take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
Sweat still gleams across her skin as she steps out from beneath the blazing candlelight of the stage. The wings are dark and cool and she drinks in that shadowy air. Behind her applause fill the room and already a stagehand is picking up the scattered flowers and jewels thrown in adoration upon the stage. “Take them to my room, as usual.” Minya says dismissively to the girl and sinks into the black.
Only the white of her Scarab tattoo gleams as she moves through the dim, dim light. She steps into a hallway, better lit. It oozes rich reds and glittering golds, chandeliers shine lavishly overhead, expensive artwork lines the halls, but Minya knows she is the most expensive thing here.
Smoke peels from her skin, licking and crawling up the walls of the narrow hallway. This noble girl smells of fire and smoke, perfume dances and melds with the smoke upon her skin, creating a tantalizing scent across her body. Another stagehand drapes a silk cloth across her back as she slinks by and her lips tip into a sultry smile, an echo of “thank you …?” dances by as she pauses and waits for him to give his name. Oh the boy stutters and stumbles over his words, he blushes and skitters after her – for when did Minya ever look at stagehands like him?
Danny he chirps at last and swallows, his eyes wide as he trails her down the hall, hopeful, misguided. She slips into her changing room. Inside it gleams more lavish than a dragon’s cave, and she is the exquisite creature that lies atop it, guarding. Could Minya ever be anything different? With smoke still curling across her skin and flames only just turning to ghosts within her mouth and skin that gleams like steel scales, Minya could never be anything less that draconic.
Carefully she draws a brush through the silken waterfall of her pink hair, petals and diamonds fall like confetti from it as she does. The gems skitter across the table and fall to the floor – they are more than she needs, they are everything that she wants.
The boy hovers in the doorway, suddenly unsure yet unable to leave not since she paid him any attention… “Danny.” Minya hums again, her eyes finding his in the mirror, studiously avoiding her own – never would she let anyone see how she avoids herself, how she avoids that wretched darkness and hatred that blooms and rips and tears like a dragon’s claws. She holds Danny in her gossamer web, she lets her words move to him like a black widow across her shining web. “Will you fetch Aghavni down to see me?” She asks lightly. “I need her to take my gifts upstairs to my bedroom.” Danny’s dark eyes widen, forest deep. “I- I can’t… That – that’s not…” He stammers off and in the mirror Minya pauses, her gaze unwavering, she is soft, she is hard, she is a spider, a dragon. She watches, as if he is a fly freshly flown into her web. The firedancer waits for him to finish to dare to say that’s not Aghavni’s job. Yet he doesn’t, his lips shut tight and he shifts uneasily before nodding tightly and disappearing into the lavish hallway to find Aghavni. If August were here, she is sure he would not let her play such games, yet he is not and the boy is impressionable, young and pliable as putty.
Her smile is content and mocking when she returns her gaze to her dressing table. The mirror reflects her: a girl of beauty, a monster an beautiful devil… a girl with a broken heart. Only the mirror catches that glimmer of darkness in the corner of her glossy lips. It is a darkness that holds, not a dragon, but a girl full of self-loathing and guilt, a girl whose better dreams are filled with street art and the wilds of Solerra’s desert. She is better in firelight and shadows, in smoke filled air and the gasp of street crowds. There she is Minya but here they adore her like a queen, they think of her a goddess upon the stage – and so she lets them.
Yet, when Aghavni comes, for her there will be the Scarab’s fire girl, whose patrons adore her like a queen and think of as a goddess upon the stage. And, like a goddess, Minya is the only one daring enough to expect Aghavni to do such menial tasks as the Scarab’s porters.
in which she arrives at the throne of a fire queen
“M
iss Minya requests your presence, Miss...” the boy trailed off, chin tucked mumblingly into his chest. He couldn’t make himself smaller if he tried.
“Director. Miss.”
Aghavni flicked her eyes away from the book perched on the ledge of her window. She’d placed it there, propped spine-straight by a tea tin rattling with silver brooches, to read at her leisure while she took her dinner.
(Maps of Solterra, announced the proud gold letters on the cover - she'd turned it away from the door's view for situations exactly like this. She rarely closed her doors to her room until she turned in for the night, and preferred seldom interruption over total isolation.)
