GENTLE LADY, DO NOT SING
sad songs about the end of love; / lay aside sadness and sing / how love that passes is enough.
She doesn’t want to be here.
She has never liked celebrations; and, in her death, she has grown even more averse to them. When she was queen, she had to attend plenty of them as a matter of obligation, and she tells herself that her present avoidance is a rebellion against that, not further evidence of her disappearance. Alshamtueur clinks softly at her hip, but she is unarmored, without even the soft golden wraps of her scarf to hide her face. (Her white hair is unbound, falling like the white curve of a waterfall to its full, copious length – her one attempt, as it were, to blend in with the crowd, which is too lax by measures for her tight braids.) The years have dampened her concerns of recognition. Most days, she is sure that the silver queen has disappeared entirely, slipped even from the grasp of her most beloved and closest allies. Slipped even from her own grasp. Most days, she doesn’t know what is left.
But she must do better. She must do better, and she does not have a choice in it, and that is why she is here. Diana has snuck off again, and she has come to retrieve her. She is not quite as worried as she could be, because her daughter is not quite as helpless as any girl of her age should be, but her concern still lingers at the back of her mind persistently, and it is that concern that leaves her wandering through the crowd, looking for the familiar patchwork of black and white and sun-god gold that makes up her daughter. She is too striking. That is what worries her most. She is too striking, too special, too bright – and she cannot imagine a world that does not try to take every striking and bright and special thing and ruin it, to crush it until all of its light has been snuffed out like a wayward candle. She wants better for her than that. She wants it, even if, most days, she cannot help but the wanting is futile.
When she stops to linger near the paints, it is because she has a feeling that they will attract the girl like a fly to honey. Ereshkigal is searching the rest of the party, a shadow that casts the wrong shadow flitting among the colorful smoke like a bad open, and she is better at searching than she will ever be – but Seraphina is her mother, and, she thinks, she knows her daughter best. She will come to the paints, and the jewels, surely-
It is a sign of preoccupation that she almost doesn’t notice the man approaching. It is because he is built like a warrior, because he is an obvious threat – all bulk and mass, long-horned, white and gold and dark in none of the ways that she is searching for. I can’t do the last part myself, he says, and she turns her head to watch him, not quite expressionless. It’s bad luck, you see. It strikes her that he seems just as solitary as she does, if not lonelier entire. (There is Ereshkigal, here, and, somewhere in the cacophony of the party, there is her daughter.) And, more than that – there is something solemn and very nearly painful in his voice, the sort of cadence that felt like an old wound. Can you help me?
If she were any other version of herself, she is almost certain that she would have said no.
In her mind’s eye, she can see Diana.
She is darting between her forelegs, light-footed, her wings too big for her birdlike body. Eyes too big for her statuesque face. (There is a way that a statue is never a child – a way that promptly dissipates when she curls her lips into a very profound pout.) Her little warbird wants to be painted, like a proper Solterran. Like you were, she says, when you were a queen, and it hurts to think of even a moment of that time, but, at her pleading, she finally nods her concession and finds those metallic golden paints that she’d put away for a lifetime. The ones she’d poured over for hours to learn how to make, the ones she’d researched in every historical tome in the library. She’d wanted her Solterra (her first child, as it were) to be the Solterra that she had imagined as a child. She wanted to be the kind of queen in the stories, the sort that were sung to her in her very earliest memories. She doesn’t remember her mother’s face, but she remembers the stories.
So she draws that paint onto her daughter. She draws the patterns underneath her eyes like the sharp ridge of twin dunes, the line down her spine like the edge of a horizon, the ornate suns – on her forehead, her flanks, the center of her chest like a second heart. And she draws the teryrs on her limbs, and the sandwyrms, and, although she does not want to remember the motions, she tries to love each stroke of the brush that decorates her daughter’s limbs.
When she is finished, Diana is disappointed. The paint is gold. (It almost always is, in Solterra, and it always is for royalty. Like a bit of the sun god.) She is already run through with it, and hers is much more precious. I look wrong, she says, her lips twisted into quiet shame. I don’t wear it right. She steps forward to stand beside of her, their reflections side-by-side in the mirror, and she brushes her lips to the space between her daughter’s ears. You’ve always been enough, Diana, she murmurs, through the carpet of her hair. It looks wrong because you do not need it.
She should be looking for her now. If she knows her daughter at all, and she does, she does, she knows that she is has already found some form of trouble or another. But Ereshkigal is already searching, and better than she ever could – sharp-eyed, mid-flight, searching for her soul through the smoke.
So, wordlessly, she dips a brush into the copper-red paint, turning the dark-haired tip in the bucket with a practiced edge. When she seems satisfied, she suspends it above the bucket, allowing the tip to drip back into the paint rather than onto the grass below, without wasting a drop. She settles in front of him, her eyes slowly running the length of all his other designs – the brilliance of the rosettes, the arrows, the elms, all symbols of places she does not know and never will. She wonders why they remind her of her daughter. (She wonders why she softens so easily at the simplest, most superficial resemblance.)
Finally, her odd eyes come to linger on his – and she finds them sharp green, like early spring. “What do you wish for me to paint?”
@
"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
