[P] perennial quiet

[Marisol]

watch the world go by, dreaming /
blood-red dreams of pretty women

The page who comes to get Marisol exits her office only a moment later, and utterly chastised; he rushes down the stairs with a clatter, ears pinned, hair flying wildly, whale-eyed with bright fear as he plunges past the crowd of servants in the kitchen, through the foyer, and out into the streets, where he passes the pale man waiting outside the citadel’s door without a lingering glance and disappears into the web of the streets.

Marisol does not know what, exactly, she is feeling. But it is most certainly not guilt.

He had entered before he was supposed to. Significantly so. She had been busy—distracted—and took a moment to open her mouth. But by the time she did he had already pushed his head through the door, as if he were some ill-mannered desert thief and not a trained attendant, and she had been so startled by the intrusion that her first instinct was to round on him like a mother chastising her child.

He had, after all, caught her in a compromising position. Testing her new form. Examining her needle-sharp teeth in the silvery pool of an antique mirror. That was hardly a good look for someone who was still smiling with her lips closed in public.  

So she set upon him before he had a chance to blink, run, or defend himself verbally, snarling in a way that was hardly royal, “You have a plentiful lack of wit, boy,” and watched him tumble down the stairs and out of view at an inhuman pace. Almost she wished he would stay, that she could chastise him further; but as she watches him flee, she is all at once nauseated, maybe by the weight of her shame or the electric pulse of her relief, and finds herself unable to move.

The mirror slips and clatters to the floor. There is the sound of voices downstairs—a startled murmuring, a whisper of concern—and Marisol knows that they are talking about the boy who has just gone running and in what way he might have offended the queen.

For a moment the world is silent. Mari stands, frozen in place, in the office that has become her undoing. The floor is piled high with various books and files, the desk strewn with quills and scrolls; candles burn and flicker in the windowsills against a true-gray sky outside, and the light in the office is dim yellow or basically non-existent. Outwardly, Marisol looks business-as-usual. But she feels… haggard. Tired. Stretched too thin for comfort. Like she could sleep for years if someone let her.

But they won’t. They can’t. It is her burden. And so she blinks her tired eyes and wanders down the staircase to the empty foyer, past the servant girls that eye her cautiously and the kitchens with their incessant clatter, and opens the wide oak door to the outside world, still half-cracked by the page’s hasty exit.

A man stands on the other side. 

He is about her height and weight, though nearly her opposite in color, a ghostly white with blood-red eyes. He stands too correctly to be comfortable; his ears are tilted back uneasily, and his gaze lingers on at her feet rather than on her face, like he is here to deliver a piece of unimaginably bad news.

Marisol sighs.

“Welcome,” she says, and opens the door wider.

“Speaking.”

credits