#serrawriting

Send ‘!!’ and I’ll write a para description of your muse from mine’s perspective, including:

Their looks

Their personality

And who they are to my muse

+ Etc!

The writing was tucked into the empty bottle and set free to sail along Pandaria's coast. A second bottle to join the first that Serenis assumed had never met it's intended. She watched as it was caught by a drift and sailed from her sight, left wondering if this time it might find its mark.

Your words cast a spell on me.

Transfix me to the idea of you.

Drawn in like the inevitable tide.

I remain, like a shell made empty.

In a cove where lost thought collects.

I dream too many dreams of you.

But dreams are fickle and unsound.

Do you fear me to know your truth?

I fear I may drown in your mystery.

So come to me, allow me breath.

Save me with the sight of you.

It was clear that when the Pandaren performer took the stage one weekend, Serenas had a new fascination. And that fixation was shaped as a long lacquered instrument of wood, lain out horizontally. Similar to a harp - at least if it were stretched out like a desk or on the lap - its long strings were meant to be plucked with utmost delicate precision. The traditional song was conveyed through deep, almost mournful chords of melody. And twanging vibratos of rising hope.

Serenas was not sure that she heard its like before, not in the way it had been played. Not in her waking moments, anyway. Maybe it had been a resonance flowing into the background of her dreams. But it was grounded and simple as much as it felt intrinsically connected to the simplest elements. The grounding of the earth, the errant sway of wind, the gentle flow of water. It was as if each long string were pulled from Azeroth herself, and converged into somber melody.

The performer, one Lady Meiyu had been the mistcaller Seon's grandmother, and the old Matriarch was glad to speak on what was called the guqin. It was an instrument made for mostly meditative practice stretching back through times ancient, and yet more.

“The body of the guqin is not unlike our own. A vessel in which the spirit rests. And where the music flows, the strings?” The Pandaren paused to delicately pluck a flow of chords with mastered precision and poise, “Are the heavens. We must refine ourselves to produce the sound worthy of them. They have long taught the same lessons in our temples, and our Shado-Pan, when we must train our bodies to fight.”

“And the heavens, they sing their own song,” Serra remarked in a murmur, an afterthought.

Lady Meiyu tilted her head toward the young scribe curiously. “You hear the heavens sing?”

Under the old Matriarch's stare, Serenas felt suddenly scrutinized. A stare felt a dozen times before by the eldest Dawnsingers, determining her worth to the House she was born to.

It only felt right then to swallow her words and give the grace of a deflecting smile, as she had a dozen times in return. “Only in my dreams. Please, my lady, continue. I would like to hear more.”

“You are a lucky little bird,” the Pandaren murmured as she paced around Serenis, a critical eye on the frail form covered in luxury. “To fly free from your cage for the first time and never know what it feels to fall. Tell me, girl. Have you ever felt the pain of a broken wing?”

It was a gentle inquiry from the Pandaren. A turn of phrasing suddenly upended by a fierce, sudden dive of her paw striking for an arm like quiet lightning.

It was a blow that never connected with the flesh, instead meeting with the golden glow of shielding magic, an instinctual defense Serenis could only manage with wide eyes. 

Slowly, Meiyu returned to her natural, regal stance, paws sheathed within her wide sleeves. She sighed. “You will never learn to weave if you fall back on that magic. Our way is honing the body to flow with the spirit. You call on your Light, beg it to save you, to numb you. A monk’s way however is to feel the pain, bear the break, so that we may better understand how to will ourselves to mend it when taken, or avoid it entirely with our flow.”

The Pandaren shrugged. “Maybe our way is not for you. Clearly your Light does not abandon you as you tell me it does, Miss Serra.”

For a long moment, Serra eyed the shimmering shield around her. All she could think about was its golden fall on her, and the white hot sting on flesh that was not her own. A selective force that did not treat all existence as equal. Its golden shimmer felt deceptive, light motes and dust filtering from a hot sun baking a window pane. This was a prayer in an empty altar room, and the only voice that answered her call was her own, bled of its fervor.

“I…no I haven’t ever broken a ‘wing’”, the cantor admitted her fault softly. She let the golden fire wash across her fingertips, numbing warmth that no longer carried the weight of melody in her. 

 “But I feel pain in the way I feel heartache, because…because none of this feels right anymore. They used to call that a Rapture. A pinnacle of greatness in our Living Flame. And I feel something is so wrong inside of me because it doesn’t sing in me the way they always say it should.” 

Serenis closed her fingers into a fist, dispersing the golden flames. Her golden eyes were wet, tears streaking down in a straining frustration. “I think it would just burn what’s left of me away if I let it, if anything.”

The Elder monk listened with quiet empathy, closing her eyes as she offered a nod for her student’s dilemna. Then with a slow, unfurling movement Meiyu let her soft paw release from a sleeve, fingers opening toward Serenis and her inward suffering. An emerald mist aperated from her claws. The dew soothed on the skin, revitalizing something that had been sinking inside of her. A buoy from a moat of hopeless uncertainty. 

“Maybe it is time to find a different song, child,” Meiyu suggested with gentle tone. “But you must leave yourself open to it. You know this, don’t you?”

