn’t think that she has ever longed for love in quite the same way. That is, pure delusion. She wants to love these children, and she wants to have wanted this. She wishes that she’d born them from someone she loved, not through the machinations of some fickle and silent god.
(The silence is the worst part of them all.)
It is useless to consider. She won’t ever have that, now; it doesn’t matter if she has been left wanting for it. Seraphina will simply have to press forward, if only because she has more than herself to worry over now.
When the man speaks, she feels a pang of something distinctly apologetic. The “lover” in the mirror must be a lost love; there is nothing enviable about that. She looks back at her own reflection, which seems almost the perfect, untainted mirror of her face, and she swallows a sigh, unsure of what to say to him. She hopes that he is not searching for some sort of comfort. She has never been much good at that.
“I am not looking for other possibilities,” she says, softly. “I am looking for something I have…forgotten.” That isn’t the right way of putting it, precisely – she is looking for something that was ripped out of her head by force. She is looking for something that was stolen. (But, then, it seems that most things in her life have been; her memories, her freedom, her crown, her own name.)
She’d rather not think of it, though. (There are so many things that she would rather not think of.)
“And you-“ There is the man instead; some stranger in this strange place, with miseries of his own to attend to. She’d rather think of them than her own. “What were you hoping to find, that you tortured yourself instead?”
(She can guess – but it would be better, she thinks, if he said it himself.)
@Tenebrae || <3 <3 <3 || rebecca dunham, "elegy for the eleven" ; title "Notname," Lyd Havens
Sera || Eresh
but when the sun split / him wide, he left me this, look, / my body veined in soot.☼
He is grey as she is.
She has always thought that her coloration was better-suited to the night than realms of day. The man who emerges from the realm of mirrors seems proof enough of that notion; he is grey like the desaturated world beneath the light of a full moon, grey like a sky full of stars, grey touched with light. There is a crescent moon on his forehead, and on his shoulder, and he smells, ever so faintly, of Denocte – incense and night-blooming jasmine, a world altogether unlike her own.
She’d held a certain degree of fondness for it, once, and fear later. Now, at that subtle recognition, she feels nothing at all.
Seraphina catches his reflection in the mirror, held in the embrace of a lover whose features she cannot quite make out, and she is not prepared for the sudden strike of envy - bright and hot and sharp as a brand – that it presses up against her chest. She doesn’t think that she has ever been quite so lonely as she feels lately; she doesn’t think that she has ever longed for love in quite the same way. That is, pure delusion. She wants to love these children, and she wants to have wanted this. She wishes that she’d born them from someone she loved, not through the machinations of some fickle and silent god.
(The silence is the worst part of them all.)
It is useless to consider. She won’t ever have that, now; it doesn’t matter if she has been left wanting for it. Seraphina will simply have to press forward, if only because she has more than herself to worry over now.
When the man speaks, she feels a pang of something distinctly apologetic. The “lover” in the mirror must be a lost love; there is nothing enviable about that. She looks back at her own reflection, which seems almost the perfect, untainted mirror of her face, and she swallows a sigh, unsure of what to say to him. She hopes that he is not searching for some sort of comfort. She has never been much good at that.
“I am not looking for other possibilities,” she says, softly. “I am looking for something I have…forgotten.” That isn’t the right way of putting it, precisely – she is looking for something that was ripped out of her head by force. She is looking for something that was stolen. (But, then, it seems that most things in her life have been; her memories, her freedom, her crown, her own name.)
She’d rather not think of it, though. (There are so many things that she would rather not think of.)
“And you-“ There is the man instead; some stranger in this strange place, with miseries of his own to attend to. She’d rather think of them than her own. “What were you hoping to find, that you tortured yourself instead?”
(She can guess – but it would be better, she thinks, if he said it himself.)
@Tenebrae || <3 <3 <3 || rebecca dunham, "elegy for the eleven" ; title "Notname," Lyd Havens
Sera || Eresh
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
