Insights of a Seer: Kassandra | 39 | Scars

Kassandra held the cup right with white knuckles, her face drawn, pale.  There was a melancholy in her visage, dressed over her thickly like the dressage of a funeral march. It clung to every surface, like a suffocating volcanic soot, her thoughts scattered in the ashes of what once was and what was going to be.

 

It was the weight of a seer, the gift and curse of an oracle. It was only to be expected. Often in her youth, she would wake up screaming from the visions she saw, trembling and inconsolable, some nights babbling incoherently about the monsters she saw. The blights, the wars, the great famines, and the zealous genocides of the lesser races of her home continent. And yet, with a lot of– correction, she had been able to curb her unseemly behavior. Each morning, she would wake up without a peep, without a sound, and silent as a mouse sneaking into the pantheon’s mass she would slip through the hallway from bed and into the kitchen to fix herself some tea. The tea was good. Light, aromatic, and with a warmth to it that could bite back against the nails digging into her skull. No one said being a seer would be easy.

 

Quite the opposite, it was only expected that it would break something in her. To break is to be humanoid, and she was to allow that part of herself to shatter. She liked to imagine she had shattered it like a mirror, and carefully stowed away the pieces of herself in a box and bound it extra tight, and she’d burrow it far and away from the light. She had been raised a Rousseau, and the Rousseau didn’t have time for the frivolities of weakness that made the weaker of heart waver.

 

No, Kass would not waver. That would be unbecoming of a seer. She would sip her tea, and soak herself in the serotonin that rewarded her, coasting in the caffeine as it slowly stirred her up into wakefulness for another long day of study. She would continue on with her day without complaint, even if her head pounded from all sides from the extensive use of her power. Even as she looked into the dull, sepia-stained liquid to observe her reflection, flickers of the memories of the night crossed into her vision. Terrible fires, natural disasters, and the worst murders that could be committed by humanity. They were white-hot, riddled into her eyelids so that they burdened her whenever she might close her eyes.

 

Sometimes she would slip something a little harder into her morning tea, just enough to take the edge off of whatever might have affronted her senses this time. She could not have weakness, and so she stared into her own recollection unflinchingly.

 

Her skin and form were flawless, on the outside she was without defect or mark to speak of. It was just a strain in her eyes, a tension in her brow that remained in spite of everything, that told the story that would never dare be spoken. Kassandra was a deeply scarred being, fractured by the necessity to handle the burgeoning responsibility that would be handed down to her. It was the duty of the seer to delicately hold that balance, to tread the path fractured and make sure not to fall into pieces. To bring honor to her family, to become what was expected of her, she had always figured that she would have to slowly strip back her humanity to find the seer beneath. For now, she could toe that line.

 

At least, as long as she could start her morning with a cup of tea.