❦
please linger near the door uncomfortably
instead of just leaving.
please linger near the door uncomfortably
instead of just leaving.
Doctor Pestilence's bird bone beak slides reluctantly off her victim's slender shoulder. "A fine answer," sulks the voice buried beneath leather and notes of camphor. An awfully clever one, Aghavni thinks, but not without admiration. The urge to ask Is this old thing not gruesome enough? Not even for a little shriek? is pondered, mourned, and swept away to pasture.
Aghavni knows there is only so much feralness allowed a girl, even masked, before she is simply dismissed as silly.
Tufts of loosened mane, bleached skeleton-white by the moon, hang like silk drapes beneath the hem of the mask. "If I were a sphinx, I suppose you would've solved my riddle. And I would've had to let you through," she says, with a corvid's harsh grace. (And a dose of curiosity - but that is not due to the influence of the mask. Curiosity is omnipresent, and as permanent in her as the brand in her eye.)
But she is not a sphinx, and there is no treasure waiting at the heart of the maze. "The fun is in the journey!" is printed in fine script beneath the creaking sign stamped 'Entrance.' She'd written it in herself, and silenced her only witness, a round-eyed, round-bellied foal, with a perfectly caramelled caramel apple.
Through the beak's pigeonhole nostrils, Aghavni thinks she sees stripes; stripes like a tiger's, and as rich as scotch. But the woman (if Aghavni were not so in character, she would've certainly recognized her voice; but she had read that plague doctors rarely attached names to their patients, since [and she quotes] "the burden of knowledge triples under the omen of death.") shifts out of sight before Aghavni can make certain.
"And I ask her to take her mask off and join me?"
The evening is as cool and tart as an autumn apple, but the mask seems made of rubber and fouler miasma. Aghavni feels her hair beginning to curl along her damp forehead, and so her decision is made without further contemplation.
However... "Do you wish me to?" she grins, smug, rendered expressionless by her mask. Perhaps it shows anyway in her cat's purr voice; she shouldn't make it so easy, should she? ("The fun is in the journey!")
Humming, she continues, "I grant wishes too. Just tonight." She leans back and tosses her head. The mask wobbles precariously from side to side, like a loose tooth.
One more shake, and down the head falls, bouncing grandly upon the ground. A bloodless coup. "Gods. That mask was suffo-"
Her mouth freezes in a perfect, startled 'o' as green eyes open to witchlight blue, a slender neck of stripes, and a gleaming golden ax. "... Regent." A raven crows colorfully into the ensuing silence.
By the goddess. She shouldn't have been so quick to take off her head.
@Antiope "speaks"
