Florentine looks over this Night Court boy as he stands before her. She watches as her words sink into the heart of him. She studies the way his eyes widen with her revelations. Was that how she had looked when the same realization dawned upon her? No, her eyes had been a mirror to her breaking heart, for that man she loved, that King of Crows, was far more ghastly than she ever realized. She knew this now.
And yet she cannot stop the yearning of her heart.
Insects dance across the swamp. They jump and skitter over still water and sodden leaves. Lily petals sway with the fluttering of insect wings and Florentine watches them all - just to keep from looking at the Night Court’s Warden.
“I don’t want your apologies, Rostislav. Not when the sins are your king’s and his alone.” The fae-girl says at last with a voice as soft as the flowers in her hair. Yet the tongue from which they fall is sharp as a razor and, as her amethyst gaze lifts to Rostislav’s it vows to cut just as hard. “He is not the king I knew and loved either, Rostislav, which makes me the fool for thinking he is anything but a man of monstrous deeds. Protect yourself, his desires are his own and his heart a selfish thing.” Now those fae eyes are hard as they hold Rosti’s gaze. Petals bow to soften them, dew clings to her golden lashes to brighten them, but nothing can rid her gaze of its anger.
Though Florentine is ever measured. She is the girl who bled to death a child and returned a second time to watch herself die and did not shed a tear. There is a hardness within the soft of her. It is a coarseness grows and grows, it is diamond and it will not break. It turns her eyes to freshly mined stone, glittering and bright. She will become the fae queen with a dagger about her throat and retribution in her heart.
The Dusk girl’s ears fall to her skull like crumbling spires and her gaze sweeps away. The sunset snags her fleeing attention and she makes no move to fight it. Rather she watches the sun falling from the sky, watches the world as it falls to black and the stars rise from their beds. It would be night soon, a place full of shadows and whispers. A part of her still yearns for the black, the part of her that drew her to the Night Court first and into the arms of the Night king. Oh how she resents that part now and watches the moon ascend with serpents in her belly.
He speaks of his unwavering allegiance and gilded Florentine is not stirred. She listens with her fallen ears, tangled in their vines of gold. She is the ragged temple, stone crumbling and breaking beneath an onslaught of time and weather, sorrow and fury. She was sacred and beautiful once and will be no longer, but to trespassers who stumble upon the ruins of the Dusk Queen.
“Will you take a message when you return?” Florentine asks of Rostislav, as her eyes still watch the setting sun. But the nymph queen does not wait for his reply, saying, “Tell Reichenbach that I have seen the fallout of his sins and I will be coming for him.”
Except, Florentine does not say how and she does not say when.
@Rostislav - sorry for the decade of waiting <3 <3
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
