The name touches something in the back of her head, a memory that has gone buried, a bell rung just barely. White Scarab. The signa is familiar enough it feels like a long-lost friend, and O sears it into her brain again and again.
It reaches her on a warm wind as she plods around the abandoned forges at the edge of the court. They are stale with disuse and covered in fine amber dust; their fires have long gone out, and surplus tools lay half-buried in the sand - sickles warped into waning moons, chunks of mottled ore, wire brushes encrusted with old rust. O shuffles her hooves through the bright sand, winds tightening circles around the forges and ovens. She tosses the hurlbat in so many casual arcs, comforted by the weight of the steel in her telekinetic grasp, and wonders absent-mindedly if this is where it was forged, before it ended up in the oasis and then in her hands.
If someone forged it, or something. A deity, an ousted king, an old god.
Anyway, it hums just like her heart.
She is poring over a particularly damaged poker when the card hits her shoulder. She startles, and turns to look; already it has been partially obscured by the ever-shifting sand, and she has to dig it out with a small, dark hoof to look more closely. It is round-edged and perfectly black, and the scarab in the middle gleams bright against the dark and the sand, and when O sees the text that reads follow the signs she almost, almost smiles.
The card zips up from the sand, nestles in the pocket that usually holds her axe. The hurlbat follows.
She twists her hair away from her face and turns toward the Arma mountains.
-
By the time she finds her way into the markets it is blackest, deepest night. Lamplight kisses skin. Tall buildings blot out the tiny twinkles of stars. Hoofsteps click on the cobblestone and murmurs are passed between mouths and O slinks like a coyote between the crush of bodies, narrow hips and shoulders shifting to fit, eyes roving watchfully. The card is still tucked against her side. She almost feels it burning -
It burns hotter and hotter and hotter, until she wants to scrape it away, but she turns a corner and there it is, and it’s worth it, when she sees the building.
It rises like a little moon over the spires of Denocte. Grand and bright and pale, O wonders how she hasn’t noticed it before; she is not well-versed in the streets of the Night Court, but could not possibly be dense enough to forget something like this. It glimmers like a pearl, shines like a fire. A little palace, strange as it is to call it that, against all the grime and dark of Denocte. Her step slows. Lanterns shudder from their scones. In the dim light O shimmers in and out of visibility like she is no more than one of her father’s card tricks.
The door is inset with a little onyx scarab. O draws to a stop and stares at it, at the little beady eyes, the too-detailed wings. For a moment she pauses, as if in deliberation of whether or not to knock. But she is merely gathering focus: she magicks a gauzy cloak around her shoulders and neck, glittering like sunlight on water, insubstantial as gossamer. It seems to make her skin twist and shift from gold to black and back again, a mirage in the dark, and when O finally does push her way through the wide doors anyone who looks at her would see not a girl but a conglomerate of shifting colors and parts, only vaguely yearling-shaped. The hurlbat at her hip turns briefly into a branch of hemlock.
For all her courage, O takes her time to adjust.
It is dark. Dark enough she has to blink to see properly, that the pattern on the lavish carpets seems to twist and bite like so many serpents. It smells faintly of jasmine, smoke, something similarly dark and bitter.
O raises her head; no one has noticed her entrance, or if they have they’re too distracted to say anything about the girl who shimmers and twists like an optical illusion.
there is a lion in my living room. I feed it raw meat so it does not hurt me.
S
he lurks in the shadows like a creature of nightmares.
Or so she likes to think, anyways. In truth, Aghavni looks the furthest thing from a creature of nightmare – her eyes are too large, her bones are too thin, her hair is too soft – but her unicorn’s horn is needle sharp and deathly accurate, and she thinks that that, at least, is a start.
August is not with her, and for that the girl is glad – he would only annoy her, steal her razor-sharp focus from right under her so that he can claim the right to greet them instead. Flash the unlucky patron his charming smile and charming eyes, and then smirk at her (still in the shadows, still lurking like a green-eyed ghost) in that infuriating, self-satisfied way.
She is glad he is not with her.
But no one new has entered yet – they are all returning patrons, and need no guide to find their way to the Lounge or Floor or Rooms – and so Aghavni is unneeded and alone and terribly, terribly restless.
