horology | the darkling

renaissance

empire - beth crowley
it's my destiny
i was born to play this game
so fear me or love me
it's all the same

/

'some children are simply born with tragedy in their blood' - unknown

-

seraphina

Numbness consumed her fast. Like vines strangling, squeezing mortality and compassion out of her. The General was her poison and her destructive fuel. Seeing the General like picking at a wound and the memories would resurface. The smell of blood. The sickeningly neat slice across his stomach, severing his body.

Seraphina never meant to become cruel. Before anything, she was a good person. She was raised to never be a bad person. But not conforming to evil didn't mean being good either.

It was like a switch had been flipped in her, a light had been ignited. Seraphina threw herself into her books and buried herself in obscene nightmares. Her visits to the dining rooms and her lessons decreased slowly until she stopped going all together. Nobody knew what was wrong with her, her impenetrable façade was too strong and her personality too unyielding. She would put on a mask, a lovely, cold, composed mask that hid her everything feeling of sentiment.

She ignored the General at all costs. It was painful for her to ignore the man she perhaps loved but what was love but a chemical, a thin line between insanity and cowardice. Seraphina often wondered whether her feelings were ever real and if what she was feeling right now was the consequences of a bizarre cruel Stockholm Sydrome where she was trapped in a line of duty or did she think she owed something to him. There was nothing that she owed him now.

It's never like in the movies where the main character breaks down into tears and the world comes falling apart around them and nothing ever seems right anymore. Because the world doesn't care if you cry, the stars won't collapse if even if you're one of the strongest Grisha who will ever be born and the Earth won't stop moving just because your life is falling apart. Seraphina never thought anything was about her but right now, she was desperate to be the centre of attention for once; for once in her lonely, privilege life, Seraphina wanted to be loved. Not by a broken family, not by a desperate lieutenant, not a power-hungry monster. She wanted to be loved by a good man.

But she wasn't a good woman. And no bad girl ever got or deserved a good man.

Seraphina was awake at 4am every single morning, insomnia plaguing her thoughts and power flooding through her veins. She cared about being in control of her powers less now that it didn't matter. She had lost the man who loved her most in her life to the person she thought she would love most in her life. The black veins of time slithered from her hands, encasing the room in roots. Seraphina sat in a corner and stared into nothing.

If she tried hard enough, she could hear his voice and if she tried even harder, she remembered when he first brought her home from the battlefield. She remember her mother's skeptical complaints but she was too desperate to have a child to let her go. Seraphina remembered how his eyes looked. Brown. Kind. Compassionate. Even though his shirt was soaked in blood, uniform encased in red, he was still kind. And this was how she repaid his kindness.

Vremya poshly otkazat'sya merzost.
Time will send an orphan with dark magic.

The words weighed her down, resonated in her head like a drum beat. She could be good, Baghra said. She could be the savour, the hero. Maybe she could make up for everything terrible that she had ever done, maybe she could really change her destiny.
Maybe Colonel Vessenksy would forgive her.