tell me : is the blood on your hands dry? is it slowly disappearing? mine isn't
“Inventive. Yes. She has made them very beautiful.”
He meets her gaze momentarily, before it drifts to her scars with a pointed intensity; she looks down at the aspilia, trying to ignore the prickling of his stare on her cheek. There is something to the way he has said it that she isn’t entirely sure how to respond to; like remarking on the gold-tone of the sands or the brilliant blue of the sky on a cloudless day. She doesn’t know how to react to it - she’s not sure that it’s a compliment, or, if it is, if it’s really any compliment to her, rather than Isra, who was, of course, the one who crafted her scars. Seraphina considers. She does not look up to see what expression he might be wearing. “I’m sure you’ll meet her, at some point,” she says, after a moment’s consideration. “You can tell her yourself that you’re a fan of her handiwork.” Seraphina still isn’t sure that it’s the right response, but – well, she supposes that he will probably meet Isra, at some point or another.
He lingers somewhere behind her while she works. (Perhaps she shouldn’t be so quick to turn her back on an assassin of all people, but she has always been a bit too quick to trust.) While her traitorous magic combs itself through his mane, her gaze locks itself on the glint of her blade and the brilliant yellow of the aspilia, the way that the moon washes the water in silver. At some point, he speaks. “I thank you, Fia, for your knowledge and your care.” Her dark ears twitch back to catch his words, but she does not turn. “It’s the least I can do – really. You did just agree to help me overthrow a dictatorship.” Her words come out candid and unfocused; her attention is clearly invested only on her sword and the medicine she is crushing to a pulp. She certainly does not notice the tone in his voice, nor her magic sorting its way through his hair. It is only, in fact, when she turns to bandage him with her scarf that she notices his braids at all, and, for a moment, she thinks nothing of it; clearly, he has taken the time to fix his mane.
And then he drops into a sweeping, elaborate bow, or something like it. “Consider me thoroughly humbled — I have never received such meticulous care before.” For a moment, Seraphina is too distracted by the gesture to contemplate his words or the way that his braids fall every so deliberately down his neck. She would be remiss to admit it, but the girl inside of her – her mother’s daughter, raised on fairy tales – is always rendered just a bit ecstatic and perhaps very slightly spellbound at the sight of courtly gestures. However, she is hardly some noble lady (anymore) staring down some knight, and, as her gaze flits from his – smug – expression to the braids spilling down the sides of his neck, she realizes, with a sudden flush of embarrassment, what he is implying.
She is rendered speechless, initially, inwardly cursing her own unmanageable magic and impulse towards control; he takes this moment to spring away, those dark wings flaring out, and, for a moment, she wonders if he intends to spring away, but he merely strides past her. Seraphina does not immediately turn to look at him, but she hears him yawn, and narrows her eyes at the horizon, fixing the rolling dunes with a withering expression. (But, she decides, a bit of humiliation is far from the worst thing to happen to her recently.)
Seraphina turns, then, throwing him a glance. “Humbled, are you?” She arches her brow, willing her expression to be as distinctly unimpressed as she can muster, and moves to follow him without any further explanation. “There is something I am curious about.” Before she can reach him, he is on to another question; curious as a cat, isn’t he? That silver gaze trails to the scarf wrapped around his torso and then back up to her. She catches up with him, and he slows to her pace. “Why do you not wear your collar?”