Sighing, she digs out a stack of black cards from the folds of her silk scarf and begins to shuffle them. The wings of the white-inked scarab beetles almost look like they are snapping open and shut, open and shut, from the speed she shuffles them at. (Charon thinks she is still not good enough, to Aghavni’s growing agitation, so she practices any moment she is idle. If August is deemed good enough, she’ll be damned if she isn’t.)
She had headed out into the bustling crowds of Denocte earlier that day to slip cards into the pockets of the ones who’d deserved them. Aghavni has a good eye for finding them, the hungry ones, so the task is often left for her to do. She both relishes and despises the task – on one hand she likes finding them, likes reading the greed from glistening eyes and the desire from restless limbs (like hers) – but the job is too menial, too much a task made for a child, and it eats away at her like maggots.
The not-being-good-enough. The not-being-trusted-enough.
Father has not come to the Den for months. He has not seen how much Aghavni has changed, how much she has done, how much she deserves to be trusted –
The girl dismisses her thoughts with a shake, the golden spikes in her mane scratching against her neck. She cannot think that way. She must remain patient – Father has always said that an incompetent ruler’s worst flaw is a lack of patience, and Aghavni is far from incompetent.
So she sees the girl when she enters. Or, she sees the shape of one slipping through the opened doors, a black gloom in the candlelight, because a glamour drapes thickly across her small, sly frame.
Aghavni’s eyes narrow – she is not fooled. (The glamour is more illusion than sorcery anyways, because of its inconsistency – a true glamour sinks its teeth into your body for as long as it has teeth. Her thoughts stray to the Weaver, and a shiver runs down her spine.)
Aghavni doesn’t know who this strange girl is trying to fool.
Swiftly, she slips the deck of cards back inside her scarf and moves like a phantom through the Den’s writhing shadows.
“Hello.” She halts in a spot the sky of enchanted candles fails to illuminate, close enough to see the sandy gold of the girl’s skin, and the curl of her night-black hair. “Welcome to the White Scarab.”
She hopes that the shadows make her smile just a bit more nightmarish.
@Apolonia | "speaks" | notes: I am SO READY for this
Ois too young to see her magic as anything but a monster. Is it not a creature of its own will? Even under a tight fist, it thrashes and turns, obeying her commands in the most convoluted way it can think of: she would prefer if it could pick one vision and stay still, but even if the glamour does stutter like static, no one will be able to tell which one is her real skin. And that is all that matters.
She sniffs back a sneeze about to be triggered by the over-thick incense, and the soft, dark skin of her muzzle crinkles as she holds it down. The hallway is thickly, lushly carpeted in shades of red; the walls are inlaid with gold leaf and shimmering lanterns; everything about the room stinks of opulence, and O cannot tell if it entrances or disgusts her. Or both? She is her mother’s daughter, not immune to material charms - and yet that snarling rebel heart of her detests being pinned in, even by walls as nice as these.
It is that same heart that keeps her on edge. She cannot relax, cannot persuade herself to let her guard down. Instead her skin crawls and her ears swivel rapidly; in the next room over she can hear the low murmur of nobleman’s voices, and pillows shifting, and people moving over the floor. And so she is not totally surprised when she sees the girl slipping out of the shadows, although not totally prepared, either.
Her eyes are purer green, brighter and lusher than new grass. O’s eyes immediately flick up to the pale horn spiraling from her forehead and wonders if it is a weapon or merely a decoration; she is pleasantly surprised to notice the thin golden spikes poking out of the girl’s pearlescent hair, and decides it is more likely dangerous than not. Ah, one after her own heart. She glances at the fan at the girl’s side, and the weight of her hurlbat (a spray of baby’s breath, now) seems to pull at her hip a little heavier.
O narrows her eyes at the way the girl remains in shadow, but says nothing. Even she knows it is not her place. Instead she levels her head to meet the girl’s gaze and offers the slightest of smiles; her teeth glint in the dim light, shark-like and easily confident. Thank you, she says, though it feels almost foreign (when was the last time she had something to be thankful for?). You run this place?
She debates flicking the card out of her pocket to prove that she is supposed to be here, but throws the idea away within the next second: she has never felt the need to prove herself to a stranger before, and this girl should be no different.
it is a strange thing to nourish what could kill you in the hopes it does not kill you
A
ghavni watches the glamour roll across the girl’s skin like storm-summoned tides, breaking and foaming in a miasma of sun-bright gold and churning black. Watches as she regards the splendor of the Den with a scathing eye, equal parts entranced and repulsed. Like she knows, inexplicably, that beauty lures men to their deaths.
