Tinea Swamp is fretting. With eyes wide open and waters trembling like damp, damp skin, it watches the girl pass by. Yet its eyes are not just for her this night, and maybe that is why she misses the way silence dogs her every step. Stephan is there, lurking within that silence, enchanting the dank swamp until it is fitful with worry.
Leaves rustle their warning whispers, back, back, back! They whisper until they are hoarse, but does the twilight girl listen? No. She listens, not to their words, but their voices - oh it is their myriad of voices that pull her at last to stillness.
There Florentine stands, a ghost of golden gossamer, illuminated by a pallid moon. She wonders how much further it is until she finds Yana. Until the swamp witch of black and silver can make a more welcoming scene of this dank woodland and its stagnant waters.
Golden lashes dust the dusk girl’s cheek as Stephan’s eyes send chills along the curves of her spine. But oh that touch, it is just the same as a chilled autumnal breeze and it is such a traitorous thought that at last smoothes the frown from the girl’s delicate face.
Finally Flora moves on, pausing less now, more assured – if only she saw the glint of a blade that winks with a predator’s eye, deep, deep in the darkness. It is a blade that thirsts for blood, a foe to the one about her neck that thirsts, instead, for worlds. Her own subtle blade strikes a rhythm against her throat, an SOS, a warning and it is only slowly that she begins to heed its frantic warning.
Again the slender girl stops, enough to hear the swamp come alive with laughter. It is a terrible malevolent song that resounds like a striking gong through the dark. Even the swamp is shocked as silence, complete and suffocating, descends when his laugh abates.
Florentine lights the dark with the curl of honeyed lips that rebel against the frown darkening her brow and shadowing her amethyst eyes.
“Only?” The flower girl asks the dark of the swamp, for that laugh… it is one she knows. It is a laugh she cannot help but answer with her own, and yet she feels the chill of danger, pressing like a blade upon her skin.
“You mock me.” She chastises with a whisper laugh, for he has already turned her heart into a hummingbird in flight. “Come out.” Florentine laughs again, even as the swamp begins to fret, even as its shadows pulls back to reveal the glint of murderous silver and the shadowed murderer that clutches it close to his chest.
“Only.” She sings and implores him again when he is too slow to move. “You are quite terrible if you planned to jump out at me you know.” Dusk steps towards him, her heart knowing what her mind begs not to: this night is not good or pure or full of twinkling starlight and gypsy laughter.
Within her chest that hummingbird beat races and races. “You are supposed to stay silent up until the moment you jump out.” She continues chastising, words falling amidst her brave, brave laughter and amidst fluttering, wary breaths.
She stops as gently as a feather touching earth as the girl at last recognises the gleam within the boy’s eyes. There is a hunger and savagery there that creeps and crawls its way across her golden skin. It is a hunger she has known once before upon a courtier who was so terribly sick. Her hummingbird heart was right, “Are you unwell?” Flora breathes at last. “I can help you.” She hopes, she prays.
@
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