She is suddenly, abruptly, even harshly, reminded of the ring of raw skin curled around her throat, patched here and there with thin fur that will take some time to grow in. She freezes momentarily, a sudden rush of shame taking root in her stomach, and stumbles, though she catches herself before she can fall. Her throat closes up, and she has to struggle for words, and she knows that she is hearing an accusation in what is only a simple question, but-
Seraphina takes a breath. Steadies herself. Maps out the stars in the night sky – finds the constellations that will lead them to the canyon. Continues to walk, her steps slow and deliberate. Finally, she casts a reluctant glance to the dark man at her side, grasping for an explanation; she has an answer for him, but she isn’t sure that she has the right words to make him understand it. “I…” Her voice trails, lingers; she doesn’t realize it, but, though there is no wind, and little chill to the desert even in the middle of the night, she has begun to shiver like some dry leaf in an autumn gale. In the absence of words, her teeth chatter together jarringly. “I took it off.” Her voice comes out like a sigh. “I felt…like I had to. It felt as though I was keeping something locked inside of me, and I couldn’t let it out, when I was wearing the collar. I couldn’t…feel anything properly.” She doesn’t know how to explain it, exactly. She has never been able to feel anything properly – so many of her emotions were cut out by Viceroy, and it has taken them years to grow back, like flowers cut at the stem; she still doesn’t think that she can feel anything normally or naturally, only too much or too little, apathy or a grief that wrenches her soul into knots, but at least she feels. She cannot survive as a statue, an illusion of personhood crafted into the shape of a girl. (But, then, she supposes that she is no girl any longer – she is old enough to be a woman.) Not when everything is on the line. “I almost died, recently -occupational hazard, I’m afraid -, and I realized that I…” The admission comes out stiffly, and she wonders if it isn’t almost too much information about herself; or perhaps the stiffness comes from her own unwillingness to talk about her almost-death, her near-passing, or perhaps it is because some part of her did die there, did bleed out on the Steppe, or perhaps, just perhaps, it is because some sullen part of herself, buried deep beneath her persona of Fia wishes – craves – for the death that was so nearly within her grasp. “…could not do what needed to be done if I couldn’t feel, so I had to…take the collar off.” Or maybe she had just wanted it off. Maybe it had begun to feel more and more like it would strangle her the longer it hung around her neck, and she was already near-dead without a hangman’s noose around her throat. “I suppose that my intuition wasn’t wrong – when I took it off, I gained…certain abilities. It seems you’ve already noticed that they aren’t entirely under my control yet.” She cast a look at his braided mane. (Even if she hadn’t intended it, she had to somewhat admire her own handiwork.) They are powerful – more powerful than she’s been told that a fledgling mage’s abilities should be, at any rate, perhaps as a result of her years of combat training. “We’re heading for the Elatus Canyon,” she informs him, with a sidelong glance, deciding that she should probably tell him where she intends to lead him. “It is…certainly the easiest place to hide in Solterra.”That is certainly true. The Mors are too clear, and the Oasis is too obvious, but the Elatus is naturally serpentine and deceptive, the perfect place for a troupe of fledgling rebels to set up their base.
Before he can change the subject, she decides that she has a question of her own. “I’m curious myself, Caine. Why did you agree to help me?” Seraphina doesn’t doubt his good intentions, somehow – there is something innocent to his gestures, to the way that he tried to pick at her, but she is well aware that he is a trader of secrets and an assassin. (In fact, that is why she sought him out.) Perhaps it is merely a matter of pragmatism; he has already said that Raum is mad. However, Seraphina has always had some interest in other people, in trying to take them apart and understand how they work – and, she supposes, she has put herself at a bit of a disadvantage. He knows – most – of the darkest stories she can tell of herself, even if he does not know her true name, and there is a certain danger in that.
She watches him thoughtfully, the look in her mismatched stare ambiguous.
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
so this was how you died; in whispers that you did not hear.
P
erhaps he should not have stared at her so for so long – he forgets, sometimes, the implications even a simple glance carries – but the gold streaking through the dark, fine bones of her face reminds Caine of paintings and gilded frames. Of finer, delicate, uncomplicated things.
“I’m sure you’ll meet her, at some point. You can tell her yourself that you’re a fan of her handiwork.”
Isra’s handiwork? Caine has seen the Night Queen breathe magic into thornless rosebushes. Whisper lullabies into singing hearts. It is not magic the boy finds impressive.
“A fan of her handiwork, or of her canvas?” His eyes trail up the line of Fia’s scarred cheekbone until it stops just before the sun-gold pool of her searching gaze.
Brow arching, he leaves her to ponder the implications of his words.
Since the very beginning of his life – when he was little more than a dying foal in the streets, mahogany hide stained crimson with the blood of his birth – Caine has always known what he is not.
He is not sympathetic.
(“It’s the least I can do – really. You did just agree to help me overthrow a dictatorship,” Fia says as she grinds the aspilia to golden dust. He merely nods, too engrossed in observing what she is doing to give much more of an answer.)
He is not charismatic.
(“Humbled, are you?” He looks up at that, giving his braided mane a final, deliberate toss. “Never.”)
He is not merciful.
(“I…” He halts when he no longer senses her besides him. “I took it off.” He thinks he hears her voice catch, but when he turns to look she has tilted her face away. The ends of her scarf flutter against his chest, and when she speaks again he cannot help but wonder why even with her hood removed, her plans laid bare, she has never seemed more of an enigma.)
“It felt as though I was keeping something locked inside of me, and I couldn’t let it out, when I was wearing the collar.”
There is something agonizing about the way she tells him these things – like she is telling them for the first time. And she is telling him.
“I almost died, recently – occupational hazard, I’m afraid – and I realized that I…”
Like she trusts him. (Does she not realize? That to trust an assassin – to trust someone like him – is to trust a barely tamed wolf, its head in your lap while it dreams of tasting your blood.)
“…could not do what needed to be done if I couldn’t feel, so I had to…take the collar off.”
What is it like? he aches to ask. The words taste like sand in his throat. He tries again, swallowing. What is it like to feel?
