no one calls you honey when you're sitting on a throne
“Ah, but intrigue is the name of the game, is it not?” she says and the corner of her lip curls and maybe there is the faint sound of a laugh in those words. “I would think that Denocte’s new queen knows a thing or two of intrigue if she throws masquerades in the night and asks of others to make walls of water and mazes that defy all reason.” Vendetta knows little of this queen, though she has heard many refer to her throughout the night. Isra, they had called her, and Vendetta again found herself wondering what sort of utopia that woman longed for.
“The perfect mask is one that, when you slip it on, it releases you from whatever holds you back.” Vendetta’s voice is liquid and rich like a dark red wine, and she answers like she knows what his question really means, but ah, are they not just talking about the masque? She sways a little, like a dance, and her skirt of blood swishes across the wood as a whispering breath would across another’s skin. “The perfect mask lets you be yourself.”
When he drops his chin to his chest she thinks of all the men she’s made bow to her, though she made them get down on their knees and beg. This man though, his roguish smirk and the impish tilt of his head, they do not belong to her or her wrath. Still, she cannot say she would not like the taste of his blood on her lips. Something about the way this interaction makes her feel, the way it plays her charm and wit like a piano, it reminds her of the day she walked out of the doors of what had once been her master’s home. Powerful, liberated.
He looks away and she takes a moment to observe him more closely. Her eyes take in the night sky of his gaze, and the star nestled between it and she thinks the evening is more for him than he believes. “Just begun indeed,” she agrees, and Vendetta takes a small step closer, decreasing the space between them by mere millimeters and yet, when she too lowers her head, it feels more than that, “But whatever that old oracle says, we can do with the night what we please.”
“What is it you are searching for?” Have you found it yet? Intrigue is, after all, the name of the game.
@Asterion
