Offline | Created 09-25-2021 |
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Noun -
A woman in a position of authority or control.
You know her. She’s the scent you smell on your husband; a perfume you would never purchase for yourself. It smells of the fantasies you’re too afraid to speak into existence. She’s the woman that once rested at an Ace’s back; a clawed hand braced upon his shoulder. He was a puppet, and she was his puppeteer. She no longer shadows the new Ace, but she has survived a purge with a sharp crown atop her golden head. She doesn’t need someone to hold her aloft in this world. There’s something about her that makes you realise she - and only she - worked to be where she is today. You hate that you respect that about her. You don’t know her story - she doesn’t tell it. But you know she has one. You like to think it’s scrawled along her skin and you hope she’ll beckon you to her so you’re close enough to see if the answers to it all is hidden amongst the ink that decorates her skin.
Your life is a closed chapter once you become indentured in Viatrix’s world. Your hand wasn’t forced and from what you hear - nobody’s is. Contracts and debts to be paid off, deals made out of convenience. The Kaiser Empire is a network of brothels scattered across the Hearts’ territory and you know not all of them are as decadent as the one Viatrix considers her home. You know your worth is based on your location. You’ll rot beneath the grunts of paupers in the slums; opium a haze of promise throughout if you’re nothing more than a piece of average flesh. You saw it once. A punishment you hope never to relive. You know that she has courtesans handpicked for the inner district; for the Gentleman parties who Viatrix ciphens a particularly grotesque cost from. She looks upon you like a mathematical equation listed in her neat script in the textbooks you’ve glimpsed and you wonder: How much are you worth? Are you a profit or a loss this month? They say she’s a genius with numbers.
You’ve never encountered someone that makes you feel so small, and yet so enthralled. You’re intimidated, but there’s nothing particularly aggressive about the petite woman. You can’t look her in the eye but when you try to look away, she instructs the return of your gaze. You’re enamoured. You’re a fly caught in a spider’s web and no matter how much you struggle to leave the web, you know the spider will consume you.
You welcome her.
Night Terrors -
Noun -
Feeling of great fear experienced or suddenly waking in the night.
Her skin is absent of ink. It drips off in great streams of gold, tumbling into a chest that soon overflows with coins. She’s raw. Gold turns crimson. She’s screaming, she’s naked, she’s never felt so exposed - she’s awake.
The woman sounds like her, an accent thick and raspy from cigarettes and poor decisions. Her golden hair is dull, her red lips cracked. She’s screaming down an alley that spins and warps, the bricks buckling and forming the gaping maws of strangers. A mother. A pimp. She’s abandoned to the red brick strangers - she’s awake, sweating.
Liquid fire streams through her veins, bleaching her bones, and turning her skin ashen. It flakes, scattering beneath the warmth of the sun. Somebody’s screaming and she didn’t realise it’s her. Bees roost in her head. She’s clawing, tunnelling for her skull. She’s digging, digging for the hive - she’s awake, a trembling ball amidst her ignorant, slumbering lovers.
Hunger. Rivers of blood. She follows it’s rivulets like a beacon through the night, tearing crevices into the dying flesh beneath. Body torn apart, muscle carved and cliffs formed to withstand the currents that can’t sate her thirst. Their thirst - she’s awake, and the scent of blood is in the air.
Her body isn’t hers. It doesn’t belong to her and never has. It’s a foreign object. Something she was born with but she has no sentimental respect for. Neither do they. They tear at it. They paint her with silver whorls and leave her to the earth that refuses to claim her. She sinks into the dirt, whispers her pleas, but her bones won’t rot and the hunger in her keeps her alive. The packs taste her, and she tastes eternal dispair - she’s awake, and vomiting.
Gold tumbles in washed curls down her back, it dusts the peaks of her face, and falls over her body in a tangle of gold strands. Numbers dance across the pages, and she breathes sense into them over his shoulder. Her empire is carved out in the next breath - she’s awake, and smiling.