It comes out as “We should both consider a change in occupation.” Caine has worn the black mask of apathy for so long, he has forgotten how to take it off. The silk has melted into skin.
Vexed, he keeps his gaze from straying to Fia by raising it towards the stars. The stars provide the only reprieve against silver streaked with gold.
“The Elatus?” he echoes, staring fixedly now at the never-nearing horizon. When the girl sets off again, presumably towards the canyon, he trails her, not quite shoulder-to-shoulder. A force of habit he does not realize he is committing until the silhouette of the canyons loom in the gloom-thick skyline like ancient sentinels, and her voice cuts through the brightening dark like a knife through butter.
“I’m curious myself, Caine. Why did you agree to help me?” His head snaps towards her, surprised, until her question notches in a crevice of his mind and his lips dip into a pensive frown.
“I wanted to know what it was like.” He draws in a breath and holds it, and when he speaks again, his voice is a hardening mix of nonchalance and uncertainty. “To be able to choose.”
He does not look to see if she understands. He knows that she does.
“It is a luxury I do not get to partake in very often, if you can believe it,” he says lightly, his gaze sinking into the shadows of the dunes as they pass. “My magic – I lost it when I entered this land, and now it comes and takes as it pleases. My appearance – well, I was not born with two sets of wings.” His wings thump up and down in the sand, affronted at the admission. “They were a nuisance when I had to relearn how to fly again.”
Tilting his head, he considers. He does not know how to tell her about his past – he does not know what there is to tell, except of magic and darkness and pain (always, pain) – but the night is dark enough, and he allows himself the luxury to believe that even if he does not tell her, she will somehow hear it in his voice.
“My previous organization” – his tongue glides over the word like it is barbed – “is, to my knowledge, no longer in operation.” No – that is a lie, and Caine knows it even when he spins it. The Garde has retreated like a wounded beast might, slinking into the shadows to lick its own wounds.
And him? What is a weapon without a wielder? He had been created for a specific purpose, and when that purpose had wandered off on porcelain legs to Saints knows where, he had been cast away like a broken blade. He does not know if he blames them.
“And the thought of going rogue does not seem an appealing one. So, you see, I have decided to make a selfish choice. I have been trained to wield my blade for a purpose.” The black mouth of a cave rises in front of them like a serpent's gaping jaw. “When your letter came, I found one.” Nothing more, nothing less.
He tries to make himself believe it.
@Seraphina | "speaks" | notes: he is so Cryptic so Mysterious
if I find your soul do you want it? do you even know? do you even know what part of you you are?
“A fan of her handiwork, or of her canvas?”
Beneath the somber veneer of queen or rebel or whatever pensive, serious creature she must be in order to do what must be done, there is still the lingering remnant of a girl – or a woman, but she is not sure if she has ever been nurtured enough to grow into one. She is hardly accustomed to compliments; court has taught her how to handle harsh words with a straight face and an impassive gleam in her eyes, but she has never grown used to the alternative. Any praise or flattery directed her way was given for the harsher, colder aspects of her personality, her unyielding resilience and single-minded loyalty to her nation, all things grown from cruelty – and it was always hard to think of those things as part of herself, rather than what she needed to survive, or what she had been carved into. At any rate, they were always as morose as she was; her presence seemed to demand it.
Which is likely why his words make her stop in her tracks.
She freezes, her attention catching on his stare trailing purposefully up her cheek. She fidgets slightly under the weight of his stare, biting back the urge to move; he stops just before he can meet her stare, and, with an ambiguous arch of her brow, leaves her with that. She blinks at him owlishly, her bright, clever eyes wide with shock, completely caught off guard – and completely unsure of what to do with it. She looks younger when she’s startled, surprise somehow softening her gaunt, exhausted features; perhaps it is the presence of that uncertainty that she always tries to hide, that stumbling, sheepish bit of awkwardness that so often runs rampant in the back of her mind. “I…” Her voice comes out softer than usual, accompanied by just a hint of a stammer, and she realizes as soon as the word has left her mouth that she doesn’t know where she’s going with that statement. If she were more eloquent, she might have come up with something charming to say, a wink and a bit of flattery in turn, but she is ill-versed in such affairs; she can’t even manage a proper thank you (and she isn’t even sure that’s what her response should be) before the conversation turns, to something like her relief, and then she is back to herself again, composed and focused and perhaps a bit too intent on grinding up the aspilia.
She gives an understated roll of her eyes at his never, brushes by him; and then they are off, and he is asking a question that she is not quite prepared to answer, but she is answering it regardless, because she feels like she owes some kind of honesty. (Comical, given her alias.) She doesn’t want to look at him, and he doesn’t try to force her to – she can’t stand it when they watch her when she stumbles over herself, when the unpolished, uncontained bits of herself come spilling out in a trailing mass, and here he keeps provoking them to the surface. A Sovereign that so much as appeared weak would fall apart, at least in Solterra; perhaps Delumine was kinder, or Terrastella, or even Denocte, but not Solterra. Her hesitation – her vulnerability – is as good as a death sentence, and the farthest thing she can imagine from a reassuring look on the face of a prospective revolutionary.
