❝𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐠𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐬❞

[Maiyun 362]

Spoiler

 

━━━━━━━☆☆━━━━━━━

 

Ardirnien closed her eyes briefly at the shattering of glass.

 

Around her, both standing and sitting- the fellows of Drusco. 

She opened them to view before her the lady Rosceline, a young woman of but eighteen

summers garbed in her bridal attire. At her side, the mocking smile of the lady in waiting

who had shattered the admittedly ill-intentioned gift she had chosen to bestow upon the happy couple. 

A jar of dead centipedes, harvested from the corpse of her murdered beloved.

A tawdry, tasteless thing to offer them. That much was apparent to all those that stood in attendance.

Ardirnien felt the look of scorn from her mother with all the heat of a brand to the back of her neck,

and she squared her shoulders back to fight down the hint of shame that accompanied it.

This was owed. This was what she must do.  

 

No one understood, she did this not because she wanted to- But because she must.  

And so she arrived in a place she was not wanted, with a party of eager eyes from kingdoms of both her own and foreign,

to cast discomfort into the stately affair.

She talked loudly, she spoke rudely, she threw what weight around she could in a blind rage,

if only to give to them a sense of the pain that she herself felt in her waking moments.  

Behavior most unbecoming for a princess, a royal, for a diplomat as she was ordained to be. 

 

With it, the memory of hushed conversations from those closest to her, advising her against such.

Whispers of concern, in how she was losing herself to vengeance.

Pleas in that Louis would not wish to see her reduced to such in his absence.

These words fell on deafened, unwilling ears.  

She could not let them get away with it. She could not allow them to get away with it,

how dare they feel even an ounce of happiness,

how dare they hold a wedding and move on from what had happened- 

 

When she could not. 

 

The young woman had thought her poorly disguised barb, her blatant attempt at ruining the wedding would bring with it a sense of satisfaction,

a balm to the roaring grief that continued to keep her nights sleepless and her days as though in a fugue state,

her feet tapping against the cobbled streets of her kingdom as worked from the rising of the sun to the slow ascent of the moon.  

 

But no such relief found Ardirnien Arthalion, after the sound of shattering glass. 

 

[amyselia 2962]

In night, Rosceline's slumber was corrupt with images of Ardirnien's caustic smile. She tossed until she had been made to wake, creeping from her lady's chamber to lurk in the halls amid the folding candlelight of a wick bound to receptacle. 

 

Cold water, long-ago retrieved from the waters of a nearby meadow-stream, winced against her face, a gasp caught sharp and relieving. She looked to her picture, distorted by darkness in the mirror's reflection, and thought of the Princess's torment; the grief that consumed her; the degradation of passion unburied, where instead a lover was.

 

She could not help but fear, even as her body was stiff and defiant, soldiering the withholding of despair that penetrated her in the moment that Lady Ardirnien presented that omen to her . . .

 

For Rosceline did believe in omens.

[Seva 624]

Far, far away, nestled onto a small stone by the side of a mountain stream, Seojin of Clan Ahn raised her head from meditation. Glancing down, her eyes caught upon the source of her disturbance, a small centipede that danced across the back of her palm from where it had clambered up from the rock's face. She lifted her hand, staring at the little creature with knitted brows, before turning her eyes upwards, to meet the ivory towers of Numendil in the distance. She sucked in a deep breath of cold mountain air, and gingerly set her hand down to the grass beside her, allowing the creature to return to its hunt.

"May the Faces of God guide and protect." She mumbled softly against the sounds of the stream, perhaps to the centipede, perhaps to her friends.