Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The shop is dead. 

No, seriously. 

It passed away when the old man failed to return. With no other options, with no other route or idea or even desire to do anything different; you took over. It, contrary to what it seems, was not done wholly out of mawkish devotion. There was just no other job you would be able to manage. Not that anyone would hire you, anyway. 

The village is quiet like death, and you don’t even technically live in it, so the shop is just eerie. The boards creak, everything moans, and groans, and complains like the wind hurts to bear. Because it would otherwise be silent, wood-cries were deafening. 

It is dark as hell, you don’t know why, the candles are on the counter. But, regardless, you are seated on one of the rickety old stools that is more disgruntled than the rest of the furniture due to your weight on it. You cannot shift your ass half an inch without it squealing at you, and so you are almost perfectly still if you discount the lazy way you run a brush through the gun’s barrel. 

There is not a lot going on in your head, honestly. You swear. 

You swear.

The gun is not picked up by what little moonlight pours through your dusted window, but you know the feel of all of them. And so you know which one it is. 

The villagers don’t have a better gunsmith. Okay, so that is perhaps a lie, they definitely do, but they don’t have a better cheap gunsmith. You are the equivalent of a dirty brothel girl, selling out, and instead of flashing tits you flash prices and unsanctioned modifications. You don’t just do guns, you do wood, you do trinkets, you do lots of shit. 

Because the old man went and left and it is all you can do. 

You need to live…for reasons undisclosed even to your own mind. 

You unwisely cross one leg over the other, making the stool bemoan its poor fortune. Your hands work at cleaning the barrel, it is a slow sort of thing—in part because of the fact that you, in general, are slow and in part because you are meticulous. You are not a gun freak, but you need to perform as one if you want to sell. You can spend all night and part of dawn just on this one revolver, and you might if you fancy. 

It is because it’s so quiet that you hear the footsteps outside of the door. 

The shop closed five hours ago, and even when it was open your customers (if you even want to call them that) were sparse. There isn’t anyone really vying to get in line besides rats and dust bunnies. 

You keep cleaning, because if someone has come to steal they will be disappointed, and if they have come to kill you the ancient wooden door and your disassembled unloaded firearm are not going to stop them. 

They draw closer and you can hear their breathing, whether because they’re just breathing loudly or because you’re hyper focused remains undecided. 

You can open the door and it would break their nose. You can do anything besides sit on your tired stool and shove your brush down the barrel of your gun. 

You do not think of how quickly you can find one of the shotguns. You do not think of the dagger in your boot. You do not think of guns or blades or defense.

You think you are ready for nothing. 

A note slips through the mailslot in the door. There is the sound of someone racing across packed snow and into the distance and you finally put the gun down. 

You place your palm against the wall for balance and shuffle along until you reach the door. You stoop with some difficulty and your fingers find smooth parchment.

 You return to the stool and fumble around for a match, and finally you light one of the candles. 

The envelope is sealed. The seal is stamped with a crest. It is the crest that shoves the animalistic side of your brain towards hysteria. 

You find the aforementioned dagger and use it to cut through the wax. You unfold the letter from the envelope and the sudden and completely unbidden urge to scream washes over you. 

It cannot be said whether or not you do. 

***

You have been lame for years. This is not a new development. 

Something had gone wrong somewhere, you have some hazy memories of a time where you walked smoothly but in the interest of circumventing unnecessary regret you had mostly evicted them from your head. 

However, you have never not been sick. It was mostly a lung thing, the physician thinks. And you think that even if it wasn’t he would not have told you otherwise. 

It is the combination of your inadequate leg and the Lung Thing that makes your trek to the castle unbearable. 

The castle itself, you allow yourself honesty for once, genuinely makes you uncomfortable. 

In part, fuck that, in whole because it is massive and it would not be out of place to see bodies speared atop the claws of the spires or blood dripping from the teeth of the battlements. It erupts from the mountain and lingers over the village like a bad mood dressed in black stone. Sections of the extended structures stretch heavenward and actually disappear beyond the thick layer of clouds, adding to the imposing nature of it all. There is something acutely meant to remind you, as well as every villager, that you are quite literally, beneath the countess and helplessly miniscule in the grand scheme of her. 

You, personally, think that if you were going to have a god complex, it is better to be a bit more subtle about it.

But then again you are a partially deceased invalid with anemia so boldness has decidedly not been an option for you.  

You limp your way up the cleared pathway that leads to the castle gates, armed with your satchel, the cane you needed to keep your balance, and a disease. There have been healthy people that walked through these gates without shit legs that did not return, so you are set about fifty meters behind the metaphorical starting line. 

It is with some level of apprehension that you approach the tall iron gates and paw at them with your spare hand. They give way with your prompt, because who would miss out on supper walking in of its own free will by leaving the gate locked? 

Romania is cold, the air is thinner than you are and you have walked further than your body was engineered for. Needless to say, you are disheveled, panting, and all-around in position to volunteer for a cold drawer in the morgue by the time you can find the coordination to rap your knuckles against the heavy castle doors. 

There is shuffling from the other side. Then someone yells. Then someone screams. Then something shatters. Then the door is opened.

Across those sequence of events, that all occurred within about five seconds, you have decided to make peace with death. Because it is all you can do. 

As opposed to being met with fangs, claws, or cadavers there is a scrawny woman clad in a maid’s uniform that is splattered with blood down her front and somehow managing to look more agitated and frazzled than you. 

She offers you a tentative smile and you struggle with the coordination of your lips to make it less hostile. Whatever she sees on your face makes the smile drop wholesale and after an awkward pause in which you tell yourself go home three times, she says: “So.”

“So,” you echo, shifting your grip on your cane and ignoring a screech that comes from within the castle’s interior. 

You stare at each other. In an uncomfortable and expectant way. And you do not like this. 

“Move?” you ask, because you are stupid. 

The maid is taken aback by this—visibly startles and recoils like you had just snapped your teeth at her—but regains her composure and steels her gaze on you. “Why are you here , miss?” 

You flip open your satchel and rifle quickly through to find the letter that had been slipped through last night. The accompanying envelope had been burned, but the letter survived, albeit scarcely, enough to be read. You do not recall attempting to shred it, but something in you remembered to leave it mostly intact. 

You hold it out towards the maid and yank your hand back before your skin can meet hers as she takes it. 

She reads over it quickly and hungrily. You wonder vaguely if she will catch the discrepancy in your being here. 

After a moment she glances from the letter to you, and then back to the letter, and this continues for several moments until she finally steps aside and ushers you within. “I will show you to the opera hall.”

Castle Dimitrescu is a monster outside and within. 

