I
t had seemed like a better idea, in the moss-drowned bacchanalia of the ballroom. When wine had flowed like blood on a battlefield and names had lost their faces; when looking out into the crowd again, after two or ten swigs, had struck Aghavni with such vertigo she had dropped her wineglass, not entirely on accident, and watched numbly as it painted the floor in a shattering of scarlet. With practiced nonchalance, she had excused herself with a curtsy and vanished down a hallway before nameless faces could begin to titter.
Solis' dogs. Aghavni grit her teeth as the vine-lashed stairway jutting from the trunk of the Hospital's massive cypresses rocked like a boat at sea; grimly, she resisted the urge to be sick over the railing and forced herself onwards, hoof over hoof.
It was a discomfiting feeling, discovering her acute distress—she refused to say fear—of rickety, sky-reaching staircases. Had the Terrastellans lacked the sense to build a Hospital safe and anchored on, perhaps, the ground? The cypress answered her with a groaning shudder; she pressed her shoulder into bark and smiled wanly at the pleats of a passing skirt.
The ember glow of a thousand candles greeted Aghavni like an old friend when she reached the landing at last. Flowers covered the floor in a bright, fragrant carpet, interspersed throughout with various offerings and sputtering paper lanterns. One lantern lifted up from the floor and bobbed towards her; as she picked her way across the cluttered space, it hovered shyly by her shoulder and glowed like a distant star.
She felt like a child, peeking dubiously down each candle-lit room as she came upon them. It reminded Aghavni of the time a much younger her had poked her nose into a room she'd believed abandoned, only to gasp when she had found her uncle in the canopied bed with one of his 'pets'. She had fled, terrified; but that evening, after Mother had passed her to Nurse to bathe, she had heard vases shattering in the hallway and the high-pitched snarl of her uncle.
Father had been gone, sent on one of his much-begrudged diplomatic outings. She still remembered how Mother had come to her in the middle of the night, believing her asleep, to kiss her head and whisper that soon, they would be free. Father would take them away, she said, and they would be free.
Tucked in the darkness between rooms, Aghavni touched her muzzle to a wilting bouquet of desert lilies and watched as softened stems straightened and greened; as satiny white petals shook out their wrinkles; as a closed bud unfurled into a tiny bloom, egg yolk yellow at its center.
She still couldn't quite believe it herself, what she could make plants do. Her uncle would've called it witchcraft; magic had been banned in the castle. If she'd had this power then, she thought with malice, she would've made all the flowers shrivel into dust in his presence. Mother would reprimand her in front of the maids, but Aghavni knew she would be secretly pleased.
Plucking one of the lilies free, she placed it inside the lantern and sank down with it to the floor. "Isn't it strange, Mother?" she whispered. "This magic of mine. Solis has yet to forgive us, I suspect, to give me such a useless one."
From where she sat, she could just make out a square of starry sky through the Hospital's canopy. As she stared up at it, for a single moment, Aghavni felt as if she had transcended the vastness; as if everything was as it should be, and she was exactly where she belonged.
@Orestes
aghavni
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« the sound of the silence is deafening »
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« the sound of the silence is deafening »
