no one calls you honey when you're sitting on a throne
Vendetta is a collector of things. She collects knives, ornate ones, ones with wooden handles or blades of something other than steel. She collects trinkets, made of gold and pearl and iron, that she finds on the blackmarket and keeps to herself. She collects people, to work for her, to do her bidding, to follow her word like law.
She collects souls, taking them for herself in the shadows of the night.
When the unicorn finds the vendor on the shore of the lake selling the strange knives made of glass the color of blue fire, she cannot help but purchase one. It sparks like lightning and is smooth as ice and she holds it with a smirk that tells of unspeakable things, before tucking it away safely to take it home with her.
Then Vendetta stands at the shore of the lake, where the water has been made to defy gravity, held up by some strange material clear as glass but not nearly as thick. Beneath her hooves is a floor of wood and gold and her red skirt is a splash of blood against it. She still wears her mask, velvet and black and made of filigree and lace, covering much of her face but for her eyes, piercing and red when she spies him. A lone man, a stranger to her, but he stands there staring into the water and she wonders if it might swallow him. He looks like the sky, dark skin splashed with twilight and the fading stars chased by morning.
She has no reason to approach him, and yet something about him intrigues her. Perhaps it is that here, at this festival surrounded by so many, he is somehow still intrinsically alone. Vendetta approaches slowly, each step a soft knock, knock, knock on the wooden boards. “Take care not to gaze too long into that abyss,” she says as she comes up beside him, wicked and beautiful.
@Asterion