“Thank you.” There is no mouth that moves when the girl’s voice comes. It simply drifts from her shape like one of Vikander’s protection spells, invisible save for a telltale bending of the air as it wanders past, sniffing for tells of trouble.
“You run this place?”
Aghavni’s posture, watchful and prowling, melts into a sway of practiced languor as she pushes herself off the massive gilded vase she had been leaning against – one of several scattered throughout the foyer like urns – and into the flickering light cast by the sea of enchanted candles.
She is almost a hand shorter than the glamoured girl when she steps up to her, and the realization digs into her skin like thorns. When she had been younger, she had always threatened August after every sparring match (that left more than just her skin bruised) that when she grew taller than him – a when, never an if – she’d never lose to him again.
When her prophecy had failed to come true, she’d had to settle for beating him with pure wit and a princess’ steel-tempered pride.
“Well, I certainly keep it running,” she answers with a shrug. Vaguely she thinks of the monstrous stack of paperwork piled in her father’s office at the very top of the Towers – her office, in his absence – and swallows the sigh building in her chest. When she had demanded Charon to relinquish her more authority, she had not expected it to arrive in the form of paper.
“Follow me,” she almost says, the phrase more frequently uttered than ‘hello’ – before she turns to appraise the girl with an arched brow. “It is no use to glamour yourself any further. Warlocks have spelled every inch of this establishment – your magic has already started to fade, and before we cross this hallway it will be stripped away entirely.”
She lets her gaze run down the entire length of her, purposely imposing, before it catches at the gleam of a weapon tucked neatly at her waist.
Green eyes widen the moment the throwing ax is spotted, like a maiden’s might at a bouquet of perfumed roses. Aghavni has never seen a hurlbat in the steel, not even in the Scarab’s impressive armory.
She tears her gaze away from the hurlbat before the urge to take it roots deep inside her, like an unscratchable itch.
She never takes things from first-time patrons, not until night creeps into dawn and the stragglers stumble towards the exit, wine-drunk and giddy, the promise of visiting again – soon – sealed into their blurring eyes. It is easy, then. Too easy.
But the idea of stealing a weapon from its welder feels wrong, like separating a babe from its mother. So she plays the scene through her mind, letting the devastation of the mother suffocate her, until her urge to take is snuffed out like a candle flame.
“We normally don’t allow weapons, either – but I shall make an exception for you if you promise to keep it away from the limbs of our patrons, no matter how tempting the thought might be.” With a sly smile, Aghavni twirls on her heels and heads towards the familiar din of the Floor.
“Come along. I’ll show you what we have to offer.”
Oh, she is not surprised at the girl’s beauty, when she finally does come into the light.
The green eyes with thick, dark lashes, the easy, pretty curved of her face and the nimble lightness of her legs - O is smart enough to realize that most pretty things have teeth, to fend off those that might eat them.
Distance closes between them until O has to look down to meet the girl’s eyes. Maybe it seems demeaning, but what can she do? She is young and her too-long legs still hold her up like stilts, taller than she would ever need to be; almost a full hand separates them in height, yet O’s respect is not grudging. She can appreciate a girl with power. The spine it takes to keep commoners in line.
And it is part of the reason she does not argue against shedding her magic, though it is not without a brief, hesitant stare: after the moment passes, she begrudgingly accepts and lets the glamour slip from her shoulders like water. First her mouth forms, then her two eyes (the third still hidden), then the phantasmic edges of her paint markings. They smooth and sharpen into solidity. If there is any emotion that rises in her at the once-over the girl gives her, it is only amusement. She would do the same.
But, perhaps, would not be so obvious in her jealousy.
You can steal anything from me, says O, almost smirking, except that. It is not in any way a joke. There is nothing more precious to her than the hurlbat, with its shark-sharp slick of teeth and deep-dark leather-bound handle: she does not mind being poor, or hungry, or sick, as long as It is there to keep her company. Losing it would be like a losing like a limb.
Like losing the only blessing she has.
She does not say anything to Aghavni’s invitation, only ducks her head and follows. In the marbled darkness it is hard to make out what is and isn’t real, and for a moment, she feels starkly out of place, too young and too small to be of any importance. But as she follows the girl, the hallways narrow and the murmuring noise from the other room grows louder, and suddenly her curiosity burns brighter than her sheepishness.
and the wind, the wave, the clock, the star, will answer you "it is time to intoxicate yourself."