He is quiet, for a moment, and she tries to focus on the sound of her hooves crunching in the sand or the soft, distant howl of the desert wind rather than the silence between them. She is honest by nature, in spite of her own paranoia, but this requires a kind of honesty she is not entirely comfortable with; she has only become less comfortable with it the more that she has begun to wade through her own complicated, nauseating emotions. She knows that she absolutely shouldn’t trust him, and she knows that she – should – be playing her strongest hand in front of him precisely because she shouldn’t trust him, but here she is, stammering and stumbling over her words, letting him pick at raw, bloody wounds. He speaks. She glances up. “We should both consider a change in occupation.” His words are so lackadaisical, to fill that space.
This response, unexpected as it is, provokes a ghost of a dry laugh from Seraphina. He isn’t looking at her, she notes; he seems to be looking anywhere but at her. (She wonders if she has hit some kind of nerve.) “Once this is all over, perhaps.” For now – her life is secondary to her cause, and she will not hesitate to risk what she must to see it through. She hasn’t thought much about the future, after Raum is dead; the thought is terrifying. She doesn’t know who she will be when all of this is over, much less who she will become. All she knows is that some vital part of who she was died when Raum killed Seraphina on the Steppe, and she is not sure if what is coming to fill in the space it left behind is kinder or crueler than what she left behind. (She has never really wanted to kill someone, save in hindsight, before this. It has always been an impersonal thing, and she is so used to floating above it all, but now she has been pulled back down to the ground.)
But – the future is the future. She might not even live past tonight; she knows, knows just how easy it is to see absolutely everything collapse in one fragile, insignificant instant. “The Elatus?” His voice, fortunately, pulls her from the grip of thoughts she does not want to think. “The Elatus Canyon,” she says, with a nod. Hadn’t spent much time there, by the sound of things. “A bit dangerous – easy to get lost, and full of teryrs.” But everywhere in Solterra was dangerous and full of terrors, particularly now that Raum was the desert kingdom’s sovereign. She glances at him over her shoulder, perhaps to see if he is looking at her again, but he isn’t, though he moves to walk just a hairbreadth from her shoulder. “Fortunately, the more off-putting the location, the more unlikely it is that it will warrant much attention from Raum…and there are some caverns in the canyon walls that will make suitable, defensible shelter.” It is strangely secure, for those who can survive the predators and the scalding, harsh conditions; and there is the colosseum, to train her warriors. (On that note, her eyes dart to scan his frame thoughtfully. Certainly not a strong offensive fighter, she thinks. Too pretty for it; that hair would be impractical in any kind of straightforward fight, and he doesn’t seem to have the nicks and scars that come from a life of fighting besides…but perhaps, she thinks, they are just hidden in the dark of his coat. Either way, he is limber and lithe, quick, built for stealth and speed. If he is as specialized as her preliminary observations suggest, they might have to work on that – he won’t always have the upper hand.)
Her question makes him jerk.
He turns to her, for a moment, then looks away, his expression stiffening. “I wanted to know what it was like.” She tilts her head; his voice seems to harden with each passing word, to grow more impassive and distant. “To be able to choose.”
Her stomach turns. Of course she understands.
She does not try to speak; she does not try to push him, either. She listens, hangs on to each word as it falls from his lips, and she tries to piece together what is behind his statements. Choice is a luxury, so he was in a position where he did not get to choose; she thinks of his earlier comment about occupations. (But that is mere speculation – attaching facts to the scraps that she has.) He can’t control his magic; she has observed that much. Apparently, he could before, back in his homeland, wherever it is. (Then why stay here? Why in Novus, why in Solterra?) And it takes. That lingers for a moment, replaced by an abrupt shudder at his next statement. I was not born with two sets of wings. He wasn’t born with them. He didn’t choose to have them, either – so they were forced onto him, and she feels a sudden, chilling rush of nausea at the thought of how much it must hurt to sprout another pair of appendages. A nuisance. His phrasing is light, and she does not trust it.