Flaxen curls, unpinned and rejuvenated, scoffed in the direction of the messenger. “Director is fine. And who are you?”
She ran a rudimentary glance over his attire, his droopiness, his un-Scarab-polished posture. A new hire? And not on the Floor, nor in the Lounge (Solis save her if he worked in the Lounge)... it was impossible to know all that went on in the little palace, but she tried her best to keep her cards counted.
Stagehand, then? That would certainly explain Minya's mention. Undisputed fire queen of the rose-littered stage. A scowl skittered across Aghavni's lips.
"I'm... I'm a stagehand. Danny, miss director."
"And what does Minya want?" she asked, gaze returning back to the tedious maps. A rhetorical question, though she didn't expect poor Danny to realize. She didn't care what Minya wanted, because if Minya really wanted something, she would've gotten it. No droopy stagehands need be sacrificed.
"She requests your presence backstage," he said. His letters ran together like melting buttercream. Sherequestsyourpresencebackstage. Green eyes narrowed. Blue eyes quailed. "Please, miss director... I, I tried to tell her that it wasn't your... job, but -"
"Ah. Worry not, Danny. Bolder men than you" - shall ever be, but she held her tongue - "have been felled to their knees by Minya."
The tea tin of brooches rattled like chattering teeth when she strode over to where the stagehand lingered, finished dinner plate in tow. She held it out to him, frowned a bit when the teacup jostled against the gold spoons (hopeless boy!) when he took it from her, and - after she made sure of the continued integrity of her utensils - leaned up towards his wide, schoolboy eyes.
Licked her lips, tasted a sugar crystal hiding in the corner of her mouth, and smiled. Like a tigress did when she finished dabbing the blood from her whiskers. "I shall save you tonight, Danny. It's just your luck I was craving tea - no, you don't have to fetch it, stay still - and it's just your luck the kitchens are conveniently located right besides the entrance to the stage." She was close enough to see the dip of his throat as he swallowed. Poor boy, her heart protested. Traitorous heart.
But she couldn't let her position be jeopardized. So she leaned relentlessly closer, smile sharp along her lips, curls soft against his shoulders.
"But if Miss Minya ever requests for you to fetch me again, I hope you shall tell her - and convince her, that's the key, alright? - just how indecent a request it is."
She watched him nod his head in uncomplicated agreement, before flicking her curls off her (and his) shoulders, nodding her head in uncomplicated dismissal, and striding out to face the rose-haired perpetrator.
---
She hated the stage. Hated the smell of burning drifting like perfume from its rosewood planks. Hated the cauldron of fire that waited in the wings for glittering Minya's kiss.
(Fire. Her fireplace stayed unlit even in the death of winter.)
She remembered the first time she'd seen Minya's performance. How astounding it was, to see a girl of cocoa and rose swallow fire down her slender throat, twirl it around her supple limbs, like warm taffy stretched into ribbons! How astounding, and how utterly horrifying.
The night had been cold, she remembered, out on the streets of Inner Denocte. Snow fell from the sky in drifts. But each leap of the fire dancer had wicked breaths of chill away, until the captivated audience had roared her name in tongues of sunlight and deep summer. Winter burned away by her flames.
Dread and fascination had warred deep within Aghavni's bones, and neither had, ever since, won true dominion. She'd been too young to remember the storming of the castle, the torches set upon the castle's scarlet tapestries (nothing but her mother's slit throat), but her infant's bones remembered. And though infant's bones no longer, they had never let her forget.
How much Aghavni hated her fear of flames. It was a weakness she could not - yet - stamp out.
She paused when she approached the shadowed doorway leaking rivers of rose-pink hair. Smiled as she swallowed her drowning dread, capped her rampant fascination. Replaced them both with a spite ankle-deep, a haughtiness that settled at its place at her temples. Just the place for a dead princess' emerald circlet.
"Min-ya," she drawled as she stepped into the candlelit room, splitting the fire girl's name into two. Sacrilegious. It pleased her. In a trivial, aristocratic way.
