she exists;
but only at midnight
but only at midnight
A
ghavni walks along the plain dirt path that divides town from market, cleanly, like a row of neat stitches. Fallen leaves from the oak trees dotting the path crinkle beneath her hooves but don't crumble; the morning rain shower has fed them with enough moisture to keep them soft. Dead, yet clinging still to the echoes of life. The air is cold and humid, and puddles litter the ground. She skirts around a particularly large one, and spots a trio of lace-gowned girls giggling into their fans. They look about her age, their cheeks plump with youth and glowing with nurtured vanity. Jewels hang off their sleek ears in twos and threes, held together by links of silver. Polish coats their hooves, and kohl dusts their lashes. One of them, clothed in fashionable scarlet, pauses mid-laugh to glance at her, in the demure, hungry way of new money.
Aghavni is old, old money. Insouciance is forged into her bones like copper into brass, the gold draped along her neck priceless in its facade of blasé simplicity. They say all aristocrats are the same—that money corrupts them all, equally.
For those who have never held it, Father once told her, all gold weighs the same. The newly rich hide their corruption behind charitable smiles and provisioned trusts and orphanages bearing bronze plaques of their names. But us?
We become it, she'd interrupted. If the world believes you corrupt, why pretend anything different?
She remembers being almost flippant in her tone; her philosophy sound, and perhaps even meant, but meant the way children do when they announce aspirations in becoming a playwright, or a mercenary, or a traveling gypsy. But her father had looked at her with a rawness in his gaze that had startled her, the hollowness of his crimson eyes filling with what she now knew to be regret.
In another life, perhaps she would've greeted the girls. Giggled behind her own fan (steel-reinforced even then, she likes to think), hunger in her eyes and comfort in her smile.
She slips past, silent, her steps smothered by damp, clinging moss. It is not that type of life. She knows that the girl's night-smudged eyes will glide past the scarab tattoo on her hip and widen in shock. She knows that her fan will then flutter not to mask delight, but to tremble fear. It's her! she will hiss, to her sisters. And without naming a name, they will dip their heads together and shudder, three lace gowns rippling in sync.
The Night Market looms upon her almost before she knows it. She is distracted, tonight. More than usual. Her eyes smart at anything glittering, avert imperceptibly away from the exposing glow of the spherical, seaglass lanterns. Shadows in lieu of kohl smudge her eyes dark. Make the green of them unholy and strange, like flickering witch light, or the glow of her mother's emerald when sunlight pierced it through.
Sleep has eluded her like a sly lover for more than a week. Teasing and teasing, then pulling away when her grasp shot out to catch it, desperately wanting. Her scarf catches on the corner of a booth, and she yanks it free. The crowds part before her, not readily, but because she slips past when it blinks. There is not a corner of this starlit city she does not know, and on nights like these, she wants to believe it knows her just as much.
She does not notice she is being followed.
Her hooves echo through the streets, click a familiar rhythm up the White Scarab's steps. She fishes in the folds of her scarf for her card, and breathes out when she feels its cool edges, worn soft by use. The obsidian beetle buzzes open its wings in greeting when the card touches its shell, and the door swings open—
"Wait, please!" She startles, a stutter in her heartbeat, a widening of wide green eyes. The card flutters down the steps. "We—" are not yet open. Her mouth shapes the words, but the boy—she is looking at him now, at his ocean eyes and glowing tattoos and rumpled, quicksilver hair, and she has never before been dazed but this, she thinks, must be it—speaks again.
“I’m sorry—it’s just… Your eyes. They’re beautiful.” Shock registers slowly in her brain. She lodges her shoulder into the door before it clicks shut. ...What?
"Oh," she says. Then, "Do you think so?" Her head tilts wonderingly. She cannot help but laugh! She has inherited her mother's laugh; nightingale-sweet, and lovelier in the night. "No one has ever come here just to tell me that." Her laugh fades into a wry grin. How bold he was, saying such things. She had almost stuttered.
Candlelight gilds her hair in filmy gold as she says, blinking languidly: "Come in. I think it's about to rain."
{ @Orestes "speaks" notes: he is SO LOVELY }