He is quiet, for a moment, but she says nothing – it is a silence that comes when someone does not know what to say, not the silence that comes when someone is finished speaking. “My previous organization is, to my knowledge, no longer in operation.” Her ears twitch up; she does not miss the edge to his voice. (Or the uneasy implication of to my knowledge; what kind of organization did he come from?) What did they do to you, she wants to ask, but she settles for watching him as he speaks – the pensive downward curve of his dark lips, the distant look in his eyes, which are still looking in every direction but at her. They must be nearing the cave, but her stare is trained on him. “And the thought of going rogue does not seem an appealing one. So, you see, I have decided to make a selfish choice. I have been trained to wield my blade for a purpose.” Something about trained [to wield my blade] for a purpose lingers in her mind; what purpose? She’d assumed he was a freelancer, but that clearly wasn’t the case. (And what purpose would train someone into an assassin and a spy?) “When your letter came, I found one.”
The great maw of the cave rises up in front of them. She narrows her eyes. Does not stop – her stride is fluid, even, deliberate. In fact, she speeds up, edging forward until she can lean ever so slightly into his field of view; it aggravates her that he keeps looking away, guilty as she was of doing it herself, and she’s unwilling to argue with him if he won’t meet her eyes. Selfish? For what? For making a choice? For recklessly agreeing to join a rebellion against a mad dictator, who would certainly kill him – or worse – if he slipped up, in a nation that was not his own, on the words of a woman he had just met? Looking for meaning wasn’t selfish. A choice wasn’t selfish. And, though he was following someone – following her, - hadn’t he chosen to do it? She couldn’t quite believe that, had Raum made the offer instead of her, he would have agreed to it simply to have something to do.
She knew what purpose dictated by apathy and training looked like – she had lived it. She still saw it, when she passed some of those like her on the winding streets of the capitol. It was clearly what he was determined to convey to her, but she couldn’t quite believe it. “I understand,” she says, stopping in front of him and raising her chin to meet his stare with her jewel-bright eyes, her gaze as even and firm and unwary as it is thoughtful, “but I wouldn’t be so quick to call it selfish. Choosing-“ And her voice is firm, an echo of queenly certainty...or the unyielding knowledge of lived experience. “-isn’t selfish, and, even if it were…we are in Solterra.” A dry, bitter exhalation, almost a laugh but worn-thin and exhausted, passes her lips. A den of snakes, full of terrible people who wanted terrible things; a culture that breeds violence and cruelty and bloodlust. (But she still loves it. But she still believes – so firmly, so devoutly, like one believes in the gods – that it can be better than this.) “You could find far more selfish, profitable causes without so much as looking for them.” But he didn’t; instead, he’d chosen to throw in his lot with her, even though she had offered him nothing. (Seraphina had expected him to ask; you were supposed to pay people in his line of work, or so she’d been told in the past, but he wasn’t at all what she’d anticipated.) Perhaps she should have been skeptical, or suspicious.
She wasn’t, though. There was something to him that was just a bit too earnest (no, that wasn’t really the right word – but, as usual, it was evading her) for it.
With that, she brushes by him, stepping towards the mouth of the cave – into darkness. Alshamtueur drifts casually from its sheath to hang in the air at her side, the product of casual mental manipulation. “Alshamtueur,” Seraphina murmurs, and the sword sparks to life instantaneously, sizzling. She dips its silver tip to a torch, illuminated against the cavern wall, and, with another whisper of its name, the sword flickers back to silence, flames disappearing as quickly as they materialized. She sheathes it again and reaches out her mind to grasp the torch. It hovers in the air in front of her, bobbing gently; she casts a glance at Caine over her shoulder, the flame suspending a halo of light around her form. “I’m afraid that it isn’t much to look at, now…” The shabby beginnings of a revolution. “…but we’re only just getting started.” She offers him something like a smile, the upward twitch of her dark lips barely perceptible in the shadows. “Come along – I’ll show you around, and we’ll see to that scrape of yours…” Her gaze lingers on the golden scarf, wrapped around his chest. “…and I’ll explain the job I have for you along the way.”
There was only so much time she could spend running from business.
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
the woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep
H
is ears prick towards her when she laughs, ghost of a thing as it is. There is nothing musical about it (she is not that type of girl, is she?) but it is soft and breezy and – gone before he can blink.
“Once this is all over, perhaps,” she says, and he hums. She speaks of a hopeful future, one where things can be over (is he living one? is his time with the Garde really, truly, over? like the closing of a chapter, some say. were it only that easy.) and he finds himself wanting to believe in it. “I think we’ll both be able to manage it.”
Caine has never thought much about the future. If there was such a being as a creator, a holy maker, then Caine is surely a boy who was never made to have things like futures. Not that he ever minded. He has always thought himself beyond such mortal longings.
Now – he is not so sure.
She tells him of the Elatus Canyons, and he nods along at her explanation for choosing them as a hideout. A logical choice, but – he bites down his grimace as another torrent of wind whips sand into his eyes – off-putting is not a word he would’ve used. Sand falls like snow from his mane when he lowers his head for a vigorous shake.