Aghavni's hooves stepped daintily, appraisingly, around the winking jewels and weeping flowers scattered in twos and threes on the floor, until she reached Minya's little throne. Leaned scathingly against the papered wall.
"You must stop picking on your poor stagehands. Unlike those," she gestured airily down at the winking, weeping gifts, "you won't have a near unlimited supply."
@Minya // I had the absolute best time writing this reply
08-05-2019, 02:00 PM
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Obsidian [PM] Posts: 39 — Threads: 8 Signos: 20
take that look from off your face you ain't gunna burn my heart out
Min-ya
Aghavni’s drawl rings like clanging bells and Minya’s gaze lifts to watch the Scarab girl enter her room behind her. Her lips tip into a smile, it is a beautiful thing, tipped with sweet poison. Minya’s are the devil’s lips, a kiss from her is enough to kill – or so the rumour goes. She has never bothered to correct it, or validate it. But her admirer’s are intrigued and so she smiles for them and blows kisses like seductive threats.
If the way Aghavni breaks up her name – twisting it, contorting it – irks her, Minya does not let it show. Not with that satin smile curling like sunlight along her lips. She rises, letting the insult slip like water from her skin. “We both know that is not true.” The fire-girl purrs, feline. Her silver eyes glitter as she holds Aghavni in moonlight and mercury. “Your father would not take any risk that would lose me from the Scarab’s books – not their most valued performer.”
She turns, her long limbs are elegance, the curve of her throat grace. Through thick lashes she watches Aghavni, “Who then would your father replace me with if I were to go? Surely not you.” She muses, sweeping the near invisible line of dust off her dressing table. When her gaze lifts, cold like ice, wicked like a blade, she smiles and there is the blaze of fire. Fire made to scorch, to hurt, to burn.
“I have these gifts that need taking upstairs to my room. I was thinking you and Danny could do that.” Her lips gesture to where a box lay brimming with gems and gifts. Too many to count – should Aghavni lose one on the stairs even Minya would admit that she would never know.
Slowly Minya sweeps her gaze up from the box, to better drink in Aghavni where she stands, farthest from the flames. Minya smiles, sweet like poison. “You look tired today Aghavni – have they been working you too hard?” She slinks a step towards the girl, her lips brushing along the silk scarves that hang in loops down from her hair. “At least you haven’t got a tear in one today. That is your normal look – do you have someone to mend them? I have a scarf that needs sewing too… an admirer pulled on it too hard on stage.” She smiles fondly, remembering, as if to treasure such adoration that would inspire such an action. “I don’t want a poor job on it though – it is very expensive. A one off.”
And slowly she lowers her lips from the scarves that drape from Aghavni’s throat. The smell of liquor and sandalwood clings to Aghavni’s skin, so different to the incense and smoke of the stage. “How is August? Have you seen him today? We are due to meet after my shift is done.” Minya’s eyes gleam, hard as steel. Only a fool could miss the way Aghavni watches him.
Their coals sigh instead of hiss. Their flames gurgle, like a dreaming infant, instead of spit. Sparks die in the hearth's dimming womb, smothered to death before they can mature into yellow locusts and catch, devouring all the velvet curtains, glass-eyed dolls, and pinewood bed frames in their way.
The midnight fires are drowsy because they are dying. Fires, like infants, die of neglect. The stagehands around midnight are too busy tending to the performers (dabbing away sweat, watering down bourbon, patting angelica archangelica onto cheekbones) to stoke them with fresh coals.
So in somber acceptance, they die a slow, quiet death.
Aghavni leans against the oven-warm wall—the Scarab's fires, even neglected, know better than to neglect their duties—and tries to imagine herself melting into it, like taffy. We both know that is not true. Fury, perfumed and pink-haired, toes along the barricade of her composure, pressing at stones to loosen them. A stone wobbles, threatens to give. Your father would not take any risk that would lose me from the Scarab's books.
There is a damp patch seeping through the wallpaper, and it is cold against her heated skin. Pipes run like tree roots through the kitchens and the walls of the stage. One must have sprung a leak. She commends that it has chosen Minya's wall to leak through.