You have never held even the slightest interest in it. You had not feared it openly, but it had unnerved you just the same as any other villager, it was a looming threat that hung atop the mountain and addressed only in rumors and hissed through grapevines. You had heard the whispers, because that is the only way anyone knew to speak of it. You know this castle’s demons. You all know the skeletons, because they had never been bothered to be tucked into closets. 

There is no need to hide when you can crush everything that would challenge you. That is absolute power. 

And you were as much a sheep to be slaughtered as anyone. 

There is only one piano tuner in the village. And there is only one person who would ever think to care about having such an frivolous instrument looked after these days. So when she calls, you come barking.  

Because it is all you can do. 

From the moment you step past the doors, you are consumed and digestion begins. Everything about the castle weighs heavy on your soul, and you feel like a weight has been placed onto your heart and shackled to your shoulders. 

Once the doors are shut behind you like a promise, there is little external light. That is the first thing you take note of. The further in you go, the less frequent the windows and what windows remain are barred by curtains. Everything is hot and shimmering flame, which is a relief to your cold-flushed skin. It does not make you feel warm , however. More like you had been told to pick between an icy death and a fiery one and had a penchant for heat.

The concern is that the ambiance is now terrifying. 

You feel hunted. You feel wary. You feel small. 

Which is the desired effect, you think, but that knowledge makes it no more pleasant to be burdened with. 

The castle is everything homes in the village are not, and the luxury makes you ill by nurture, and perhaps to some degree nature as well.  You would be in awe if you were not so high-strung. 

However, the most unsettling thing is the air. 

Everything is crushing you. And the air is so thick , such a contrast from the rest of the mountains that you are sputtering quietly as the maid leads you through the labyrinth of corridors and hallways and—most awfully—stairs. Your humble walking stick clicks across tile and falls blessedly silent on carpet, it feels a crime to make too much noise. The scent of the house is sickeningly strong like something poisonous fighting with everything it has to appear welcoming and the effect has clogged and weighed you down. 

In conclusion, the change in environment is not good.

But you have not been struck dead, so ten points to you. 

When you reach the opera hall, you have just about worked through your remaining energy reserve, or so you think. 

Because once you step within, you have a momentary pause before you fall helplessly in love. 

She’s beautiful. And she steals your breath away in the instant you set your unworthy gaze upon her. 

For the brevity of a moment, you forget yourself; you forget the maid, the castle, the fact that you are a lamb within a monster den, and you stumble as fast as your wrecked leg can carry you to the piano.

You, unthinkingly, drop to your knees and nearly contemplate prayer. 

Mahogany? No, no, it’s rosewood, you conclude running your hand around the outer build. Spruce for the soundboard, likely, that would be best. Gold (Gold! The insanity of it to your commoner eyes!) is accentend and embellished in elegant designs around the lid and stand. You do not touch this, out of superstition and ingrained instinct. You are juxtaposed to the instrument—it is worth more than several of your lives—but you are weak and hopelessly infatuated, and must touch some part of it for risk of madness. 

You are trepidatious as you lift the lid, tender, gentler than you have ever been. Your pulse quickens to your own ears and you feel your heart struggle vainly behind its bony cage. 

Your breath hitches and you repress a gasp. The keys are ivory. Real ivory. 

You are in conflict about it, but it is such a delicious struggle. Your teeth come down harshly on your lower lip. 

“I have lived for you,” you breathe out. “I have lived my life, a thousand pasts and a million futures, just for the chance of meeting you—and yet still I am undeserving.” 

You caress the leg of the instrument and are ready to make this room your altar when the maid loudly clears her throat. 

You whip your head around to fix her with the full force of your discontent, the effect is lessened somewhat when you have to readjust your glasses up your nose. “You may leave us, now.”

She does the recoil thing again, only this time you have snapped your teeth at her. She lifts her hands in some sort of surrender and backs herself up the stairs once more. 

“Collect me in one- apologies, two hours,” you say, turning back to face your beloved. “She has not been seen to in some time.” 

You despise piano tuning, actually. 

It is another of those very meticulous and tiring things, and your misfortune lies in the fact that you are particularly adept at meticulous and tiring things. 

Your skill-set is niche and somewhat ridiculous, but it is circumstances like these that might see you through the winter. The countess promised her usual sum in payment for your work, which is to say, you’ll be set for the next year if you can make it out of the castle. That is how it always worked with the old man, and now that he’s gone you have no one to split the reward with. 

Funny how that thought brings a chill down upon your spine. It is the incorrect reaction, you remind yourself. You will be doubly richer and so, logically, there is no reason to mourn. Logically…

You set your mind into routine and begin your work, gingerly testing the keys and shuddering at the sound. It truly is too good for you. 

It has been roughly two years since the last tuning, but it had not been your work. The old man was a good teacher, very good, but you were better — your reverence grants you talent, it is the boon he never had. He saw no God in the strings and hammers (only in that woman ) and that was his shortcoming. 

You would flay your tendons from your twisted bones before committing sacrilege. You would pluck each of your teeth from your rotten jaw before failing this task. You would maneuver your own large intestine to strangle your wet and pitiful heart. You would- 

You shake your head and it makes you dizzy, but has the intended effect of shutting your inner monologue up. There was no need for theatrics while you worked. 

Your ear is perfect, you had refined it through…methods better left vague, but perfection nonetheless. And so you are keenly aware of what needs to be done. It is the execution where most struggle. 

It has been forever and a year since you have gotten a chance to work on something so lovely, the tiny upright back at the shop has seen war—despite everything you have done in maintenance. 

You feel unfaithful to it after your sudden and overwhelming infatuation towards this new, brighter, prettier, and better kept polished wonder. 

You are still reeling about the ivory. 

You tuck the tuning hammer between your teeth while you isolate your first key with the mutes, and it is when you pull away that you realize something is wrong.

You are a creature of habit, when you settle into normalcy you settle . The village is quiet, your shop quieter. You have lived there longer than you can remember, and you have adapted into it well enough. Everything is soft there, and so the castle’s intensity has left you wound up and tightened like a spring. 

It is your keenness to sound that allows you to hear the whisper of fabric behind you. 

You do not move, because the hairs on the back of your neck have risen to attention and as a prey animal you have been allotted the intuition of knowing when you are being watched. 

The gaze is nearly a solid thing, and you are all taut muscle and dilating pupils beneath it. You are conscious of the presence behind you, and you understand all at once that you are in danger should you move. There is no reason behind that line of thinking, but you know it to be truer than anything. 

Your heart attempts to crash its way from your chest and in the process sends a cacophony down to your wrists, your neck, and into the reverb drums of your ears. You do not risk the desperate, doggish breaths you suddenly feel the need to take, for fear of it jerking your body. Instead you take in your environment, this time under a defensive lens. 

