please linger near the door uncomfortably
instead of just leaving.
Aghavni lowered the stiff leather beak of the plague mask over her muzzle, marveled as her pupils blew as wide and black as poppy hearts by the sudden extinguishing of light, and felt for the pouch of dried camphor hanging about her neck.
She'd gotten the order wrong. Camphor in the tip of the beak, packed in plump like a stuffed hen, before drawing the crumpled leather specimen over her eyes like an opaque funeral shroud.
The mask was far too large for her. Medieval plague masks hadn't been designed to be worn by wraith-slim girls hanging halfway over the threshold of Adolescence, two limbs pinwheeling above the platform of Womanhood. But, as she caught her reflection in the dingy puddle by her hooves, a shiver trailed deliciously down her spine.
The leather of the black mask had begun to rot, the edges of its bugged out eye sockets ravaged by rats and damp basements. Somewhere in its illustrious lifetime, a wearer had thought to sew a real bird's beak atop the leather one - and done a shoddy job of it. Aghavni's embroidery work had always been horrendous, but her stitches would be near surgical compared to the tangled nest of thread binding hollow bone to cracked leather. Teetering atop her neck like a buoy, she looked as if she'd had her head lopped off and replaced with a monstrous raven's, three sizes too big.
She looked terrifying. Like Pestilence ought. The Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Heaving a sigh (that failed to express the depth of her boredom), Aghavni tucked herself back into the cornstalks as a clopping of hoofbeats resounded down the shadowy path. She tried to tell if the rhythm was even or not - were they timid hoofbeats, or overly confident ones? Visitors were assured at the door by a cheery attendant that the haunted corn maze was only in "good fun," its frights contained to those that wouldn't, not at all, madam, make you hurl up your supper.
What she wanted to know was how a maze held at Harvest Festival could be marketed as "good fun" if it didn't.
A firefly alighted upon the beak of her mask. She waved it off, gently, before it could attract a horde of its glowing brethren, and watched it flitter away into the night. She'd politely declined being outfitted with a costume after signing up for the late evening shift, insisting that she'd furnish her own. When the moon had risen above the woodsmoke haze of the Night Markets, shining as brilliant as a silver coin, she'd slipped past the droning role call to find her way into the heart of the maze.
Because, on the last day of Harvest, the Scarab was due to commence its first Night of Hallowed Sin. After catching word of a maze being paved in the Prairie, the opportunity to test Pestilence's costume on a herd of unsuspecting lambs was too tempting to pass up.
She'd thrown herself mercilessly into her work after passing through Solterra's flames, and finding herself standing at the foot of a cold throne, with the echoes of a lion's roar and Solis' laughter chiming across her flushed, furious cheeks. Did you think me so easily gotten rid of?
She hadn't stopped to greet the new king. Instead, she'd walked quietly back through the empty corridors, past the doors of her old room, Mother's room, Zolin's room, until she'd emerged black-eyed and broiling in the frigid Solterran night. The words 'I will return. I will return to my birthplace, Solis, and I will wait for you.' stained upon her tongue.
She couldn't remember how long she walked for, only that she must've fainted near the alleyway leading to the Scarab, because she'd awoken aching and filthy, tangled in the sheets of her bed.
A stack of black playing cards fresh off the press lay warming the bottom of her satchel. She lifted one out, admired the embossed design, and pushed the sockets of her mask back into alignment with her eyes.
The sharp tang of camphor wafted from her neck as she stepped soundlessly out from the corn, and pressed her beak against a warm shoulder.
"You are approached by Doctor Pestilence." Her breath smoked out in ribbons from beneath her mask. "What shall you do?"
The maze seems like the biggest undertaking of the festival. It is bigger than bonfires and more time consuming than setting tables with altars and candles, more busy work than hanging decorations up and down the streets of Denocte. But as Antiope stands before it under the light of a thin, sickle moon, it looks much better than she could have imagined.
She had never heard of a corn maze before arriving to Novus, but in the true spirit of coming to terms with the new life she has chosen, the one that has fallen upon her shoulders, the tigress woman is determined to try these new things.
Antiope has, perhaps quite smartly, left her axe at home for the night. She does not want to accidentally hurt someone for trying to sneak up on her in good fun. While not easily startled, it is difficult for her to lose the warrior instinct in her of taking down someone who is approaching you, silently, from behind.
It is late, and there are a few patrons out enjoying the darkness and atmosphere as they pass around her. A few enter the maze. A few, presumably, exit as well, but she cannot tell that from here. With one last glance about, Antiope enters the maze. Outside there was a chill breeze biting at her skin but within it does little more than dance across the tops of the corn stalks. It makes a strange, half rustling, half whistling sound.
