Chapter 19
A very, very long time ago, Seraphina Pitchiner had a mother. She was tall, though not as tall as Seraphina's father, with gleaming brown curls and kind hazel green eyes.
As a child she only knew what her mother looked like from the photographs her father possessed - one that graced their mantle with her parents on their wedding day looking happy and in love, blissfully unaware of the future, and one of her mother alone in her father's room on his nightstand, forever caught mid-laugh at a joke that Seraphina would never know.
Growing up motherless was difficult enough in the best of times, but in a time of war when her father was a highly decorated general that people depended on? As terrible as it sounded, the war had taken her father from her long before the Fearlings did. She hung on to the scraps of time he was home, knowing even as a child that he was living on borrowed time.
She had always been more perceptive than other children. Her various caretakers said she got it from her father, but Kozmotis Pitchiner always said that she got more of her mother. "My little angel," he would say with a smile, brushing her dark hair out of her eyes when it got unruly.
Seraphina loved her father as most children do, with a possessive fervor that demands attention, but pure in its intensity. She also resented him in much the same way, hating the time he had to spend away from her, knowing that as much as he did love her, his duty to protect others came before even her, his own flesh and blood. It rankled at her, but she was also proud that it was her father that people depended on, who they looked to for aid.
That was Before.
Before… well.
How do you react to the knowledge that your father failed in what was possibly the most important task he had ever been given? To him succumbing to that which he fought? That his body is not dead, no, but his mind most likely is, smothered by millions of creatures which delight in nothing more than causing the utmost terror, who now use him as a host to destroy what he had tried so hard to protect?
A long time ago, Seraphina had a father. She lost him in the worst way, his face and body now used by the enemy the Lunar Empire had fought so hard against. She hated them, and him.
They used to visit her in her nightmares, familiar eyes which had once looked upon her with fondness and devotion now lit with madness. "Little angel," they cooed in her father's voice but with whispering multitudes beneath it. "Come to us, little angel. We missed you so much, we have. Surely you miss your father, dear one? We know you toss and turn, yearning for him to return to you."
"Stay away from me," she demanded, baring her teeth at them in both childish stupidity and bravery. "I will kill you someday, I will."
A cacophonous shriek of many laughs escaped the thing wearing her father's face, lengthening and overwhelming as the things in dreams often do. "Will you now? Your poor father, lured in by your voice, betrayed by his fear for you, and now you wish to kill him?"
"You are not him," Seraphina hissed, not letting any other emotion show. "He is gone, and you will not trick me like you did him."
"Everyone is strong until they are weakened," the Fearlings warned. "Even mountains crumble in the face of Time, and you, little girl, are no mountain."
Waking should have been a relief, but all Seraphina felt was a bone deep sadness.
She grows as most orphaned children do, hoping for a better future but not knowing whether it would ever come. She roamed the universe by herself for a time, traveling the stars and becoming powerful in her own way, learning how to harness the elements to her will.
It is pure chance that she meets Sanderson Mansnoozie, a jolly pilot with the ability to manipulate dreams, and plagued by nightmares as she is, Seraphina is intrigued, and the two of them strike up a friendship. It is pure luck that when they are shot down by the thing that wore her father's face, this Pitch Black thing, she and the Dreamer are able to (crash) land on the nearest planet, a small place its inhabitants call Earth.
Defeating him is the hardest thing Seraphina has ever had to do, and it damages her both physically and emotionally. She, Sanderson, the Tsar Lunar who had been hiding on the planet's moon, and a local wizard named Ombric barely manage to seal him away, for it was nearly impossible to truly kill Fearlings.
Recuperating took time, time that endeared Seraphina and the people of the Earth to each other. They call her Mother Nature and it was laughable, really, the girl who had almost always been without a mother being called Mother. But she loved them, she really did, humans and spirits alike, for the latter flock to her like flowers to sunlight, and as she transcended her previous mortality, she began to look after those spirits who had an affinity for the weather.
For a time, life was peaceful.
And then come the Guardians, a group that consisted of her old friend Sanderson, a Pooka who had somehow escaped the wholesale slaughter of his people, a half-human Sister of Flight, and a former human thief apprenticed to Ombric.
Learning that Tsar Lunar brought them together was mildly amusing. Finding out they had been assembled to fight Pitch Black, who had escaped his bindings, does not please Seraphina At All. Though reduced in power, he is still a formidable opponent, and as the self styled Nightmare King clashed with the Guardians, she just barely restrained herself from marching onto the battlefield and throttling him herself. No, she had had enough of fighting the creature that still wore her father's face.
In the end the Guardians won, forcing Pitch Black to slink back into the shadows, becoming the Bogeyman of the human world. Uniquely aware of the world as she was, Seraphina had a general idea of his activities, and it is largely uninteresting until he meets one of the weather spirits Tsar Lunar had nudged her way: Jack Frost.
Seraphina knows some of her weather spirits better than others, and Jack Frost, though vivacious and full of life, is lonely. She yearns to be seen, and Seraphina has been alive for too long to not know how someone like Pitch Black can prey on that, and so she makes plans in case she must intervene.
Except… nothing happens. Well, not nothing, they become friends, but that in itself is strange. It both confuses and warms Seraphina, because Jack now has someone to talk to who will talk back, but it is Pitch Black.
Nothing untoward seems to be happening until Toothiana, bless her kind soul, comes to her wooded Empire, and her news gives Mother Nature pause. Has she missed something? Was she not watching close enough when it came to Jack Frost? Their journey to the North Pole is quick and they arrive nearly concurrently with Pitch and Sanderson in his wake, the small Dreamer's usual unruffled state marred by the quick flurry of symbols that flash above his head when he sees the Tooth Fairy and Mother Nature.
The argument that follows surprises her, though she is careful not to let it show. The protective behavior and the sheer venom he shows at being accused of harming Jack in any way does not follow previous interactions with him, but the way he looks at the winter spirit is - oh.
Oh, Seraphina knows that look.
She knows it from the photograph on the mantle, from the nights a long, long time ago, when she would ask for stories of her mother, and her father would oblige with a melancholy smile as he spoke of how they loved each other, though not in so many words. She knows the conspiratorial smile that Jack exchanges with Pitch, not a joke she doesn't know, but an emotion she very well does.
It remains to be seen whether this will end badly, but Seraphina hopes it does not as she gives Jack her blessing in order to enhance her healing. "I will be watching, Pitch Black," she warns the creature who has worn her father's face for years.
"I would expect nothing less," he replies, and as he and Jack disappear, Seraphina wonders if maybe, just maybe, there may still be some part of her father in there.
Me: I'm gonna write a lil Seraphina POV
Seraphina: I am filled wit and t
Me: ...okay, that happened :/
Anywho, hope everyone enjoyed the attempt to condense an ambiguous number of centuries' worth of history down into roughly 1.4k xD Next chapter will be Jack and Fluff :D