The whispers of her feet rise to join the shushing of his tail.
Faida trails the regent, soft-stepping down the center of the throne room as though she were some demure bride. There is no giddiness to the soft pull of her lips and her eyes are too detached, strung from stars and moons an eternity apart.
The bone girl drifts through the gilt room as though she has always been here. Maybe she has – for there is nothing earthly about Faida. The girl is wraith and witch and death entwined.
Her tail trails like a tattered train of a dress, her forelock a decorous veil falling across her thick-lashed eyes. Oh this girl is grace and elegance, she is slender beauty; a flower so divine it lures the eye and ignites the heart. But beneath her petal skin, poison pulses and pushes and whispers. It calls from her universe eyes and its song is a dreadful thing of endless black; the tumbling space between stars and moons and planets.
The regent stops before a throne and Faida’s head tilts, corvine and lupine, sharp with beak and teeth. Her voice – a sound as soft as fur and feathers – resonates from the stone around them, “Have you lost a king?”
Dry, dry lips, paper-thin and snow, snow white, tremble as they close. Only she knows why she shivers. Only she knows why her body trembles, and it is not from cold, or fear, or energy.
She blesses the boy beside her with a smile that grows and grows and grows. Within this room she is a rogue flake of snow; so fragile she may melt in the heat and so dangerous she promises death with an icy caress.
The bone girl stops, only when she is before the dais, a bride before the altar. Her eyes drift like flotsam to the boy stopped beside her. They stand together, like a bride and groom, but Faida has no space in her heart for love and her soul is old and corrupt. She is no longer a bride when she ascends the dais upon slender limbs and circles the throne as though she were a priestess behind her altar of blood and sacrifice. Black, black eyes catch and claw and bite at the boy as though he were a rabbit – the fox will never let him from her sight.
“Well?” Faida whispers from her place beside the throne. Down, down upon the regent she peers with her eyes gleaming wild, wild, wild. There is a monster within her, Camdis, it roars in her blood and purrs in the laugh that peels from her throat.
@Camdis