The Regent makes decent work of its various dead ends and even manages to catch onto a few of the assigned scarers before they can reach her. She passes beneath each flickering lamp and through stretches of darkness, and, by the time she reaches the center of the maze, Antiope realizes she’s enjoying herself.
For perhaps the first time since arriving, she doesn’t feel the incessant pull of her magic, the prowling of the lioness in her bones, waiting and wanting to drain the world of its life. She doesn’t feel like something other than these equines, like something in her is missing, or too big. Antiope, for the first time since her life changed, isn’t even thinking about everything that she has lost.
When something hard and leathery presses against her shoulder, she pauses and turns toward the strange, bird-like mask. Her sapphire blue eyes are sparkling even in the lamplight, and she doesn’t quite realize it but there is a smile tipping up the corners of her lips. “I suppose I ask her to wait, because there are much better things to do tonight than whatever she might have planned for me.”
Antiope tilts her head slightly, and then when she smiles a little wider it is intentional. “And I ask her to take her mask off and join me?” The Regent thinks she recognizes that voice, and the rest of the body attached to the head that was hidden beneath that terrible mask.
please linger near the door uncomfortably
instead of just leaving.
“I suppose I ask her to wait, because there are much better things to do tonight than whatever she might have planned for me.”
Doctor Pestilence's bird bone beak slides reluctantly off her victim's slender shoulder. "A fine answer," sulks the voice buried beneath leather and notes of camphor. An awfully clever one, Aghavni thinks, but not without admiration. The urge to ask Is this old thing not gruesome enough? Not even for a little shriek? is pondered, mourned, and swept away to pasture.
Aghavni knows there is only so much feralness allowed a girl, even masked, before she is simply dismissed as silly.
Tufts of loosened mane, bleached skeleton-white by the moon, hang like silk drapes beneath the hem of the mask. "If I were a sphinx, I suppose you would've solved my riddle. And I would've had to let you through," she says, with a corvid's harsh grace. (And a dose of curiosity - but that is not due to the influence of the mask. Curiosity is omnipresent, and as permanent in her as the brand in her eye.)
But she is not a sphinx, and there is no treasure waiting at the heart of the maze. "The fun is in the journey!" is printed in fine script beneath the creaking sign stamped 'Entrance.' She'd written it in herself, and silenced her only witness, a round-eyed, round-bellied foal, with a perfectly caramelled caramel apple.
Through the beak's pigeonhole nostrils, Aghavni thinks she sees stripes; stripes like a tiger's, and as rich as scotch. But the woman (if Aghavni were not so in character, she would've certainly recognized her voice; but she had read that plague doctors rarely attached names to their patients, since [and she quotes] "the burden of knowledge triples under the omen of death.") shifts out of sight before Aghavni can make certain.
"And I ask her to take her mask off and join me?"
The evening is as cool and tart as an autumn apple, but the mask seems made of rubber and fouler miasma. Aghavni feels her hair beginning to curl along her damp forehead, and so her decision is made without further contemplation.
However... "Do you wish me to?" she grins, smug, rendered expressionless by her mask. Perhaps it shows anyway in her cat's purr voice; she shouldn't make it so easy, should she? ("The fun is in the journey!")
Humming, she continues, "I grant wishes too. Just tonight." She leans back and tosses her head. The mask wobbles precariously from side to side, like a loose tooth.
One more shake, and down the head falls, bouncing grandly upon the ground. A bloodless coup. "Gods. That mask was suffo-"
Her mouth freezes in a perfect, startled 'o' as green eyes open to witchlight blue, a slender neck of stripes, and a gleaming golden ax. "... Regent." A raven crows colorfully into the ensuing silence.
By the goddess. She shouldn't have been so quick to take off her head.
When the mask is pulled away from her shoulder, Antiope takes a moment to better look over the equine wearing it, and the mask itself. It’s quite a grisly looking item, and if she were younger or more impressionable and easily frightened in general, it might have gotten some sort of reaction out of her.
The wearer seems a little disappointed in her lack of shock or fear, but Antiope fears very little if anything. Especially death. “If you were a sphinx with a riddle, my prize would have been the same,” she responds. Another day, a bit of company. She shifts her weight and takes a step further down the path, as if inviting the wearer of the mask to abandon it for the night and join her instead.
They seem to consider it for a moment, and the thoughtful hum that resounds from beneath the mask is softer than the purr of their voice. It’s a strange discordance with the face of the mask, which does not change nor wear any expression at all, but it does make Antiope wish she could see the eyes beneath it, the curve of lips.
She’s pleased when they agree to join her, tossing aside the mask and revealing their true identity. Antiope isn’t surprised by the face exposed to the gentle, warm lamplight but is glad none-the-less for it. Aghavni begins to speak but seems shocked to see the Regent standing there when she stops suddenly.