You have no traditional weapon to speak of on your person, so that’s scratched from your list. Your cane is an arms-length away, lunging for it now would accomplish nothing. Running is terrifying for obvious reasons, whatever is behind you is close and you have no way of knowing how fast it is. The hammer in your mouth is so small the only way you’d damage anything is if your attacker fell out in laughter on the floor and allowed you to pelt them with it. There is a vase on a table, it is closer than your cane. If you are quick enough-

There is a hand on your neck there is a hand on your neck there is a hand on your neck there is a hand on your neck there is a hand on your neck. 

It is cold and gentle and awful and you set your jaw as every muscle in your throat tenses. The tuning hammer threatens to chip one of your teeth as the force of your tightened jaw comes down upon it. 

You are drooling around it now, spittle falling from your prone tongue as you fight against turning and biting the hand. You have never wanted your teeth to meet flesh more across the entire two decade span of your life. 

It is the sheer violence of that thought that recalls you back into the situation. You will not be biting anyone. It will be your end. 

The hand finds a few strands of your hair and pulls them. At first gingerly, testingly, before finally yanking the strands and likely the follicle free of several. You suck a breath in around the hammer. 

You are going to bite someone. It will be your end. 

It is when you come to terms with this that the hand retreats. 

You somehow know its owner to be gone as well, and cautiously, you turn to find nothing more than an empty space behind you. 

***

You are unsettled the remainder of the time you work. 

It distracts you from your usual precision, and you are horrified by this. 

When the maid returns to gather you from the opera hall, you are unsatisfied with your failure. The piano has been tuned to the old man’s standards, which you had been able to meet since you were twelve

Which is to say, usable, but not perfect and therefore a failure.

You cannot stay any longer with it, nor in this castle, however. Your love for the instrument supersedes your self-preservation in theory, but your idiot heart will not quiet enough for you to focus. This is the most you will be able to manage.  

The maid has since been removed of blood splatter, her prior frazzledness having been replaced now with carefully masked apprehension — and you now understand the way she had seemed to attempt to bar you from entering the castle instinctually. 

You are nearly out of the door when she spins to face you. 

“Do not return here, miss.” 

She says this through a clenched jaw and so quietly you nearly do not hear her. 

“They speak of you,” she continues. “I fear what may happen should they grow any more curious. If you receive another summons, run. Run as far as you might be able, but I bid you not return to this castle.” 

“They?” you ask, knowing the answer. 

“The countess and her daughters, miss.” 

You hum. “One touched me.”

The maid pales and you watch her shudder. “Then all the more reason for you to stay away.” 

And then you are shoved out and the door is slammed behind you. 

You stand there for a moment, your brain working around the information—placing it into files and drawers, and then you start back down the trail. 

Your body is once more plunged into mountain air and the distinct drop in temperature sends your head throbbing. You clutch tighter to your cane. 

The castle vineyard is barren with the arrival of fall and dappled with snow. You, for some reason, cannot imagine it any other way — there must be a way to harvest grapes that thrive in shadowy winters because color seems so extraordinarily out of place here. 

To be fair, though, all of the color in this part of the world seems to have been siphoned, like someone had painted a bleak overlay over the skies and rivers and dragged anything too saturated to slaughter. 

You haven’t ever been particularly attracted to shows of flashiness, so the monotony of the mountains feels more welcome than you figure it should. 

Scarecrows have been left leaning in no particular order, clearly being battered in snowfall and wind. They are ominous and largely disconcerting and when you step closer to examine one you realize why:

They are corpses. 

They are corpses. 

They are corpses.

They are harrowing corpses with empty eye sockets and graying leathery skin and open mouths with rotting teeth and maggot holes and the sour infectious scent of bile and exposed flesh. 

Skin sloughs from muscle, muscle from bone and you are sick sick sick sick-

You do not immediately retch, but you have doubled over, and your mouth and eyes are pooling. When you glance up through the haze, you recognize who you are looking at. 

You know him from the still distinct wrinkles about his mouth, from the thinning patch of blonde hair still atop his head. You see the glittering chain of his pocket watch still hanging from his trousers. His scoliotic spine is still familiar, even if part of it now is bared to you, having been pushed up and out through his skin like a serpent paused in shedding old skin—the vertebrae glistening with snow. The friendly curve of his arm has been made jagged and legs are not meant to bend that way . 

One blue iris has been turned a murky gray with death-glaze; the other is gone. A crow is perched on his shoulder and stares at you heartlessly. 

The old man had been called away, and you knew he would return. He never left you all that far behind.

You do end up retching when the crow tears away at his last eye.

Chapter Text

You lose a lot of time between the vineyard and the shop. 

You had teetered home after your final encounter with the old man, and you had left a shameful amount of vomit in your wake—food was something you had found difficult to keep confined to your digestive tract on a standard basis but even more so after your introductions with horror—but eventually it ended up being mostly water and acid. 

You have fallen twice, if your memory is faithful (it isn’t), you accept the icy flakes melting on your eyelashes and nose as proof enough. The knees of your pants are torn. Your skin is flushed and there are abrasions where the fabric parts. 

There had been a lot of signs across your clothes and body to suggest you had lain in a snowbank for a period of time after a stumble. You blearily recall feeling cold, then blazingly hot, then cold again. 

Like last night, it is dark. And again, you are seated on a rickety stool. Only this time you are hunched over, heaving into your tattered shirtsleeves and keeping the water-acid mixture at bay. You cannot afford to have your throat so scorched. 

You do not cry, but to your credit you are leaking from your nose. It is an acceptable level of human—if not slightly distasteful—grief. 

Your family had become estranged from you early, which had created the perfect catalyst for three distinct things: deep resentment, a degree of mania, and solitude. 

The first two you handle(d) well, and the last had been handled for you. 

You were not lonely, nor exposed to the complexity of isolation. You had never mourned your loss of familial ties, and you had never wished in any part that you were caught in the twists and tangles of connections. You were perfectly fine regardless of who was present in your life, and could not have cared more apropos of who came and left. 

But that man had raised you. And he had been the one staying awake well into the early hours of dawn, stitching your coats back together, dipping cotton balls into containers of antiseptics to wipe along your scraped elbows and bruised face when you lost your balance. And he had been the one to show you your adoration of music, and had never done more than rub the back of his neck awkwardly when you grew to become obsessive.

And perhaps you had not loved him, but he had sheltered you from that damned solitude. 

You lurch and swallow thickly. You will not spew across his floor. He had likely grown tired of cleaning up the mess years ago. 

***

After your stomach settles, you know what you must do.

It has been, give or take, ten years since the last time you’ve served proper Penance, not that there was an absence of cause for it—there was simply always someone to stop you, for some reason. With that obstacle now permanently removed, you are now free to repent in whole. 