Serra could not stop the silent overflow of her tears - once they started it was always difficult to stop. But for once, she broke into a smile despite them, nodding anxiously.

"You say that you know her, yes? I would be so happy to see her at one of these Tart shows you mention with..." she did not know what to call the Man in Black half the time, simply glancing with respect toward the stage he often occupied. "Maybe even Seon could take me to a performance? I wouldn't be any trouble."

"Maybe..." the Lady Shadowsun hesitated, as she often did. Not that she could fault her mother. She cared, she cared, and she cared. It was a concern, buried deep. A humming warmth that trembled on the surface beneath her mother's skin when she lay her own hand on hers to comfort her. An ongoing concern to protect that only trapped her in a new cage, Serenas felt.

She did not fly from one cage just to be shut into another. And so she gave her gentle smile as she often did. The young Dawnsinger remembered such smiles as needed, tender lies, when she needed to withhold the truth from a faltering patient in the clinics of Silvermoon, even as she soothed away their pain on their final nights.

Serra held her mother's gaze with her golden ones, coloring her mind with the subtlest suggestion. A little mental push, feather light inspiration couldn't hurt. Ah, but her mother's will was strong. But the connection was there, between hands, between growing affection, between mother and daughter.

Her mother's eyes followed hers to the Sojourn's stage, and felt there what she did through the empathic transfer: a rising euphoria at the sound of Nahi Summerhold's voice. The softest note of influence -- her mother's fondness for the music was already present, and it was just enough to let her mother think she had come to a favorable conclusion on her own.

"Maybe...we will find a way to bring her here to the Sojourn instead. And then we'll see, lovely," her lady mother drawled off with consideration as she patted the hand that held to hers.

Serenas couldn't help but bite into her own lip, terribly pleased with the outcome.

Send ‘!!’ and I’ll write a para description of your muse from mine’s perspective, including:

Their looks

Their personality

And who they are to my muse

+ Etc!

The well-worn journal was open at an empty table of the Sojourn, pages stirring open lazily on the creased page that fresh ink was scrawled across. Curious enough eyes might have read what was written there:

A silver banshee.

It is with a certain cruelty that they name the divine.

Did they fear the magic of her voice, that it would lure the listener in too deep and hold the soul hostage? Did they name her banshee for her sweeping clouds of hair, or the frightening ordeal of such a songstress dominating the stage?

Were they frozen in awe by the heavenly octave she let flow, or the audacious glint of her eyes on all made captive by her? Is her voice for some a beautiful lament, the resonant expectation of a sweet final respite?

Perhaps they think her coy way cruel. Perhaps it is cruel to find a beat of inspiration in my sick heart, to hear her. A sweet pain in my guilty throat to imagine my voice lifting in time with hers in duet.

But oh, she is a Divine Haunt.

Send ‘!!’ and I’ll write a para description of your muse from mine’s perspective, including:

Their looks

Their personality

And who they are to my muse

+ Etc!

Penned elegantly, coiled into a scroll tied with a light blue ribbon, and left at a barstool Gin would often occupy. Anonymous.

A voice growled out the word "gin" like a demand, and I saw it wasn't poured in a glass, but cut from a mouth made for grins, set into the softest, prettiest face. It was her name.

I don't know if she smiles or is just baring teeth. Is there a difference for the Moonbound? You can see the wolf in her woman shape. The way she tenses with every moment another voice comes at her. Like strings pulled too tight to the bow. Almost breaking free.

And then she speaks and I hear the joyful rush of a fiddler. A dance of words, full of life. If there is a predator there, a dark shape set in the grass for a hunt, her voice chases it away. I cannot help but listen and smile, though I shouldn't.

I only know her name. I wonder if she will one day know mine.

Send in ‘👌’ for a reason why my muse likes yours.

{For Gin!}

"I really like the sound of her voice," Serra answered with a brightening smile, eyes watching the lively human from a distance with interest. "I don't know Common as well as my own Thalassian, but, oh, it makes me just smile to listen to it. It's lilts and springs like a very energetic violin. I'll bet she has an amazing laugh too."

{ @major-gilneass / @drunkenworgen }

{MUSES & MOTHERS}

"...it has been different, I think. Seeing her in the flesh, hearing her speak. Watching her speak with others. Watching her move. She's very much my mother, beautiful, strong and composed as she had really ever been. Sometimes, frankly, she's a little intimidating in that way. And...that was very much my mother when I was small too. She always chose who she was softer with. Especially after Father died."

Serenas pensively traced the line of her own left ring finger, digging her nails into the meat of it. "But there is a difference now. I'm very....surprised that she took up with the Void. It's made her a different sort of beautiful, I think. But the Dawnsinger line had always seen the void as anathema. An utter betrayal to the name, really. It snuffs out our ability with the Living Flame. I've always struggled with it, but it was our gift. She passed it to me, as all Dawnsinger mothers pass it to their daughters. And now, I don't think the flame sings in her."

"I don't fault her...not really. I can only imagine the life she's had. She's been through so much that I was not a part of. But she doesn't sleep, and...I've heard the void takes people to such dark places. I just can't bring myself to ask the questions I want to? But more than anything, it makes my heart hurt knowing that they'd never let my mother in the halls she was born to again. I suppose it's a silly thing to think that things could one day be as they were."