“Teryrs?” He straightens his back, satisfied with the amount of sand he has dispelled, and angles towards her. Caine has heard the Solterran tales of the desert beasts enough times to recognize the word, though when he says the name his tongue glides awkwardly over it. Something about the Solterran ‘r’ – a curling of the tongue, a gutteral expulsion of breath – makes it difficult for him to replicate. “Have you ever seen one?”
She is so acclimated to the desert – moves through the swallowing sands with nothing short of a bobcat’s grace – that he asks the question with her answer, a short yet telling “yes”, already in mind. Frowning, he tries not to acknowledge how keen he is to hear another one of her stories.
He had not wanted to tell her about his past. He hasn’t really, his answer had been vague enough to infuriate even himself but – when Fia halts in front of the cave and turns to look at him, with the even, solemn gaze he has come to expect from her (strange. when has he ever come to expect anything of anyone? he has just met her. it is not logical.) Caine stiffens.
His bones weigh a thousand tons, and his hooves are anchors in the sand. “I understand.” He does not doubt her. “but I wouldn’t be so quick to call it selfish. Choosing – isn’t selfish, and, even if it were…we are in Solterra.”
He returns her almost-smile. He wonders if she’ll believe him if he tells her that at least in Solterra, the snakes do not masquerade as lambs. They are unashamed in their violence, undeterred by their ambition. They do not run. They fight and they bleed and they die, and it is this primordial pride, shedding their own blood, becoming their own monsters, that Caine has never found fault in.
“You could find far more selfish, profitable causes without so much as looking for them.”
“Fighting a revolution is not the most profitable way to spend my time, that is true. Now that you have pointed that out –” he lifts his brow and his smile is all teeth. He pauses, appearing to reconsider. “But – you are just starting to think me a generous assassin, and I am in need of a new image, so that is payment enough.” He shrugs, and his lips tilt down just a little – his perfectly polished veneer flickers – but perhaps it is just another trick of the desert. “Selfish, you see?”
He steps into the darkness of the cave before his smile can betray him again.
“Alshamtueur.” Light pours into the cavern and casts dancing shadows on the walls. “I’m afraid that it isn’t much to look at, now…” Caine walks up to a pile of crates tucked neatly in a corner. The light from Fia’s flaming sword is just enough to cast everything in a film of weak gold. One crate is filled with packaged food rations, and another, with its lid slightly ajar, reveals a collection of carefully stacked and polished blades. “…but we’re only just getting started.”
Other crates are stacked sporadically around the expansive space, and his eyes drift to the various breaks in the wall – entrances to tunnels – that branch off into what he suspects to be other rooms.
“Did you do this all yourself?” His voice echoes along the walls. As a boy locked in the marble and walnut corridors of Agenor’s mansion, Caine had always relied on books and (rarely) Agenor’s lessons to offer him glimpses and whisperings of other worlds. Worlds of shadow and intrigue, adventure and secrecy.
And now that one is in front of him, his very blood hums with dormant fascination.
“Come along – I’ll show you around, and we’ll see to that scrape of yours… and I’ll explain the job I have for you along the way.”
Her voice rouses him from his thoughts. Business. He is here because she has summoned him, and she has summoned him because she requires an assassin. He has almost let himself forget it. “It was a shallow scrape, it doesn’t even hurt,” he says mildly, but he trails after her anyways.
He makes a list of the things he has yet to make known to her, things like his enchanted map, to remind himself further that this is a job.
The future is yet to come, and his occupation (a pretty way to put it) has yet to change.
❦
@Caine | "speaks" | notes: here we have caine slithering out of serious talk with his usual grace
I can't even count how many souls I've made off the same deal you're on remember - the devil ain't s a friend to no one
“I think we’ll both be able to manage it.” “So do I,” she says, her voice dipping quietly. She wants to try to, even though she isn’t sure that she can. Seraphina isn’t sure that anything will be left for her when all of this is over; Raum killed her, and he took her life. Even if she made her presence known to the world again, once he was dealt with, she couldn’t return to living the life she’d had before he struck her down. And, really, she wasn’t sure that she had anything to return to – she had few friends, and most of them had scattered when Raum came to power; she was sure that Solterra would have no love for her, after she had condemned it, considering that it barely mourned her even before Raum rose as the nation’s tyrant; she had no family of any sort, and it had never so much as crossed her mind that she could have one until it crossed her mind that she was not sure that she had anyone to return to.
She had lived for her country, for its future, for her duty - but all that meant, she’d found, was a cold, empty throne room and a crown she’d never worn.
But that didn’t matter. For now, Seraphina had the luxury of remaining dead, and she was Fia, a different creature altogether. She didn’t have to carry that weight, and she didn’t have to think about the future, because Fia…Fia didn’t have to worry about rebuilding a crumbling nation, or accounting for the sins of a failed queen. Fia just needed Raum dead.
