( if only she felt a saint for it, and not like a tomb that's been excavated, some half-dead thing that's been made to walk among the living. more shambling body than jacaerys velaryon. more sankt ilya drowning in chains — the mother to an abomination of nature, merzost polluting her marrow, carving out her bones to sow life where nothing should ever grow. giving pieces of herself away, little by little, until she's hollowed insides.
it feels like minutes stretched to hours by the time alicent's knock comes, each second prolonged by the pervasive grief living in her chest. she refuses to ask the existential question of how a year might feel, a decade, a century of loves lost and friends forgotten — whether she might withstand digging each grave, or if aleksander had truly known what she risked burying with them. alina rises, instead. goes through the motions of living as she peels open the door, creaking like the voice in her throat. )
You shouldn't be wandering alone.
( light-footed, she steps away to invite alicent inside. the scant bit of sunlight peeking through the drawn curtains does little but shadow the tired, swollen cavities of her eyes. spotlights the waning, waxing paleness of alina's complexion, and snow-white strands that melt through the dark fall of her hair, more severe for how it's been haphazardly pinned to the back of her head. a hundred tiny details that age her beyond her years, in a universe that has made her fragilely eternal, an immortal contradiction of frailness and power. )
no subject
it feels like minutes stretched to hours by the time alicent's knock comes, each second prolonged by the pervasive grief living in her chest. she refuses to ask the existential question of how a year might feel, a decade, a century of loves lost and friends forgotten — whether she might withstand digging each grave, or if aleksander had truly known what she risked burying with them. alina rises, instead. goes through the motions of living as she peels open the door, creaking like the voice in her throat. )
You shouldn't be wandering alone.
( light-footed, she steps away to invite alicent inside. the scant bit of sunlight peeking through the drawn curtains does little but shadow the tired, swollen cavities of her eyes. spotlights the waning, waxing paleness of alina's complexion, and snow-white strands that melt through the dark fall of her hair, more severe for how it's been haphazardly pinned to the back of her head. a hundred tiny details that age her beyond her years, in a universe that has made her fragilely eternal, an immortal contradiction of frailness and power. )