A hidden door

Re: A hidden door

Postby Rance » Sat Apr 20, 2013 6:58 pm

A lie. She did not set stock in telling lies, but it seemed reasonable in this moment. She knew it was no coincidence. She knew.

When Dulcie hugged her, her body was stiff and unresponsive. The girl returned it, if with wary hands. Her fingers lingered for a moment on Dulcie's shoulders, a touch, a yearning for closeness that could never beg or be requested.

Happiness is rare here.

"It -- it was nice spending time with you, too," she said, a requisite return of the compliment that came with it a timid smile, but that felt, to her, like dry-rotted thread scraped across the edge of a freshly-sharpened needle. She could have asked if she had said something wrong, inquired if she had made a statement that was untoward. Was it the talk of burning? Is that not what Myrkeners did with their dead things? Turned them into blackened bones, bodies and memories and all, and let them get blown away on the new season's winds?

She gave little smile to the innkeeper as the woman traced her way back up the stairs. The seamstress remained in the humid bathing-chamber, her blackened hands snaring around the front of her gown-skirts like she were wringing the life right out of the fabric.

There was something in the water, a little whisper that murmured in the back of her head, You will emulate, but you will never be, Glour'eya Wynsee--

She ran her gloved fingers across the surface of the bathwater. She caught, on a curled middle finger, a strand of Dulcie's hair. She lifted it from the water and--

she remembered the Dream, with streets bricked in gold and skies full of Hawks, with gutters crammed with the dead and wishing-to-be, with Hungry curled in the shadows, with her head as smooth as a bare hillock and her teeth as wooden as the rails of a dead-cart--

took the hair in her palm, held it in a fist, a little secret.

And then she too found the precarious stairs, and left the bathing-room behind.
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Rance
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