You take a haphazard glance about the shop, there isn’t much to make of it that will not see you with lockjaw again. You would have risked it under different circumstances, but you cannot afford to be bed-bound now. If you recall correctly, not everything had been thrown out. 

God, it’s been so long since you’ve used the rocks. 

You still know where you hid them along with the wheel, in the alcove under one of the bookcases, right underneath one of those moldy couches that have needed to be thrown out since before you were conceived. 

You flatten yourself out on the floor and reach an arm underneath, finding purchase on your quarry. Your body is violent as you hold the device to the moonlight, sirens go ringing in your tender muscles and buzzing nerves. You think if you had been anyone different, you may have left. Gotten up and continued on without needing this. 

But that is not your prerogative, you are shackled and chained to law. You have broken holy dogma. You have failed in the singular way you did not think you would ever fail so horrifically again. Your complacency has made you lax, and now someone is dead. 

Do not fear the ramifications of sin, or may you see your monstrous soul in Hell. You are predestined to burn, but you are so vulnerable to the promise of mortification. 

No one had bothered to remove the hook from your ceiling, thankfully. 

You balance precariously on a chair and attach the wheel to it. You have the drawstring-purse of heavy rocks at your hip, bending your body with their weight. You still remember collecting each one, heaving them back to the shop with all of your childish might and feeling the old man’s gaze trail after you in curiosity. You were new to him, then. 

You have them secured to a length of rope, and slide the rope through the delegated rift in the wheel. You had asked him to carve it for you. Again, new to him. 

You can still imagine the panic in his eyes when he found you after having used it for the first time, screaming until color had bloomed in his face and down his neck, hollering down the road for a doctor. You were young, pained, and confused. You did not know why he was so distraught, so relentless in his quest for the wheel and your rocks after—demanding so forcefully that you hand them over—why he had looked at you with…pity. 

You haul the purse until it is sufficiently suspended, settle yourself on the floor with rope in hand, trembling with the strength of your grip. Your mangled leg is outstretched where you had marked a point in white paint beneath your blessed contraption, two perfect lines intersecting to form a pleasant X. You diligently hold a wad of cloth between your teeth to bite down on. 

Your heart is frightened, your mind is, admittedly, clouded. You are wading in the turbulent and unfamiliar waters of sorrow, but you have always handled turbulence and unfamiliarity well. 

This is necessary. 

Instinct and logic war with each other as they always have, brutally and using your weakened brain as the battlefield. And for the most fleeting of moments, you are scared. You are scared of what you are doing, of what will follow, and of your mind. You have always been horrified of your mind. 

It is in the moment where you arrive back into your senses that you let the rope go, and the rocks fall. 

Your leg had been so close to healing, too. 

***

It is some hours later when you have halted the bleeding and made yourself semi-mobile again. You will be slower, the bone is more than traumatized at this point, and you will be in pain. But you are not bed-bound, which is all you need.

You lean heavily on your cane, intent on returning to your work, but you are arrested by the room adjacent to yours. It has never seemed so unwelcome to you before. 

Against everything in your body, mind, and spirit, you turn and gingerly press the door open. His door. 

It is as it was when he departed years ago, still in that same disarray. He was not particularly tidy. There are the books still splayed out across the rug and over his nightstand. The candle atop one is frozen in time, melted down to a near stub. His wardrobe is still ajar and his folded tunics are still within, brown, more brown, gray, white. There are still the wooden blocks you played with as a child tucked into a corner. 

You find your hands wrapping around one of the tunics, and in the same automatic trance, you set yourself at the foot of his modest bed. You curl up there like some deranged house pet and clutch his shirt to your chest. 

You are cruelly bogged by memories, by scents, by sounds, by pure sentimentality. You have never been host to it before, you have no patience for it. But you curl in tighter, and you clench his tunic to your body hard enough to ache. You feel something cold and awful prick at the throbbing muscle of your chest, frigid claws that dig into your being and tear away at you ever so subtly. 

You admit, quietly, that you are an exposed nerve. His death having ripped away your epineurium. 

You do not cry, and even the pitiful dripping from your nose has stopped. 

However, you do come to understand a basic principle as you lie there, huddled in on yourself with the closest thing to bereavement you have ever been willingly beholden to:

The countess must die. 

***

You have taken up the oath of vendetta and have accomplished your first grand mission in response. 

Terrorizing an eleven-year-old.  

All imbursement from the castle is transported via courier, as this is how it has always worked, apparently. So when the skittish mailboy (who now, whenever he sees you, immediately bolts, screeching at the top of his prepubescent lungs “vrăjitoare!” ) had arrived at your doorstep with yours; you were ready. 

In hindsight, perhaps it was a bit much .

You had slammed your door open as soon as you heard the scampering of his dusty boots outside, and he had jumped out of his skin before reaching out with a shaking hand to offer you your compensation, a pouch of lei. You then proceeded to tear it from his grip, turn, and slam it into the nearest wall hard enough that the ancient wood of the shop screamed and something snapped and broke. 

You placed your hand on his thin shoulder, dug your bony fingers in until he yelped, drew him in close enough that your noses nearly collided—why he began to cry, you have no idea—regardless, you handed him the letter you had written and rewritten thirty times and made clear exactly what fate should await him if it failed to find its destination. 

He had nodded his head so vigorously you briefly thought you could hear his fleshy child-brain ricocheting in his skull, before tripping over his own laces and disappearing into the night. 

Now you wait, because it is all you can do. 

The nibs of your quills, as you have been discovering, are not meant to withstand your gnawing anxious teeth. You pace your shop with the restlessness of some sort of caged animal, cane clicking on the hardwood as you begin the slow process of abrading a small trench in your floors, a quill always hanging from your cracked lips. The pain distracts you, and you are in great need of distraction. 

You are more thorough with the guns than you have ever been, taking them apart, putting them together. Cleaning—you can’t stop fucking cleaning them—, unloading, reloading. You count the shells and rounds feverently. 

Still not a gun freak, just performing, you remind yourself. 

You no longer hunt time, and so it escapes you. 

There is a rigidness to your routine, now more than ever, and it is the contained staticness of your days that wear on your soul. 

You sent the letter with the mailboy with all of the optimism you have ever had and all you will ever have, which is to say, none. But you were left with less than a handful of options, and you were desperate, aching so profoundly for opportunities. 

You could not afford to do anything besides create your own, even if they were concocted poorly and sang of suicide. You would die for this, it was inevitable, but you would not suffer anyone with a hand in this murder to escape your inane justice. Divinity is dead here, in any case. 

The letter had taken thirty attempts in part because you were a shitty writer and in part because you could not bear to write it without growing infuriated to the point of destruction. Your quill would tremble in your hand before it snapped, or you would push it through the paper accidentally and then repeat the gesture intentionally until it was shredded. After you had finally managed to complete it, you proceeded to vomit very accomplishedly into the fireplace.