Grinding her shoulder into the damp, Aghavni imagines taffy seeping through the weakness in the mortar. "You have never met my father," she asserts, sweetly. "He's rather fond of taking risks. Livens the blood, he says."
She watches as Minya sweeps invisible dust off her table with a delicate limb. Picking at imperfections only she can see, she thinks, and tries to conjure a tendril, a wisp, a cloud, of reticent empathy for the glittering girl in front of her.
Who then would your father replace me with if I were to go? Surely not you.
The tendril, the wisp, the cloud, picks up its skirts and sweeps grandly out of the room.
(Some part of her has been waiting—baiting—for this. For permission.)
"Surely not me," Aghavni echoes. Her lips part. Her tongue presses against the roof of her mouth, runs along her teeth, settles back down under the covers. There is more coming, she knows. Like the static frizzing the air before a lightning strike, she anticipates.
The fire is not—yet—dead. See the way it pulses, beneath the ashes? A heart, reanimated.
The diamond-eyed dancer's smile zaps life back into blackening coals.
Casually, Minya gestures towards the box on the floor, its reinforced edges bulging outwards like an overripe melon, jewels spilling like stuffing from the suture in its gluttonous belly. Lightly, Minya says: I have these gifts that need taking upstairs to my room. I was thinking you and Danny could do that.
"Oh?" Aghavni pushes away from the wall and feels its heat drain from her like sticky marrow out of crushed bone. The dampness stays. It clings in condensed, icy drops that roll lazily down her shoulder. She steps gingerly towards the box and noses at a winking ruby pin. Red as love. "Your gifts, here?" she says, tilting her head and smiling a little, like she doesn't quite understand.
"I suppose I should do your washing next, too, and fetch you a cup of tea while I wait for your silks to dry," she says. Her tone is as light as Minya's. Lighter. Faerie floss spiked with belladonna. Two wrongs don't make a right, love, Aunt Marianna had said to her once, when she'd grown fond of her enough to allow her into the sitting room. They make you even. Who gives a damn if the world goes blind? Her lips had twisted into a sneer. Marianna was good at those. Her sneers left scars that lingered for months. For a woman, it is better to be blind than disgraced. Better to be feared than loved.
"Poor Danny." She looks towards the door, as if expecting the boy to step through it. Summoned like a genie when his lamp was rubbed. "I would have to let him go, wouldn't I? His services would no longer be needed by you, because you'd have me. Should I move into your room, too? It'd be a tight squeeze, not like in mine. But a maid moves into her mistress' room, not the other way around," she muses. Is that what you wish, Minya? Or shall we be like sisters, share our jewels and pull each other's hair and hate each other only half-seriously?
Smiling, Aghavni lifts the ruby pin to the candlelight and inspects the facets for scratches. Finding none, she pulls her mane from their knots and captures the tumbling curls inside the pin's golden clasp. "There'd be no one to do the account books, though. No one to inspect the caravans, to order new alcohol shipments, to oversee the staff. You know how staff are." She lifts her eyes. The pin clicks into place. "So prone to trouble."
You look tired today Aghavni – have they been working you too hard? Aghavni's smile twists into a sneer (though Aunt Marianna's still has hers beat). Her voice softens like taffy. "They have been working me too hard. Do you know why, Minya?" She steps away from the box and draws closer to the dying fire and its dancer. "Because I keep everything running. Clockwork."
She turns her eyes to the heap of silk scarves on Minya's bed. "I don't mend mine when they tear. I give them away. I suggest you do the same, if you can spare them." Enough. Her facade slips from her skin like water. The end of her sentence snaps like ice cracking. Under the drowsy light of the fire, her face writhes in shadows; she has not slept well in days. Her temper is at its breaking point. Or perhaps she has broken it already.
When Minya whispers August's name like sin, Aghavni's pupils prick to needle-points. She is pleased to discover, when she reaches for it, the freezing heat of her temper coiled inside her like a rattler. Her horn bumps against the dancer's antlers and knocks off a dangling crystal bauble. It falls to the carpeted floor with a dull thump and rolls under the bed.
She spares no eye for it. It is not an accident. Precious few of her actions ever are. "Busy boy he is," she murmurs instead. "Usually, he's scheduled for a spar."
