Vendetta is a collector of things. She collects knives, ornate ones, ones with wooden handles or blades of something other than steel. She collects trinkets, made of gold and pearl and iron, that she finds on the blackmarket and keeps to herself. She collects people, to work for her, to do her bidding, to follow her word like law.

She collects souls, taking them for herself in the shadows of the night.

When the unicorn finds the vendor on the shore of the lake selling the strange knives made of glass the color of blue fire, she cannot help but purchase one. It sparks like lightning and is smooth as ice and she holds it with a smirk that tells of unspeakable things, before tucking it away safely to take it home with her.

Then Vendetta stands at the shore of the lake, where the water has been made to defy gravity, held up by some strange material clear as glass but not nearly as thick. Beneath her hooves is a floor of wood and gold and her red skirt is a splash of blood against it. She still wears her mask, velvet and black and made of filigree and lace, covering much of her face but for her eyes, piercing and red when she spies him. A lone man, a stranger to her, but he stands there staring into the water and she wonders if it might swallow him. He looks like the sky, dark skin splashed with twilight and the fading stars chased by morning.

She has no reason to approach him, and yet something about him intrigues her. Perhaps it is that here, at this festival surrounded by so many, he is somehow still intrinsically alone. Vendetta approaches slowly, each step a soft knock, knock, knock on the wooden boards. “Take care not to gaze too long into that abyss,” she says as she comes up beside him, wicked and beautiful.

"Speaking."

Vendetta watches him play with the water, grasping at it as much as one can grasp at something so frustratingly tangible. To be able to touch it but not able to hold fast to it, it felt away, dripping, spilling back into the rest of the lake.

He smiles when he looks at her and her answering one is that of a wolf's. She might be your friend, showing you that you have nothing to fear from her. Or she might be preparing to tear open your throat. The unicorn has no quarrel with this man, though, and he is safe for tonight. From her at the least.

"Is it not the abysses of one's own making that keeps them the most captive?" Vendetta has no abyss, no gaping nothingness that threatens to swallow her up. She is in completed control af all the pieces and parts of her life. But, she thought, perhaps he did, this man of dusk and stars.

"The masquerade offers a measure of intrigue that I find... exciting," the woman of pearls and roses responds, a curious glinting in her ruby red eyes. Secrets, smoke and mirrors—there wasn't a lot of that to be had in her position, though she would never give up the infamy she had created for herself. No, she just got her thrills through different means. "You might be surprised to find how much a mask suits you, if you find the right one."

If she is talking abut herself she makes no indication of it, and her smile, as sharp as it is, does not falter. Perhaps that is all the indication that's needed. And when he asks her if she's found the night to her liking she thinks of the strange dagger hidden beneath her skirt, and how she cannot wait to hear how it sings against the flesh of another.

Vendetta holds his gaze when she answers.

"I've found many thing that have caught my eye," and vagueness of it is perhaps as unsettling as the way you can't quite see her eyes completely in this lighting, hidden beneath the shadow of black velvet. "And you? Surely there is more for you here than a dreamer's world, even if you did help to fabricate it."

"Speaking."

“Ah, but intrigue is the name of the game, is it not?” she says and the corner of her lip curls and maybe there is the faint sound of a laugh in those words. “I would think that Denocte’s new queen knows a thing or two of intrigue if she throws masquerades in the night and asks of others to make walls of water and mazes that defy all reason.” Vendetta knows little of this queen, though she has heard many refer to her throughout the night. Isra, they had called her, and Vendetta again found herself wondering what sort of utopia that woman longed for.

“The perfect mask is one that, when you slip it on, it releases you from whatever holds you back.” Vendetta’s voice is liquid and rich like a dark red wine, and she answers like she knows what his question really means, but ah, are they not just talking about the masque? She sways a little, like a dance, and her skirt of blood swishes across the wood as a whispering breath would across another’s skin. “The perfect mask lets you be yourself.”