W
hen the glamour peels away from the girl’s skin, Aghavni’s smile comes easier.
A pretty one she is, with her long white legs and gleaming golden coat — and Aghavni has always liked pretty things. Perhaps it is a trait a princess is born with, she thinks. To marry only the handsomest of princes, to bear only the noblest of children, to die in the most splendid of dresses.
What a ridiculous thought.
“You can steal anything from me,” the girl says, as Aghavni’s eyes linger longingly on her weapon. “Except that.”
She smiles like a cat might if it had lips, sharp and feral and pleased. “A pity. And — bold of you to assume I would steal it,” she says mildly, dragging her gaze up to peer thoughtfully into mismatched blue and yellow. “I would ask first.”
She cannot recall the last time she has ever spoken with someone younger than her — all her life she has always been the youngest, struggling to pretend the opposite. A doll-faced child shoving herself laughingly into “things you cannot possibly understand yet, little Sol. What a silly child.” She had been sharp even then. To hear the unspoken “or ever” hidden on their tongues: things you cannot possibly understand now, or ever. Little fool.
Is this girl — this golden girl, with stockinged legs and magic — a fool?
Their hooves echo along the marbled floor, but it is not enough to drown out the din of voices rising louder and louder like an incoming tide. Aghavni halts just shy of the curtained doorway, breathing in the musk of perfume like incense.
“We are about to enter what is fondly known as the Floor. It is what most of our patrons come here for — the gambling. But,” and she pauses, flicking her green gaze to O once more. “You are not our typical visitor.”
Aghavni longs for the deck of cards stashed in the folds of her scarf, to cut it and shuffle it and cut it again. To do something other than struggle to conceal the uncertainty raking its claws through her mind.
What shall I do with you? she longs to ask.
But all she says is “Perhaps you’ll take a fancy to it,” before pushing open the velvet curtains and holding it ajar for her young patron.
Welcome to the shadow world, she thinks, with a touch of foolish remorse.
Iwould ask first, the girl says, and O smiles because it is not true. Fair enough; she herself has never been the politest of children — from birth she has been O the trouble maker, pretty girl, evil thing, prone as much to gnawing on bones as necklaces. She cannot pretend to hold any moral high ground and isn’t even sure she’d want to. There is no power in pretending she cannot be savage, not when it fuels her as much as her father’s blood.
She follows Aghavni with a careful step and eyes swiveling back and forth over the length of the hallway, not unnerved so much as duly curious. The place reeks of luxury, almost to the point of being nauseating — O would be more comfortable on cobblestone than this sickeningly soft carpet. But the darkness, at least, is something of a comfort. Here she can be nothing more than the suggestion of a girl both tender and sharp, a collection of gold, of iron, of teeth moving like a wraith through the arching hallways behind someone who, for once, might have something to teach her.
(It has been a while since she was willing to learn; O’s inordinate self-confidence can be educationally crippling, but this is real world experience, she tells herself, infinitely more valuable than the stories Bexley tells her before bed.)
They continue down a length of hallway that seems almost never-ending, though it must be partially the slow pace they take and the ominous darkness that streams from overhead. She follows Aghavni with unusual patience. There is a lot to take in — the stink of incense and alcoholic perfume, lanterns glittering with hard light from their sconces, the strange looks the servants give her as they pass in opposing directions - and she absorbs most of it with no more than a pensive blink. Composure has always been her strength.
She meets Aghavni’s green eyes with perfect determination as they come to a stop by the velvet curtains. It is impossible to tell whether her remark that O is not the typical visitor is meant as a compliment or not; she chooses to take it as such, in a bizarre reach to assume positive intent. Her only response is an easy smile. They turn into the Floor, and —
O shudders at the touch of the curtains on her hip and forces her step to continue. The room splits wide open: in the dim light tens of patrons surround tables stacked with decks of perfectly-cut cards, wares of gold and silver ready to be bartered, servers in coats of deep, cool blue; their many shapes shift like mirages in the half-darkness, as if O is watching through a circular hoop of deep water that pushes and pulls at the dimensions of the regular world. Pretty as it is unnerving. She sucks in a breath through her teeth.
“Perhaps,” she offers Aghavni in a low murmur, and leaves out the perhaps not.
