Apricus ◂ Star Wars

𝐀 𝐏 𝐑 𝐈 𝐂 𝐔 𝐒

Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.

You will never be lovelier than you are now.

We will never be here again.

― HOMER

〖 °❈° 〗

 𝐀 𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐄𝐁𝐈𝐑𝐃 𝐇𝐀𝐒 𝐀𝐋𝐖𝐀𝐘𝐒 lived within Irina Naberrie's passion-burnt heart.

Her soul is born of soaring bliss and feathered sin, scarlet tendrils and golden infatuation. The center of her own idyllic portrait, light is hers. Cascading down in waterfall rays, rotten through the core. Held in the tortured fingertips of a planet half-dead, this sunshine is eternal - a blessing that never battles with the night.

But among the aristocrats of Naboo, daughters are raised as ancient creatures - sheets of glass, sharp and reflective, fragile and pure. Never supposed to know the warmth of rosy dawn and ripened day. Her first lesson: if given the choice to speak or to die, she must die every time, for her family has raised a queen and they must not feel the shame of the crownless.

Fate forgives, however, humming upon molten skin, ever-soft, ever-graceless as it embraces her hollow bones gently (destiny itself is envious of how entirely Irina is alive, every piece of her winged and defiantly alight). It is difficult for others not to fear such a statue of embers, trapped and radiant, blinding and incandescent; full of a joy so raw it wants to ravage the galaxy, to erupt into flame and revel in the smoke. Yet, besides a dashing stroke of unsubtle bravery, there is nothing within her to dread. She has never left the vulnerable arms of youth.

Distracted and ignorant, no soldier's reflexes line muscular memory, soft-throated skin shines open to spears of words and metal alike. Emotion is infantile in the way it fills her eyes with raptured, honeyed stardust, consuming her whole as if each stream of sanguinary joy or flood of fanged tragedy is being felt for the very first time. In such guileless naivety, Irina was no bride - a veil had never covered truth from her face, lies did not think to touch her lips.

Yet her sister had been the one bathed in reverence, possessing the rare silver tongue of both a poet and a savior, pretty words and ringing truth. Politics were sickness to Irina; a blazing girl addicted to beauty's edge could find no catharsis in the cruel-rot infection of comically defenseless lungs. There was no jubilation the web of twisted shadows which blotted out stars with the ink of a thousand treaties forged in deceit.

In her soul, Padmé was a city of strained diamond and silken youth molded in faith - she could stand to break a little more, to fight the weight of a sea for a little while longer without being pulled under. Irina already danced at the brink of hedonistic ruin, impossibly ambiguous, a leonine creation of discarded piety.

The opposite of sacred.

One sister had always seen the fissures of the world and the other had become her own little destruction, a crack in the credence bridled society held so dear, an outcast with a sparrow on one shoulder and a raven on the other. A single wound more and she would dissolve into a graveyard of detritus and bone. There was nothing to hold her afloat, for lineage cannot grant honor to all of its tributes.