I'M NOT CRAZY,
but when the sun split / him wide, he left me this, look, / my body veined in soot.☼
She belongs to the sea, the monk says, his gaze turning to the way that the water cuts a gash across the mirror, dark and tumultuous and stricken with storm; and Seraphina knows that there are many ways of belonging to something, and she dares not assume which one he means. She could be dead. Drowned. She could have become something beyond her imagination, a creature of tooth and scale - she could have simply chosen something over him, a sea in the place of the love of a man, as he chose his goddess. She nods, then, and she wishes, suddenly and harshly, that she knew what had happened to the people that she used to love.
(She is only just beginning to come to terms with that emotion – painful and bruise-tender and colored like a bloom behind a closed eye – as love. She wonders if there is any way of recognizing it that makes it hurt less, and she knows, too, that she has never been good enough for anyone that she has loved; least of all if they have loved her back. It might be what scares her the most, when she thinks of those twin lives inside of her. What if she doesn’t love them? What if she does? What if, worst of all, they love her, too? It is so hard to think that she could deserve it. It is so hard to think that she could treat love kindly, that she could keep it; that it could not run from her, and she could not run from it. She is terrified.)
When his gaze turns on her, she can see it in his eyes that he does not understand even before he asks his question – and, naïve as they are, a crooked and hopeless smile settles across her dark features. She looks back at the mirror, and she sees nothing but her own face. “Magic,” she says, her voice as simple and as clean as a sealed wound. “Magic, and death.”
She is not here. She will never be anywhere again; and she supposes that she must make her peace with that, however cruel it may be.
(In truth, she already has. But there are these moments – and this one among them – where the sentiment comes crawling up her throat again, and she longs for closure she knows that she will never be granted.)
There is no use in looking for her past, in these shards of mirror or anywhere - it is already gone. There is only her; and she will have to be enough.
She looks back at the silvered man, then, and she says, softly, “I hope that you find your way forward, monk.” Through the labyrinth or more abstractly – that is irrelevant.
She turns back the way she came without another word, or another glance tossed over her shoulder.
(For the briefest moment, she swears that her reflection has two golden eyes instead of one, that she is delicate in all the ways that Seraphina isn’t; but the image is gone before she blinks.)
@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.☼
She belongs to the sea, the monk says, his gaze turning to the way that the water cuts a gash across the mirror, dark and tumultuous and stricken with storm; and Seraphina knows that there are many ways of belonging to something, and she dares not assume which one he means. She could be dead. Drowned. She could have become something beyond her imagination, a creature of tooth and scale - she could have simply chosen something over him, a sea in the place of the love of a man, as he chose his goddess. She nods, then, and she wishes, suddenly and harshly, that she knew what had happened to the people that she used to love.
(She is only just beginning to come to terms with that emotion – painful and bruise-tender and colored like a bloom behind a closed eye – as love. She wonders if there is any way of recognizing it that makes it hurt less, and she knows, too, that she has never been good enough for anyone that she has loved; least of all if they have loved her back. It might be what scares her the most, when she thinks of those twin lives inside of her. What if she doesn’t love them? What if she does? What if, worst of all, they love her, too? It is so hard to think that she could deserve it. It is so hard to think that she could treat love kindly, that she could keep it; that it could not run from her, and she could not run from it. She is terrified.)
When his gaze turns on her, she can see it in his eyes that he does not understand even before he asks his question – and, naïve as they are, a crooked and hopeless smile settles across her dark features. She looks back at the mirror, and she sees nothing but her own face. “Magic,” she says, her voice as simple and as clean as a sealed wound. “Magic, and death.”
She is not here. She will never be anywhere again; and she supposes that she must make her peace with that, however cruel it may be.
(In truth, she already has. But there are these moments – and this one among them – where the sentiment comes crawling up her throat again, and she longs for closure she knows that she will never be granted.)
There is no use in looking for her past, in these shards of mirror or anywhere - it is already gone. There is only her; and she will have to be enough.
She looks back at the silvered man, then, and she says, softly, “I hope that you find your way forward, monk.” Through the labyrinth or more abstractly – that is irrelevant.
She turns back the way she came without another word, or another glance tossed over her shoulder.
(For the briefest moment, she swears that her reflection has two golden eyes instead of one, that she is delicate in all the ways that Seraphina isn’t; but the image is gone before she blinks.)
@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
