PUT ANOTHER WAY, I WAS ALMOST
on empty, and though no one / believed it or cared to see, I was just another / animal, and like all animals / desired, we would suffer.
He returns her greeting, and he introduces himself as Torin; he asks her, then, if she is “from these parts.” She isn’t, though there is a part to her that wants to admit to the nature of her own homeland – she doesn’t want to think of the desert, or the sun kingdom, or, worst of all, of the sun god. She doesn’t want to think of anything at all.
(Trying not to think about things has almost never worked for her before. It isn’t working now – and what she tastes on her lips, more than winter wind or the hot sting of her breath against her lips, which threaten to crack in the cold, is regret, regret, regret, like poison down her throat.)
When she responds, her voice feels rough with disuse, and it seems to stick to her throat in a way that it never did when she was queen or emissary. She has always been rather introverted, but she is sure that she used to give competent speeches, which continued into the days of her rebellion – but surely that was some time ago, and now she is unpracticed. “I’m Sera,” she says, because it slips off her tongue easier than the rest of her name nowadays, “and I’m not quite – from here, no. There is a desert kingdom to the east of these plains called Solterra; that is my homeland. Are you familiar with it?” She wonders if he is new to these lands; if he isn’t, she supposes that it is quite useless to describe Solterra to him.
Perhaps she has been greeting too many lost strangers, recently. She is beginning to anticipate them when she sees an unfamiliar face.
When he offers his congratulations, she freezes like ice. At the last, lowest loop of her braids, her white hair begins to pluck at its tight bounds, threatening to unravel itself at the ends; her sudden, rampant burst of magic threatens to lift her hooves from the snowy ground, to suspend her above it like some kind of passing, white-breathed ghost, but she manages to quell its urges, press it down near her breast.
She has to ask herself what the ordinary, polite response would be. (She hates the feeling of his eyes on her sides; she hates that he sees her like this at all, that anyone does, and that she will never, ever be able to escape this or go back to her life before it again.) It does not come immediately, but, after a moment of uncomfortable silence, at least it comes.
“Thank you.” Her voice comes out quiet; nearly reluctant and certainly uncomfortable. She thinks that this is the first time that anyone has congratulated her on her…situation, and she isn’t quite sure what to do with it. She supposes that it is normal, when one encounters a stranger with child, to offer their congratulations, and for a moment, it nearly makes her feel normal. Like a woman with a lover, or a woman who chose this, or a woman who at least understood what was happening to her own body.
The illusion crumbles almost immediately. Sure as the sun in the sky, it cannot hold.
She blinks at him through lashes as white as the new-fallen snow, her odd eyes lingering on his face with all the wariness of a trained soldier.
@
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
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
