Introspection is a deadly thing at times when caught unaware of one's surroundings. Dalmatia is always so careful to keep her thoughts omnipresent, her eyes scanning and roving even when they flicker back to their goal over and over, her mouth a taut line that is as immovable as the mountains standing between Solterra and Terrastella. At last, her approach has ended and there is nothing close to alarm or suspicion or even mild curiosity about why she is here or even what she is doing. After all, Ruth, the fifth child of House Ieshan, is just standing in the middle of the courtyard with no one about her, watching over it all, overseeing the evening and not taking part. Why would one approach her? Those that look and do not speak always have page upon page of stories to tell. Sometimes, they know too much. Sometimes, they are nothing more than another vapid face.
No matter the outcome, Dalmatia is here now, in this moment, left to watch how it unfolds. Ruth, it seems, chooses evasion as her tactic, putting forth a pawn, a smoke screen instead of answering with something of how she would feel. Useless girl. The woman in grey's frown deepens for the briefest of moments. Blowing out a slow puff of air, she answers in turn. "The party," Dalmatia muses "may not be boring, but even a crowd would not stop me from boredom should it claim me." With the flat words come an even flatter shrug.
Noncommittal, just like she is after the cliffs.
Once, Dalmatia would have been at the forefront of Terrastella, of the Halcyon, steering them toward the sun, steering them toward the sky, the future, prosperity. Anything. Everything. It was going to be theirs.
That once upon a time crashed, falling on rocky cliffs, shattered like a plant tumbling from its third floor trellis to nothing more than stone and rocks below. It's gone now, but Cicero isn't.
Sometimes she thinks he'll never leave. Then she remembers that it will be her hand which holds the blade to be pressed against his throat, to be covered in the silk of his blood, and it will be her face that he sees last. She deserves that much for his lies, for his arrogance!
Another deep breath, then...a pause that lasts too long as the woman cloaked in mist, cloaked in shadow, looks over the other made of stone, made of something both more and less feeling. It pulls her back to the present, away from the precipice of her thoughts that would consume her. They are a viper meeting a cobra, and oh how they hiss in their own ways when their eyes clash. "Should you help me, Ruth?" the woman counters, at last, the barest inflection throwing rumbling tones up at the end as she looks down her long, thin nose.
There is no pleasure in her eyes. There is nothing but death left for her to hold.
Beware: I am fearless, and therefore, powerful.
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