REICHENBACH'S BAE
As a child, when she had asked Lysander to marry her and talked of love and broken hearts, she had not known what it truly meant. Her heart had not fluttered at the idea of him nor had her soul ignited beneath the spark of his gaze. It had seemed a convenient thing, he seemed husband material and so to pick in advance seemed a wise move for a child of only a few months. Nothing like being prepared.
Yet the girl stands now, older and wiser, feeling only slightly more schooled in the affairs of love. Yet such lessons have been enough to make her look back upon the child she was then and laugh, a sad little laugh. Oh to be so factual and ignorant again.
Beneath her gold lashes, Florentine watches Lysander go. He is borne of the earth, soil and rock, flowers and roots. He is plain beside the winter’s gold of Isorath, but it was not lavish things that ever snagged the girl’s flyaway heart.
Her gaze returns to Reichenbach as he turns to her. His anger is that of stars colliding, of universes rubbing together. It bruises her with its force, and Florentine feels it upon every piece of her golden skin his eyes touch. Her fringe falls across her eyes, tangles of gold shielding her from his wrath. But her eyes, oh her eyes, they peer beneath the snarls of her forelock, bruised amethyst flecked with their orange that blazes with her mother’s dragon fire.
Florentine had died in war before, she had felt the life slipping from her broken body, they way her heart clenched and stuttered. She had not survived death, but she had survived Time and come to live again. She was the girl with infinite lives, but, even as she died, her heart had not hurt like this.
Who is he to you?
Her Night king stresses the question with his anger brewing, wild and hot. She feels it across her skin, a wild fire she has never known. The girl trembles, a flower caught within a storm. She bends in the wind, her neck curving to catch a final glimpse of gold. Lysander is gone, as ever, faded into the earth like shadows into dark.
“Who is Isorath to you?” Her gaze returns to her boy of stars and dance, returning his question with her own. She recalls a night within a temple where she tried to run, only to fall, tangled in stars and moons and Calligo’s dark.
She had been tangled ever since.
With butterflies in her throat and hummingbirds in her heart, Florentine pushes those memories away. They could not help her here, they could only remind her of what it was before she saw the way her lover looked at her Regent.
“I feel like a fool, Reich.” Raw, wounded, small, her voice is so many things as it falls and cracks open upon the rocks of her sorrow. “The day I was given the crown, Isorath invited me to meet with him.” She begins her story as her eyes fall away from her king’s wild curls and wilder shadows. Her gaze looks out to the tower of her citadel, rising above the distant trees. “He told me things, a small taste of the many secrets he has learned during his time spent in the Denocte. He asked me of you, of us.” With that she looks back to the boy of star-flung nights, “That was not so long ago, Reich.”
Florentine steels her trembling heart with Aislinn’s tears. This boy is stringing many hearts behind him and she lost hers in that temple so long ago. What is left of her, that he does not own, she braces for her next question. “Did you have feelings for each other, even then?”
She stands, a fleck of gold trapped in the swirling white of a festival night. She longs to go to him, to have his warmth against the cold kiss of snow. She doesn’t and trembles with the effort. Through the haze of snow and wind, smoke and music, she gazes at her boy like she once did over the light of a bonfire. “Answer me this, and then I will tell you of Lysander: Do you love Isorath and does he love you?”
Florentine, she is a girl in love with a boy belonging to another court. Too often she has asked herself where her loyalties lay. Was it with her court or with her lover? But, as she stands before Reichenbach now, her Regent a ghost between them, she cannot help but fear where Isorath’s lay. Did he have feelings for Reich when he accepted her offer of Regent?
The flower girl, a reluctant queen, stands alone.
@Isorath @Reichenbach @Lysander
This styling is also nice for some non-obtrusive OOC credits, wordcount or banter. Don't forget that divider up there.