You hated it, hated every word and every ink stroke. You hated reading it to ensure you had made no mistakes in grammar or punctuation. You hated the practiced and purposefully calligraphed Lady Dimitrescu you had left in address, and you hated the miniscule way you had left your own name in signature. You had imbued that letter with this hatred, might as well have written it in your own wicked blood. 

The countess would sense it, all the way from atop her forsaken castle in the clouds, with all the rage you held so deeply in your heart for her. And she would shudder, mimicking human vulnerability with a single action, and regardless of what happens thereafter, you will have won in your small, irrelevant way. You dream of this, often.

It is a week following your threat to the mailboy that he slips a letter in through your mailslot in the dead of night. 

You hear it from your room and nearly trip over yourself in your haste. You vow you will rip your own stomach open the day you allow yourself to fall down a flight of stairs. 

You put your mangled leg through more effort than you ever have, slipping on the floor and losing your balance. You crawl —you absolute imbecile—to the door, finding an envelope dressed in black leaning against the door. 

The seal is one that makes your heart cry, in anticipation, in horror, in desire. 

You don’t need a dagger, you just tear it open as violently as you will the countess’ head from her shoulders. You peel the letter away, even the paper feels expensive somehow. 

You have neglected any candlelight, but you think that even if you had been plunged into absolute blackness you would have still managed to read the words:

To whom it may concern,

While your letter is appreciated, you flatter me. 

Your praise and adoration are well-received, however, you border on heresy with your affections. You speak reverently, far beyond what the Church stipulates for a Lord’s orison. There is only one God, you understand, and you may not make an idol of me. Remember yourself in future, or you risk damnation. 

- Countess Dimitrescu

You tremble so wildly you nearly begin to spasm. Your body is ignited, you are on the brink of another episode of mania. You cannot calm your breathing, you cannot settle your bones. There is no hope of stopping your hands, they are now evolved for unconcious letter-assassination. The Lung Thing is the only barrier that prevents you from screaming, you have no air for it, but you wheeze as powerfully as you are able. 

You sound like a dying horse, but you are a dying horse that is contorted viciously with euphoria. 

If you had imbued your letter with hate, the countess had planted hers with false modesty veiling pleasure. 

Neither of you had meant half of what you wrote. 

One does not simply ‘risk damnation’. If you are suspected of heresy you are dead. Either you are pious or you are dead. There is generally an overdose of death to be provided when it comes to the mixing of the Church and everything outside of it. 

If the countess was unamused, your body would have been swaying angrily in the gallows a week ago. 

You have never had the displeasure of seeing her beyond the portraits of her face in shrines. You did not need to in order to know she was terribly and colossally in love with herself. 

Who would reject an enamoured village girl, sending her mewling praise and bootlicking exaltation, knowing the risks but still favoring a Lord over God ? 

It was less of a gamble and more of an insurance, a trial of whether or not you’d read her right. But after all those years, groveling before a monochrome image and watching the old man’s face twist in fear every time he received a summons, you had some idea of what you’d be dealing with. 

You were casting a line into the ocean, praying you’d not only entice a shark to bite, but that you’d be able to reel it in too. 

And bite it had. 

The sun creeps into the sky, and begins to guide away the inkinesss of night in exchange for a paler blue by the time you have spent yourself, heaving and coughing on the floor. You have completed the first step in an impossible process, and you must now begin the second. 

You push yourself to your feet with enormous effort, cane forgotten upstairs, and navigate yourself back into your room. 

The second letter will have to completely obliterate the first. 

You play in fire now, not with it. Your body is already engulfed, you must entertain this woman by pouring gasoline upon your flesh and pray she does not see fit to have your neck snapped before you can wrap your hands round hers. 

With everything she has, she must believe you to be as snivelingly obsessed with her as you proclaim. Otherwise you will die. And you are not allowed to die alone anymore. 

The quill is heavy in your hand. You are a terrible writer. You are a terrible actor. This is less than ideal.

You gnaw your lip until it bleeds. 

And then you get an idea. 

When the next letter is deposited through your mailslot, you do not crawl to it. You do not have to because you are already there, waiting for it like you have been the past several nights. The mailboy has wisened up and is now too fast for you to yank him by the collar and demand progress updates, and so you are now left with the singular option of waiting. It has boded ill for your mental state. 

But the letter falls into your hungry hands, and you forget gentleness as you rip through the envelope and past the accursed crest stamped into the seal. 

You are liquified by the thought of the countess’ hands upon it, melting the wax, watching it pool slowly onto the paper. Did she ever burn herself? Intentionally? Perhaps in the way you have; you cannot handle wax without it searing your hands at least twice. You pray she has felt the sting of it, but when has a devil ever taken fright at heat? 

You want her to know heat. 

My sweet heretic, 

Did you know, your blood is rotten? 

Of course you didn’t.

I have cultivated a winery that rides upon blood, the grapes may be the equestrian, but blood is the steed that carries the entire operation upon its back. There is nothing quite like it, I assure you. I have spent decades coming to understand blood and all its intricacies. I am the sole arbiter of it. 

Never write to me with yours in substitute of ink ever again. 

- Countess Dimitrescu

You laugh, and regret it. It’s an awful hybrid of air and vibrating trachea, but you are in no control over it. 

You do not need the countess to tell you that your blood was rotten, you have always known. 

There is a healing scar across the plane of your forearm. It is clinically made, but you went too deep and it hurt like a bitch, so to speak. 

Your letters insofar have run up to five or so pages of pure saccharine endearment, and hers do not even reach a tenth of that. You had nearly passed out in your pursuit to keep a vein spewing, eyes lolling back into your skull as you dipped a quill into your own blood. She must know this, and still had seen fit to condescend you. To call your blood, spilled in the name of her prayers, rotten. 

The gall. The nerve. The narcissism. 

You tremble beside yourself, a massive conglomerate of nerves being poked at with a knifepoint. You are incandescent. You are successful. You are so, so reaffirmed to murder.

 You don’t even know how you’ll do it yet. You want to tear her to pieces with your teeth. You want to dig your nails into the soft vitreous body of her eyes. You want to cut her tongue out and force her to choke on her vomit. You want death. 

Your hands come to your neck entirely of their own accord, and you have to remind them that you want her death, not your own. 

There is a time and place predestined for you to succumb to mortality. And it is soon, but not now. Not until there is a body beneath your heels and you are slicked down with hard-won vengeance.

***

By the third week, you have your bullshit down to a science. 