She knew that she was running (and Seraphina did not run), but she told herself that this was all part of the ruse – and she went on.
She looks back just in time to see him shake off a veritable cape of sand; it sticks out in his dark coat, but the moonlight catches on it. During the day, it would be dull. Now, it gleams – like little stars. “Teryrs? Have you ever seen one?”
She notes the way he stumbles over the word teryr; she glances over her shoulder at him. She’d assumed that he was foreign, but his pronunciation did do a good job of hiding it – she wonders what his accent actually sounds like, and where he might be from. (But, even if he can disguise his voice, Caine is no desert creature – she can see it in the way that the sand just hinders his stride, in the way that he moves. She wonders if he is more comfortable in the air. With two sets of wings, she would expect it.) It crosses her mind that she could ask him, but he’s been evasive enough already, so she doesn’t bother to ask – yet. Instead, she decides to linger on his pronunciation for a moment. “Teryrs,” she repeats, emphasizing the r sound. “Like this - r. You have to lift the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth, near the teeth, and speak from the back of your throat.”
That she has seen a teryr is probably implicit, but she decides to entertain the inquiry regardless, her gaze turning back towards the rolling sea of sand dunes – the gold of the sand like dark roils of silk in the moonlight. “And, to answer your question…a few times. Solterrans hunt teryrs in certain rituals – to choose leaders, in particular, but for some other rituals as well. They are considered one of Solis’s sacred animals, along with the sandwyrms.” The rituals were religious, but they also served as a show of force – she assumes that he can guess as much, however. “…I’d seen them at a distance before, as a girl, but I didn’t encounter one very closely until the hunt that determined Maxence as our sovereign, after Zolin. It nearly killed me.” Her tone is cool and detached, when she speaks of her own near-death, but it quiets when she speaks again. A hint of a waver works its way into her voice, and, for a moment, she seems to stumble over her words. “Maxence was…brash. Full of fire. And he never really thought things through. But he was…a good man, regardless, even if he was an...impulsive leader. The teryr threw me back against a ridge of stones – and he called out to me, while I was bleeding out. It was the first time, I think, that anyone particularly cared if I lived or died.” She’d barely known him, then, and she would barely get to know him. She would never learn where he came from, or why he came to Novus, or what he loved or loathed; but he was the first person who’d ever given Seraphina a chance, the first to have ever looked at her and seen someone worth saving. For a moment, she is quiet, then she continues. “And then a teryr killed him. It attacked the court - the mate of the one that he killed. We hunted it down, and its children, but all we found of him was bones. Solterra is…rarely kind to her sovereigns.” She glances at him, out of the corner of her eye, then looks back to the dunes. “I’ve encountered a few since, but they have been…less climatic. I try not to make the same mistakes twice.”
(She wonders, for a moment, if she should have mentioned Maxence – but he was close to plenty of the members of the court, not just his Emissary.)
All of her stories, she thinks, seem rather violent.
---
He’s trying to avoid the subject, and she knows it.
Though her years in court had done something for Seraphina’s tact, she had never been especially keen on social graces, so she elects to push him a bit anyways. He’s determined to convince her that his motivations are entirely selfish, she thinks, though it doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind that they might be considered altruistic until she brought it up. She reminds herself that she is speaking to an assassin. (At least in part – she has been told, of course, that he does all manner of stealthy work.) He kills people for a living. She has done something similar, but likely for different reasons. Nevertheless, she doubts that most assassins come by their line of work by being good people. “Fighting a revolution is not the most profitable way to spend my time, that is true. Now that you have pointed that out - But – you are just starting to think me a generous assassin, and I am in need of a new image, so that is payment enough. Selfish, you see?”
His phrasing makes her wonder if he hopes to get under his skin, like the nobles in the palace, with their back-handed statements and their compliments that were never actually compliments; he implies that he is using her,manipulating her, twisting her up around a fantasy. If that were the case, it would be rather foolish to say it to her face.
(And she catches that flicker of an expression – the way his lips curve, and, for a moment, aren’t that toothy smile.)
She continues to watch him, even as he turns, her eyes lingering on his own until they move out of view. Silver as the moon, she thinks – they’re a striking color, against the darkness of his coat. She strides forward alongside him, summons flame, leads him inside; the fire dances across her scarred face, drawing odd shadows. “Then you’re asking me,” she inquires, tilting her head and fixing him with an unreadable upturn of her lips, the facsimile of a smile, her tone somewhere dangerously middling between deadly-serious and strangely teasing, “to trust you. I assure you, that is a far higher price than anything material-“ and she pauses for a second, as though she is considering her next words, “-but I’ll grant it, and I’ll choose to think of you as a particularly generous assassin, who is helping me because he does not want to see children starving in the streets or a tyrant destroying a nation that has suffered more than enough. Is that the new image that you are trying to cultivate, Caine?” Though her voice dips low and curls when she speaks of Raum and his doings, her tone remains strangely light.
