aghavni
—
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