It is a lovely assembly of fabrication, ripped letters, torn papers, bloody bandages, and late nights spent writhing on the floor. There is a theory to every bit of mutilation, to every act of false devotion, to every early morning you limp down to whine at the door—waiting ever so impatiently for the countess to bless you with a response. You feel insane. 

Every letter draws you closer to her demise. You can taste the sweetness of it upon your tongue in your sleep and chase the feeling into dawn. You think of nothing but her, and it occurs to you that you are, again, obsessed. 

There is just something so inherently wrong with going against religion, in the name of something equally as sinful, to correct God’s mistake of letting Her take one of few things precious to you. You are in pain because of it, know in every atom that your soul is profane. 

But have you ever been anything else?

When you kneel before your bed at night and imagine it as the countess’ casket, and when your mouth waters and your mind spirals; does She know you are evil? She’s meant to be all-knowing, omniscient and swift in punishment, yet you are not dead. Has God failed you too? 

You sit at your desk, biting at the inside of your cheek as you pen what you hope to be your final letter. You have been working at this for weeks, in one sick, inane, and ludicrous plan. 

There is an estimated twenty-percent chance of this working in your favor. You have alternative options, but none so well-thought out as this one. If you truly mean to murder a Lord, this is what you have devised. 

It is flawed. It is dangerous. It is stupid. 

But you are all of the above, and yet still tottering around, so perhaps there is a hope to be found somewhere. 

As you finish, tucking the—remarkably long, even by your own standards—letter into a cream envelope, you feel the full weight of your life come and sit upon your chest like an uninvited cat. 

You are mad for this. There is no other explanation. 

The mailboy knocks three times, you answer, and the night proceeds in usual fashion. You are left alone, curled on the old man’s bed and desperate for his spectre's forgiveness. 

You do not think he would have cared so unconditionally for you if he had known, as you and his murderer know, that your blood is well and truly rotten. 

You hold the pocketwatch you salvaged from his defiled corpse, and listen to the second hand tick like a heartbeat. 

It is to your displeasure that you are woken only a few short hours later, by that same repetitive knocking. 

When—by estimation as you have either burned or shredded them—the twentieth letter slips through your mailslot, your heart performs a series of nauseating acrobatics to leap into your throat. 

She has never responded to you within a night. 

This is your warning before you are hunted and lynched.

This is where you have pushed your luck beyond its fragile limits.

You are done for. 

Your existence has been in vain, you complete idiot. You are going to die, and with not a drop of blood to show for it. You have been reckless, and now you suffer the consequences. 

You open the letter with your dagger and nearly take a finger off. 

The Countess Alcina Dimitrescu, First Lord to serve our God, and founder of the Dimitrescu Winery requests the honour of your presence. 

Dinner will be served promptly at 16:00.

Attire is strictly mandated as formal. 

Your attendance is compulsory. 

In contrast to your first encounter with a Dimitrescu summons, you know for a fact that you scream this time.

Chapter Text

You are, put kindly, fucked. 

You are fucked in several wholly different ways. Fucked upside down and sideways. You are fucked so hard you cannot think straight, and you were not even able to manage that in the first place sans the fuckening.

Someone is pounding on the door, asking after your health, and it occurs to you then that you have not yet stopped screaming. 

When you had written to the countess, suggesting a private council, you did not think of dinner. You did not think of dinner and you did not think of formal attire. You had thought of an office, a common room, perhaps. You had thought of what was meant to be a two minute audience of bullet-to-head. Dinner was an unpredictable factor. Dinner was not bullets, and dinner was making you scream. 

You shut your mouth for fear of anyone thinking to drag you to the nearest madhouse—which is not to say that you didn’t belong in one, it’s just that violence is somewhat hindered there—and instead gaze upon the letter with open revulsion as if it had bitten you. 

You have worked this woman over for weeks, and have failed to account for this. You now have less than twelve hours to recover from a dinner invitation. 

You drop the letter in favor of thrusting your hands to your hair and gripping your scalp as if you could physically pull your mind back to acceptable levels of sanity. 

What the fuck were you supposed to do, exactly?

You do not register the way your body is leaning too far to one side before you fall on your ass, hands still knotted in your hair. 

You would like to die, now. 

You turn your head slowly to risk a glance at your wardrobe, with several of the self-carved drawers ajar. You know all that resides there is confirmation of your annihilation. You have not owned anything that could be mistaken for formal by a minute-old blind infant, who knows nothing of formality, in the darkest reaches of night. 

You wear grey rags, moth-bitten pants, and patchy coats that had been made by a man who was triple your age and ridden with arthritis and carpal tunnel. He would have been your hope, and he is now hollowed out and stuffed full of straw in a bitch’s vineyard. The village’s sole seamstress hates you viciously—as the mailboy is her son and if nothing else that hatred is rightly deserved—and if you yourself attempted to sew or create anything from what terrible fabrics you might be able to scrape together, the castle doors would fling open and you would be rent in twain on basic principle. 

So, as it stands, your options are incredibly vast and consist of: dying, dying, dying, or—if you are feeling particularly adventurous—you could also try dying. 

You pull the pocketwatch by its chain and flick it open to check the time. Oblivious to your agony, it only salts your wound by pointing its short hand at the delicately engraved 5. It takes you, with your idiot hobbling gait, half an hour to reach the castle. That is half an hour deducted from the infinity you need to keep from presenting yourself to the countess as an impoverished lunatic. Impoverished lunatics do not break bread with nobility; this is rudimentary information included in the Homicidal Invalid’s Guide to Surviving Dinner with Murderesses. 

Would it be more prudent of you to shoot yourself now, or later? 

You push yourself up from the floor, and almost meet it again when your leg buckles under you. Luckily, you are more used to your leg failing than operating as a normal appendage ought, and right yourself before any more physical damage can be coupled to the preexisting psychological. 

You stagger to the wardrobe and begin rifling through the contents, perhaps someone twisted a miracle and left something salvageable in the throes of it. 

You find your best shirt, which you have worn since you were fourteen and had to sew back together five times. You find a pair of dark trousers that are flimsy and loose on your hips. You find the only overcoat you have that does not reek of mold, and it dwarfs you so severely it sweeps the floorboards. And you find a belt that may very well be older than you are to bring the whole ensemble together. You do not find a miracle. 

The countess lives in luxury’s lap, or perhaps it would be more fitting to say that luxury crawled easily into hers. You live in a village of peasants and beggars, surrounded by misfortune and poor soil. You do not have two of anything to rub together. She must know this. 

You look at yourself in your cracked mirror, and you see desperation. The effect of impoverished lunatic is still very much present in your bloodshot eyes, which look back at you horribly and wildly.  

It seems hateful to you, that out of everything, your lack of appropriate dress should be your undoing. 

Your nails come to your lips and you pick at them while you think. 