When he drops his chin to his chest she thinks of all the men she’s made bow to her, though she made them get down on their knees and beg. This man though, his roguish smirk and the impish tilt of his head, they do not belong to her or her wrath. Still, she cannot say she would not like the taste of his blood on her lips. Something about the way this interaction makes her feel, the way it plays her charm and wit like a piano, it reminds her of the day she walked out of the doors of what had once been her master’s home. Powerful, liberated.

He looks away and she takes a moment to observe him more closely. Her eyes take in the night sky of his gaze, and the star nestled between it and she thinks the evening is more for him than he believes. “Just begun indeed,” she agrees, and Vendetta takes a small step closer, decreasing the space between them by mere millimeters and yet, when she too lowers her head, it feels more than that, “But whatever that old oracle says, we can do with the night what we please.”

“What is it you are searching for?” Have you found it yet? Intrigue is, after all, the name of the game.

"Speaking."

Vendetta listens to him speak and she thinks. She thinks that there is more to this man who does not make abysses out of aquariums that defy gravity. She thinks that games do not come easy to him but they come to him all the same, seeking him out in the night. Dragging their claws through him and claiming him as their victim. Most of all she thinks that he is not all that he appeared, standing and staring into the water, alone.

He speaks of the queen, and if she hadn't already known that she had presumably called upon him to help make this attraction, his tone would speak volumes more. He is fond of her, admires her, even, perhaps. “The best stories,” she adds, “know how to create reason out of chaos.” And he smiles at her and she regards him strangely for a moment with eyes bright like blood.

“The only secret I am hiding is what the rest of my face looks like behind this mask,” and there is the barest of whispering sighs on her lips as she says this. A wry curling to the corner of her mouth. She doesn't lie, however, in saying this. Vendetta might be playing a game, toying like a cat might with a mouse, but this is who she is. She does not ask permission nor forgiveness.

He turns to look at her and she can feel the heat between their skin, even on this midsummer night. She thinks she can taste the ocean on the air around him and it's a sharp and pleasant smell. The ocean is her birthright, her history, and if the desert weren't her home she might like to know where it is that he calls his.

“Never look hope in the eye,” she says then, and if there is a dagger's edge to her voice her eyes are no sharper for it, her muscles no more tense. Hope is like a siren's call, luring you toward her with sweet promises of something more, until you've found her and she has taken everything from you. Including your life.

Vendetta knew she had felt hope once, perhaps had felt even love or trust. She chose not to remember those times, for they had only ever been her ruin. It was best not to hope but to take more, take better, for yourself.

He laughs and she watches the way he does it, the way his mane is tossed slightly as he shakes his head. The darkness of his eyes, perhaps, a little bit brighter and more like stars. There is a girl inside her who never knew a boy, never knew anything but the pain that became her anger that burns like ice. There is a girl inside her that she thinks, maybe, rears her head a little bit when she says, “Perhaps just men with life in their veins and boys in their hearts who want to learn how to celebrate again.”

"Speaking."

He is not wrong when he says it, for beneath the obsidian mask she wears, velvet and delicate, are eyes of red, faceted like precious stones. A wash of ivory, pale as the moon hanging low over Denocte, with bold swathes of deep brown like the night sky. But the most striking thing about her is not her eyes like freshly spilled blood or the medley of her skin. It is what’s underneath, visible only to those who look closely. The keenness of a predator, the slow burning fire of a thousand suns, the glimmer of power and control.

And, despite all of these things. Despite the many reasons she can think not to take this man’s offered hand when he extends it to her, she does anyway. With a curl of her lips and a glittering to her eyes does Vendetta take his offer. And when his muzzle near brushes against her shoulder an arc of lightning travels along her spine, and the heat of his closeness lingers along her skin until it has her turning and following him. Their steps combine on the wood and gold, two different pulses whose paths have crossed, as they leave the lake and its illusion behind.

"Speaking."