kassandra
small then, and smaller
my desire's to stay alive
K
assandra has not loved many places in her life, but she has loved the experience of enduring them. Her Folly Tower, the silver-barred, marbled globe of a prison where she spent her formative years, had been her home, but the kind of home that left a foul taste in her mouth. Obviously, if given the chance to return there-- to go back to the hatred, and silence, and being treated by everyone as though she was a foul witch-- she would say no. Denocte had opened it’s arms to her, a mystifying, dream-struck straggler, with very few applicable skills, and almost no way to be a benefit to society. They’d made a home for her. At the time, Kassandra thought it so with open arms and open hearts. Now she wondered.
She wondered if she was invited in and looked at like a parasite, a bug; she wondered if she was invited in because they could not say no. They were all nice people, all of them, to a one-- but did they actually like her? She was plagued with the question-- one of many that filled her brain to buzzing like locusts. It kept her up at night, wandering the Court, taking stock of everything while not truly seeing.
(She avoids those self same carved eyes of Caligo because looking at them fills her with a heavy, blue sort of need to cry, and also anger, sapphire embers at the center of a fire where they burn the hottest. A ball of hot ink sitting deep in her gut where it threatens to burst into flame.)
She finds herself, instead, following the crescendo of steadily rising voices, Oculos at her side. Ducking down a side alley, she discovers the source of a conflict, a gathering of citizens. She tried to quickly assess the situation-- she was shit at it-- and, instead, locked eyes with Oculos.
The hound flicked his ears back and barked, a loud, piercing sound, which split the night and cut the voices off at the root. Kassandra stepped forward, then, filling the open space where the silence now was.
“What seems the be the problem here?” she asked. Her voice, surprisingly, did not shake-- but that was less so from confidence and moreso because she was quite tired.