The seamstress hates you, but you are all hungry and starved for some ounce of financial liberty. You may have enough lei to tempt her into giving you something approaching suitable, if you can pretend for five minutes that you are not as socially intolerable as she would have you believe. 

You could also hold her at gunpoint. This is not beneath you. 

You blink slowly. 

Then again, perhaps that is better off left as a last resort. 

You would have subjected yourself to Penance again for the thought if not for the time constraint, there was just never enough time anymore. 

You instead gather yourself, straighten your glasses onto your nose, and lean yourself onto your cane; because it is all you can do.

There has been a wrench in your plans that has bumped you off-kilter. You’d thrown your fit over it, but you were still duty-bound to retaliation. Only children and people with sound minds could afford to crumble when confronted with a situation that demanded versatility. If you, with your broken body and dullard brain, were nothing else you were fucking versatile.

And you could solve this problem without falling back to armed robbery or duress.

***

You are breaking down as you walk. 

The route the castle is no more forgiving than it had been all those eternities ago, before something had reached within your anima and flipped a series of switches that made you hostile. You feel as if you are inhuman, and in place of flesh and tendon there are a hundred writhing spiders and a hundred brutal ants crawling through your nerves and blood; that they are pulling your muscles into the crooked motions that move you forward. Worms squirm tunnels through your organs like rotten apples, they make a nest of your heart and confuse it until it palpitates with a thousand beats of theirs. Hot larvae slither under your skin en masse and you so badly wish to split your skin open to clean your bones.

You are out of breath, dissociating out of your mind, and you are trembling so fretfully that your teeth clatter. 

Contrary to what you wish was true, it is not because of the physical exertion or nerves regarding Baby’s First Murder Attempt. 

It is because you are wearing his suit, and you are going to be sick. 

It is too big on you, and so you look ridiculous. It looked ridiculous on him the few occasions he had worn it, but he had the aged charm to compensate that you do not. The brown tweed jacket is limp on your shoulders like it has given up and died, and it is long enough to lick the backs of your knees. You have placed the last of your hopes and dreams into the belt that holds the trousers up. Any promises of retribution will be promptly and swiftly abandoned if your trousers should fall. You will end it all.

You will have to pass the vineyard again.

It is with that thought that you go white-knuckled on your cane and you feel the bile begin to creep. 

You have sworn off vomiting for the next century, especially tonight, because you think if you start you will not stop until you have spewed up your lungs. You cannot lose your shit while the countess still draws breath. 

You teeter forward, switching to taking heaving gasps through your mouth as you see the beginnings of the vineyard. 

You can almost feel the ghost-breath hissing down your neck, you are so vulnerable to phantoms. It stings your eyes and makes you dizzy. You will not look.

It is not that you won’t. It is that you cannot, you coward.  

You bite your tongue until you taste blood, and you keep moving. There is no option of going back for you, you have easily destroyed any way home that does not involve a body falling tonight. Whether it be yours, hers, or both, you have become betrothed to this. Your revolver is hidden within the jacket, you have pared the time it takes to brandish it down to near nothing. The daggers are just insurance. 

You are not quite sure how you want to do this, but planning now would only exhaust your remaining brainpower—which is currently being poured into the various hallucinatory insects that apparently power your gross motor skills. 

You haul yourself to those heavy doors, and you are so beautifully close to coming back into your mind when the door opens. 

The maid from before is the one who greets you at the door, and if she had been frazzled in your first encounter she had died and been forcibly shoved back into her body now, such is the state of her distress. 

You take each other in, and whatever had caused her anxiety was temporarily pushed aside in favor of her adopting the meanest, most harsh curl of someone’s lip you have ever seen to date. She opens her mouth to speak in the same moment you push past her and into the entrance hall. 

“I told you not to-”

“-return here. I recall, I simply elected not to heed your advice,” you respond, adjusting the bow tie that you had found alongside the rest of the suit. You loathe it, passionately, but there was nothing else you considered passable and you could not go without one. 

The maid stares at you with her mouth slightly opened in some state of disbelief, as if she has also decided to join in your anatomical insect parade, and you have enough time to wonder if maybe she is delusional as well.  

Something you do not understand washes over her and she closes her mouth, steels her eyes as if she means to cut you with her gaze alone, and balls her fists into her skirts. 

“Your summons?” she asks, in tones that rival the Romanian winter. 

You produce the countess’ letter from your pocket with a flourish, the wax seal and embedded crest still clinging to the envelope. 

She does not actually look at it, just snatches it from you and stuffs it into her own pocket. She turns her back to you and begins walking down one of those nonsensical corridors. 

“Follow,” she snaps, not looking to see if you obey. 

The action unsettles you deeply, not necessarily because of the maid’s curtness, but because of what it implies. 

This is the solitary process that serves as a barrier between yourself and the countess, an unarmed maid that you could theoretically pull your dagger on and correct her attitude (You will not be doing this.) if you considered it worth the effort. 

The countess has robbed girls from the village—daughters and wives. She has had men shredded and left on display as bird-scarers, she proudly makes a business of blood wine. You have an extensive novel of personal history that has molded you into a desperate creature. But you are a desperate creature borne from a hive of them; of the powerless, the hungry, the furious. You who have been stolen from. Villagers would never criticize the Lords through spoken word, but you, logically, cannot be the singular person to think of assassination. 

So where are her defenses? 

You do what you can to memorize the route back to the front door, calculating several other potential escapes that you may be able to perform should things take a turn. There are no guarantees here, but you had not developed this plan on the contingency that you would live long after you pulled the trigger. 

If you did, well, it might just be better to slit your own throat after you finished anyway. 

There is something peculiar about the maid and her pattern. When she had led you to the opera hall, it had taken you some time to arrive, but she was seemingly well-versed in the castle’s geography. As she guides you now, you watch her arrive at a hallway, stop, look between several directions, think, and then finally select one. This happens on multiple occasions, and you’re starting to formulate hypotheses. 

You increase the length of your strides, painfully, to walk next to her. She flicks her attention up to you for half a second before locking it forward. 

“Is it much further?”

“No, miss,” she replies. “It’s a large castle, if you need any assistance (here she looks at your cane and your bandaged leg and you think your expression must have turned hellish, for she refocused elsewhere immediately thereafter) I’d be glad to provide it.” 

“None required.”

And that is how the conversation dissolves. 

You are slow physically, and even more so inept mentally, but your stupidity has limits. So after approximately two mind-numbing minutes, you realize exactly what is happening. 

She is trying to get you lost. 

You think approaching her with the accusation would be counterproductive, so you dissect the information on your own while she leads you through an intentional labyrinth. 

The castle is old, and the countess is rich. There are likely artefacts and jewels and God knows what other priceless remains lie here. If you were to purloin something, it would be significantly harder to make out with whatever you stole—granting enough time for someone to catch and flay you. 

