caine
—« last year we abstained »
I
n the span of an hour Caine has toasted to a jester, a beheaded marchioness, a puppeteer with three painted (living) marionettes tied to his strings, and a child moaning balefully beneath a floating white sheet, which he was later informed (kindly, by the child's grandmother) was a ghost. As for himself, he had dusted off his crow-feather mask, draped his cloak between his wings so that it covered the scars, and manipulated the amount of shadow leaking off of him so that everything below his withers became writhing, amorphous darkness. His hair he had left alone, a curtain of liquidy black, pulled sleepily over an eye.
When other party-goers politely inquired as to what he was, he politely inquired what they thought he was.
The answers were amusing and various, yet thematically similar: a raven, a dead raven, a magician, the Shadow Man, a (dark) faerie prince, the reaper. A girl with a lacey white mask over her eyes had nudged her younger brother, the one who had answered reaper, and whispered: "No reaper would look like him, Jem. If they did, then we would all be in trouble." The brother had scoffed; the girl's cheeks had pinked beneath her mask.
In response, he had bent down towards her and conjured a red butterfly to flutter past her nose. "It's precisely because we look like this that you should be troubled. Never trust too pretty a thing." He had said it joylessly, but all she'd heard was his words. Staring wide-eyed at the butterfly, rendered just as it had been in her dream, she had bowed quickly before dragging her brother after her back into the nebulous crowds.
He has somehow polished off only one glass of wine throughout these episodic encounters. The wine, fragrant and sweet, has done nothing but chew a hole into his chest.
(A hole he is afraid to call longing.)
A floating fox-mask jostles roughly into Caine's wing, sending his glass shattering, and the smile he has been wearing like decoration stretches wan and thin, like taffy. He bends down and stares at the jagged glass pieces strewn across the cobblestones.
He supposes he ought to discard of them.
Sighing, he shakes off his cloak, dispelling the shadows (the ones nearest to him shiver with the sudden cold) and sweeps the broken glass gingerly into it. He stands, wrapping the cloak with its heart of glass carefully into squares; he does not know what next to do. His lessons in etiquette had not been quite so conclusive. And night markets sold everything but bins for disposal.
So he moves to the fringes of the crowd, near the mouth of the city's walls, where cobblestone gave to rubble and soft swells of sand.
It is faintly ridiculous, he knows, but he can think of no better solution than a burial.
@Warset | very ready for these strange kids <3