Antiope raises a brow, the corner of her lips quirking up slightly. “Aghavni,” she greets, “I was hoping I was correct in assuming that was you under there.” She gestures to the mask, now lying upon the ground of the maze. The thick black leather, rotted and decaying, almost disappeared into the shadows where it rested. “Still care to join me?”
The striped woman gestures deeper into the maze, sapphire eyes gleaming in the low light. The corn stalks are almost silver in the moonlight, for as green as they look in the day. And their shadows fall sharply over the pathway like jagged bars, and over the backs of the equines like the stripes that Antiope already wears.
“What exactly is Doctor Pestilence doing in the maze so late?” the Regent asks, turning her eyes to Aghavni, listening to the sound of the breeze in the tops of the corn and the distant voices of other patrons in the maze. Still, it is quiet enough that right here, it seems like they are in their own little world.
I got my red dress on tonight
dancin' in the dark in the pale moonlight
"Aghavni."
She startles a bit, hearing her name invoked in the sanctum of the maze. Inexplicably it makes her feel almost guilty, like she were a foal caught with her nose in a grain bag (or, and her mouth quirks at the memory: like she were a hair-in-curlers waif caught with her ankles weighed down by Hajakhan mother-of-pearl).
A breath of wind pierces through the hedgerows and wicks away heat from Aghavni's forehead. It wicks away surprise, too, and by the time her mane settles along her neck like a golden cloud, her lips have pressed together into a pink pout.
"What gave me away?" she asks wryly, as she lowers into an ostensible and sweeping bow. As she straightens she picks up the felled mask and brushes dirt off its beak, though her eyes are trained nowhere near it. Instead, they gleam cat-like as she peers up at the red dots lining the elegant swoop of Antiope's cheekbones.
She has always found the Regent exquisitely beautiful, almost to a fault; Aunt Marianna had once said that the gods punished those they’d made too beautiful by giving them thrice their share of tragedy. Her head tilts as she looks sidelong at Antiope, and wonders what tragedies hide beneath eyes as blue as heartbreak.
He whom the gods love dies young.
Aghavni prays she will never be loved by a god.
"If you had not asked, I would have done so anyway,” she chirps. Dead leaves crumble as she spins on her hooves and begins walking, leisurely, down a path she'd chosen on a lark. It had looked more dubious than the others: more saturated with shadows, the hedge askew around the edges, barely wider than her shoulders. Practically an invitation.
"Late?" A protruding twig bends skywards as Aghavni wriggles her way under it, leering bird-beak mask trailing gloomily after her. She throws a sly grin over her shoulder: a crescent moon in the vacant night.
"Why, fair Antiope, the night has only just begun." A breeze carrying the scent of sea salt and sweet caramel combs through the hedges and makes them shiver, as if in anticipation.
Antiope’s eyes linger on Aghavni’s fine features; on the purse of her pouting pink lips and her eyes, as bright chips of emerald as the Regent’s own are sapphire. She smiles, a quick, gleaming thing and says, “You are memorable.” What she wants to say is that she remembers the way light reflects off the champagne hue of her skin, and the way her voice curls over words like something royal.
She doesn’t. Instead she says, “Only your own grace gives you away, even when you hide it under such a mask as that.” Their eyes meet, as Aghavni looks up at her from under a curtain of delicate lashes and eyes with feline wit and keenness. Antiope recognizes such edge, like looking at her reflection in the smooth glassy surface of Vitreus lake. She thinks, however, that Aghavni wears it better—less like a hungry predator.
She follows Aghavni down the shadowed path without so much as a need to ask, fitting in behind her as the dim lights in the maze seem to all but disappear back where they had been standing. It is only them, and the night, and the maze, as alive around them as such a thing can possibly be.
She can almost feel the the stalks reaching out, eager to brush along her sides and shoulders like hands in the dark.
The path feels like some strange entrance to another world, like they will reach the end of it and it will open up into a place that is no longer Denocte, no longer a corn maze out in the middle of the prairie.
Aghavni’s voice drifts back to her like on a breeze, gently, languidly, but she catches the gleam of a smile thrown over her shoulder toward the Regent as she speaks. If there is anyone else in the maze, Antiope cannot say. If there is anyone else in the world, she cannot say she cares.
“And what,” she asks, perhaps leaning forward a little too far as she crouches beneath the wayward stalk, perhaps purposefully brushing her nose across Aghavni’s hip as she straightens her neck, though she doesn’t seem to address it. Still, her eyes are bright and ardent, even in the dark, “Does this night have in store for the two of us, lady Aghavni?”
![[Image: 13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png]](https://file.toyhou.se/images/13716916_Rc8f5hGvZkB3cYP.png)
