that's the thing about you and me
we're flying in the face of gravity
we're flying in the face of gravity
Lassandra has never been good at reading people. The pale m are’s silence does little to calm the butterflies whipped to a frenzy in her stomach. She feels seen, uncomfortably so. Tendrils in her brain reach out for Oculos’ presence but he has gone missing chasing a magician’s rabbits; raw red instinct bleeds back into her and she shivers.
This strange and golden creature speaks in a voice like sugar and honey. The saccharine voice asks a poignant question of her. Kassandra considers, chewing lightly on her cheek. She feels a kinship, here, with this youth. Something familiar. “I have been a princess-not-princess,” she says, thinking of her mother-- a king’s sister (a lie)-- “and a caged bird. I would not like to be a subject, I think. Perhaps a friend?”
A breeze shakes the heavy air, so weighted with the perfume of flowers and the smokey grasp of incense as it burns away in skull-shaped thymiaterions and glass thuribles suspended from silverite chains. A new figure approaches, a slender youth, with skin the color and texture of unbothered sand at night. There is a golden mood emblazoned upon her shoulder; her hair floats out behind her like alabaster sargassum.
The golden moon sits heavy in Kassandra’s eye and she tenses to fight down a tremble. I will not have a Seeing, she thinks, not here. Not now.
She approaches and speaks of flowers. Flowers, not fatalities. Crowns and not cries of havoc. Stay here. Stay present.
She speaks her nerves instead of swallowing them. “Black roses seem so… dreary. Am I such a harbinger of doom?” She laughs at her own joke; she laughs at the irony.
“I would love to dance, if I am invited,” she says to the gilded-lily mare, the excitement of the opportunity causing her mind to calm. “Though to be honest I came here on a hope. A silly one, I wager, now.”
