BEXLEY BRIAR
For hours, the only living things around are these: flowers violent in blooming, trees bent at the waist with knotted skin and quietly moving leaves, and honeybees with their low aureate hum.
Then, under the quiet summer sun, Delumine blossoms. Girls in silk and chiffon go whirling through the meadows; boys laze in the heat, sprawled for miles like an army as they crush the new green grass. Harps and flute float from over the hills. For once, it seems as though Novus is at peace with itself. Denoctans and Solterrans intermingle over steaming cups of tea. Merchants set up stalls up and down the cobblestone, selling all kinds of wares to all kinds of people. In the shade of old oak trees, huge groups of people gather, the tone of their conversations oscillating in carefully timed response to the chaos around them.
When Bexley Briar emerges into the heart of Woodstock, she is quietly abnormal. Her usual scowl is gone, replaced by a look of cool, pleasant interest; her gaze is dulcet rather than bitter; around her head rests a crown of waxy light-pink dahlias and intricately woven greenery, a glut of bright color against those bleached curls. In the light she is a slippery thing, a fish underwater, gold and white and blue and pink moving soundlessly through the crowded markets, the pockets of people, the lush, flower-freckled grass. And for once she is utterly unconcerned with the crowd around her - rather than with judgmental interest, she regards the other visitors placidly, happily, even.
A good day has come to her, finally.
She will not take it for granted. No, today is for flowers and fairy lights, for feeling-better that lasts more than a moment. She buys a new necklace - a thin drip of gold, encasing, at the end, a tiny, teardrop opal - slips it over her neck, clasps it tight and moves on, giddy to feel normal again, to feel sated, for a moment, by a material possession. A memory of her childhood returned. A simple day come back to her, and Bexley swallows it greedily, sinks her claws in deep and won’t let it go, traversing the streets with unbridled enthusiasm, humming and flirting and dancing in the white-hot sunlight, petals soft and saturated in her hair, glittering gold and white, a once-again-living being.
Her scar still attracts stares, but Bexley wills herself not to mind. And mostly, it works.
She’s gazing at a collection of ribbons when something familiar sounds behind her - a well-known voice saying something about card tricks, a voice that brings fire to mind immediately. Should she freeze? Run? Scream? Her body tenses for a moment, inexplicably, and Bexley forces herself to throw off that cloak of fear, to disintegrate her own aura of shame. Instead, she smiles. A wolfish thing at odds with the pleasantness of her current state. She turns, one hoof over the next, to look at him, and tilts her head: clicks her tongue in a mockery of maternal disappointment, curls brushing her shoulder, crown still in its place, absolute mirth playing over her face.
Acton, she drawls with a dead-eyed smirk. What a nice surprise.
@acton <3