(She does not quite believe him.)
She steps through the haphazard collection of barrels, crates, and sacks, carefully avoiding the goods within them. Where had she put those bandages? (Seraphina was meticulously organized, but she hadn’t been doing most of the collection, and her loose band of rebels hadn’t developed a system for organizing what meager supplies they had, yet.) She strolls towards the back of the cavern, though her ears remain twitched back, towards Caine. “Did you do all this yourself?” “Not quite.” She glances at him, allowing a hint of a smile to play across her dark features as she notices how he glances around the cavern, simply stocked as it was. It is gone before he can look back at her. “There are a few others already – you’ll probably meet them, eventually. And the caves were already here, of course. Our people have been using them for hundreds of years.” In various capacities. (Not all of them good; slavers had set up their bases in the caverns, and criminals had used them to hide from the guards.) She turns to rummage through a sack of medical supplies; surely they have some bandages in it. “It was a shallow scrape, it doesn’t even hurt.” He has been saying something similar since she pointed it out, – whenever she attempts to treat the wound, at least – but he doesn’t say it with nearly enough conviction to convince her to leave it be.
She rolls her eyes, but her back is turned from him. (It might be audible, however.)“That hardly matters. If you intend to go back to the capitol tonight, Sandwyrms and jackals can smell blood from miles away, and they’ve been especially hostile since the blizzard – I think that food is in scarce supply.” She lifts a roll of bandages and a bit of salve out of the sack victoriously and strides back to his side, turning a critical eye to his shoulder. Her scarf unwinds from around his frame, hanging in the air at his side momentarily then flopping to the ground in an unceremonious heap; the bottle of salve loses the cork and drips a bit on the part of the bandage that would meet his skin. She’d been told that there was a bit of adhesive on them, but the salve would aid with healing – and sticking – regardless. The bandage places itself neatly on his shoulder, lying almost perfectly flat against his skin. She adds, absentmindedly, “Of course, you’re welcome to stay here until morning, if you’d like.”
With that, Seraphina turns towards one of the tunnels, hooves clacking rhythmically against the sandstone; in the enclosed space, the sound feels even louder. The tunnel is short, and it spills out in a small room. A makeshift desk has been formed from a few crates, stacked up on top of each other, and an inkwell sits in the corner, with a quill – from a hawk or a vulture – sticking out of the top. (There seem to be a few other vials, too, perhaps of different kinds of ink.) Countless papers are stacked in several neat heaps, and a sack of blank parchment, nearly overflowing, sits alongside the crates, tilted so that the paper is barely prevented from spilling out. A map is pinned up on another pile of crates, and it has been marked up meticulously; documents are folded up (or left open) and pinned at various locations.
She turns to face him again, her expression grim. Seraphina had allowed herself to get caught up in the momentary reprieve from the horrors in the capitol and the overwhelming job laid out in from of her; she didn’t want to think of it, but she had to. “As for the assignment…if you were to happen upon Raum – or any of his more influential followers - in a dark corner, and they somehow, mysteriously wound up dead in the process, I’d hardly complain.” This is said with some levity, but the look in her eyes is dead serious. “However, at the moment, what I need is far less grandiose. Raum has already begun to limit food and water, and I’m sure that he plans to prevent anyone from entering the Oasis…” And, even in the winter, she shudders to think of what will happen to those without water in the desert heat; they’ll die in droves, excruciatingly slowly and painfully. “I need schedules of the shipments in and out of Solterra. Food, drink, weapons...anything that might be of use. Of course, stealing the schedules might draw some attention, so, if you can find the time, copies would be better. And I need to know what he plans for the Oasis. If he intends to block it off…” She grimaces, thoughts of Jaylin crossing her mind; if she were left in the water, who knew what Raum would do to her. “I have a friend to free, and she can’t survive out of water. The schedules are probably somewhere in the records room in the library, in the east wing...I doubt that Raum has had time to change the structure of the building yet. And, as for the Oasis…anything you hear would be helpful. I suspect that at least some people in the palace know of his plans, and noble Solterrans are very partial to gossip.” If she knows what Raum has planned, she can undo it, or at least conjure some plan to fight back. As it is…she can’t get close enough to him – or any of his people – for fear of being recognized to hear about what he has planned.
She needs eyes and ears. She thinks that she might have found them.
tags | @Caine notes | sera? write a short reply to caine? inconceivable. it has to take like four hours and she has to meticulously contemplate everything, ever while also rambling verbally. the floodgates are open. I can't stop her.
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
