seraphine cauchemar, district seven | finished [cb]

Hellemine, Zeldavine, and Seraphine 

— the devil, the witch, and the sacrifice.

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She’s not sure what happened in the womb, but Sera knows that she escaped something evil. A plague arrived in the form of rot, flooding her mother’s organs with its blackness and leaving her feverish. Perhaps the woman had tried to make a deal with a dark spirit, offering up her soul to keep herself and her daughters alive — or maybe the fault belonged to Sera’s occult-inclined aunt, who had whispered a healing chant and pressed burnt sage to her dying sister’s forehead in an attempt to change the cruel nature of things. Whatever the crime, she’s certain that her sisters were born with that same dark infection raging inside of them.

Except they learned how to control it.

A lamb trying to find her place in a den of wolves, Sera isn’t comfortable with considering the third option. For all of her kindness, she wonders if she might have stolen their mother’s warmth away from Zelda and Helle; that the third-born might be at fault for having taken away all the light provided for the Cauchemar triplets to share. Harming others is an action she cannot forgive, and it frightens her to think that the witchcraft of her family might have manifested itself within her in a different form. She holds her hands to the sky and she follows the holy scripture as best she can — but she’s always been a weak believer. She’s just trying to find somewhere in the world to call her own.

Helle carries something wicked inside of her, twisting in her stomach and hissing when all else is silent, and Zelda follows their aunt to the woods and practices what should be shamed — but Sera? She sits by the river and counts her blessings. They're all she has. A candle can be born from a wildfire; bright flame placed on a wick and brought inside of a cottage built from oak. She doesn’t have to cause destruction, regardless of it being her birthright. Paranoid and shrill, she always assumes the worst. Trembling fingers and pursed lips, she’s a mouse of a girl. The hawks let her stay in their nest, but she’ll never belong. Not to anyone. Not to a demon, or to a clan, or to a heavenly king. Because she knows even Ripred won’t let her past his golden gates.

Hope is the one thing she can’t lose, though.
And religion lets her keep it.
Let her be Cassandra;
a cursed prophet that no one respects. That’s fine.

Just let her feel safe.