f l o r e n t i n e
The dagger at the girl’s throat trembles and sways with each step she takes. It knows, it knows.
It is bereft of its subtle magic, bereft of its sharp cut. It beats against her breast, a rhythmical dance: cold to hot, thud to thud. The beat is heartfelt– a heart on the outside to echo the thrum of the red within. It sings, this dagger with its chain. It sings songs of chiming metal and clinking gems. It glitters and scatters light and throws it down to dance upon the earth. It is an instrument, creating songs that cry out for the world and times it can no longer reach, and songs for the girl to dance to. Florentine smiles, even as her dagger trembles knowing what she does not.
They are stuck, this girl and her magic dagger, for its magic is inexplicably gone.
Florentine listens for the rustle of grasses and the touch of their tickling bodies, blade-thin and silk-soft, against her wings. Each feathered tip drifts like fingers through this windswept sea of grass, held high and tight above the churning, crashing behemoth waters below. But even above the tumultuous waves that hiss and spit, she hears a voice call out. There is need, passion, challenge in the crying voice and it delights the flower girl. In but a blink of an eye, Florentine is swiftly seeking the source of this disembodied voice.
Grasses bow, backs bent and bodies cowed, beneath the arc and pulse of her wings and the force of the winds hurtling in off the sea. They stir and tangle in confusion as her body ascends, wings setting to the air and in moments Florentine is gone.
It is mere moments until night and day clash within Flora’s amethyst eyes. Dusk paints its colours upon Rannveig below, her skin living and breathing beneath the black silence of night and the bright shout of day. She is sleepy whispers and wakeful cries and Florentine’s petals, shed from windswept flowers, tumble down, down to greet her in silence.
But it is not only the Dusk kingdom’s queen that the petals meet. A putrid stench hangs wet and heavily about them as the swamp continues to drip, drip from a stranger’s skin. Flora’s eyes skip from dusk to midnight skin and then out across long, long ivory hair, stretched out like moonlit clouds in the pitch of night.
Florentine lands beside the mares, her eyes skipping from one to the other and back again. “Well, I met another witch once,” She begins, voice as light and earnest as though they were all old friends, never parted. “And she was just as beautiful as you.” Florentine pauses for thought, her head tilting with bird-like curiosity, “Witches are never as ugly as they like to make out. But I suppose there is a terror in fierce beauty.” The flower girl’s eyes linger a moment longer, ruminating over the swamp witch before her, her nose crinkling at the pungent smell.
“Oh, I am Florentine by the way.” Her eyes flit back, at last, from the midnight witch to the Dusk Queen, “Now, you were saying something about a system of stability and purity? It sounded quite rousing and I am quite partial to an honourable challenge now and again.”
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