Perhaps this line of reasoning also extends towards physical attempts; and so establishes the first line of preventative measures. It would make some sort of sense for this to be in effect now, rather than your first visit as you had not been expected to meet with the countess then, correct? 

But then you also had every opportunity to collect possessions from the opera hall, so why not pull the trick then as well? There is not any way for your plotting to be known, and it surely would not be expected on appearances. The maid had not even checked you for weaponry. 

That gives you pause. 

Why had she not checked your person? You were meant to share a meal with the countess, presumably in private, if she were paranoid of you escaping with something valuable or after you had attacked her, would it not make sense to also be leery of any paraphernalia associated? 

Something feels wrong, and you start to sweat. 

When you arrive at the dining room, you think you might hyperventilate before you have a chance to do anything, which would be largely embarrassing and yet still very in character for you. 

The table has been set with china dinnerware and wine glasses that likely cost more than your home, however it does not feel as ostentatious a space as you would think a dining room in the castle would be. The table and cloth border on modest, and the room would feel welcoming if not for the circumstance. You suppose the countess would not necessarily have need for much else, you cannot imagine she has many guests. 

The thing that strikes you as curious is the large chair heading the table. 

You know exactly who will occupy it, that was a mystery unraveled the moment you had registered it. What puzzles you is the size. 

The maid clears her throat and guides you to the seat of honor, which makes you immediately and acutely uncomfortable, but protesting against a seating arrangement that was likely ordered by the countess herself would not bode well for you.

You are meant to be smitten tonight. 

Again, you fight bile. 

“Please sit, miss,” the maid pulls the chair out for you. “The Lady and her daughters will be arriving shortly, there was an incident before you arrived that required their attention.” 

The way the colors of her face migrate towards an unhealthy shade of green implies to you that the ‘incident’ was best left discussed as just that: cryptic and clearly abstaining from details that will threaten your tender stomach. 

A decidedly uncomfortable silence falls between you, and you shift awkwardly in your chair. You are used to wood that had barely been passable for furniture. The upholstery that you are resting your ass on feels unnatural to you and activates the unfortunate side effect of causing your brain to redouble its efforts into overthinking everything. 

It feels too easy. 

You are a walking exhibition of Murphy’s Law. You are a bastard child of misfortune and poor odds. Things do not go well for you. Things are not easy for you. Things have never been easy for you. Breathing is not easy for you; there is no way in hell this will be. 

The maid eyes you from the corner of her vision, you think she looks panicked. You watch her roll her jaw. 

Something is wrong, so terribly wrong. 

“Miss?” she says, tentatively. 

You acknowledge her with an incline of your head. 

“You ought to know,” she fights with something internally, and it presents to you as darting eyes and fidgeting hands. “The countess is not a forgiving woman.” 

“I could have surmised that much on my own.” 

“You don’t understand,” she whispers urgently, this time reaching down to grab the arm of your chair in a sudden movement that makes you jolt. “She-” 

You blink.

Her face goes still, the warning eternally caught in her throat forevermore. 

Her head rolls, detached from its place on her neck and hits the floor just between your shoes. Her body follows suit. 

You blink. 

“She always was a bit of a chatterbox, don’t you think?” 

A woman steps forth to occupy the space where the maid once stood, kicking her body somewhere to the side in a fluid movement. She is lithe, pale, and draped in black cloth. The fire of her hair furls in waves from underneath her dark hood, and she is staring into you with molten, awful, gold eyes. 

You stare at her, largely because you are trapped five seconds in the past—when the maid had a head and was not creating a slow puddle of blood on the floor—and also because she had materialized from nothing and nowhere, which warrants staring. 

The woman performs an elegant downswing with a sickle, the steel flashes in front of your face so close you see a glimpse of your stilled reflection. The ferocity of the movement makes you recoil so harshly you smack your head on the back of your chair. 

The resulting pain resumes time for you. 

You start to tremble, you are shaking so badly your vision is altered and you cannot breathe. Your body does something that causes you to spasm in the chest, and you wheeze in an attempt to find air. It does not come to you. 

“Oh, come on ,” the woman says, in the same sort of way one might chastise a child for a tantrum. “It’s hardly worth all that fuss- oh! Is this your first time seeing someone beheaded? I’m so glad I got to you first!” 

You are focused primarily on not going into cardiac arrest when she places her hands on either side of your face, tilting your head up to her. 

She brings her head down to yours so that they meet and smiles at you with a curl to her lip that suggests some eerie degree of fondness that makes you try to shudder away from her. She boxes you into the chair with her body. Her grip is fast and you do not go far. 

You are drowning in gold. 

“My name’s Daniela,” she whispers against the shell of your ear. She then does something you will never forget: she bites into your earlobe and pierces it. 

You are so out of air, there is no hope for screaming. You manage the most pathetic sounding whimper to date and struggle vainly, kicking with your good leg and scrabbling at her face with your gloved hands. 

You cannot escape this. 

You forget everything you have ever been taught about defense, you forget the revolver, you forget the daggers. Your brain reverts into something primal and desperate and weak. You are hardwired to powerlessness. You kick and thrash and cry, your senses have left you. You are going to die, you are going to be eaten alive. Why did you factor civility into your calculations? You are a rabbit with a broken leg caught in a snare, and God help you; you have wandered into a den of wolves. 

Daniela purrs against your neck, pulling away from your ear to lick at one of the veins of your jugular. 

“Your blood,” she says, softly, in awe. “I’ve never had anything like it. I’ve never had anything like you . You’ll be mine, won’t you, human?” 

You do finally scream, but it is such a meek thing. Why did you bother?

She bares her teeth, you feel them on your skin. 

Something yanks her off of you. 

You cower into the chair like the half-wit you are while chaos breaks out somewhere in the room. There is the distinct sound of glassware being broken, you see blurs of movement from your peripheral, Daniela growls, and you cower in your chair because it is all you can do. 

“That was entirely unnecessary.” 

“Oh? It looked like you were having a bit too much fun, it’s my job to make sure you don’t. We haven’t even had dinner yet.” 

“I just wanted a taste, is that so terrible? Bela already-”

“Bela did not bite into her ear.”

“Nibbled.”

“You don’t understand moderation, it’s either ‘bite’ or ‘maul’ with you. No in-between, you don’t know how to ‘nibble’.” 

“Have you no faith in my ability to learn, dear sister?”

“ Fuck no.”

You unravel yourself in a series of jerky, unsteady movements. Another cloaked woman has entered the scene of what is revealing itself to be the most unfortunate afternoon of your existence. She has her back to you, but you see the midnight of her hair from your vantagepoint. The biggest relief you find is that she does not seem nearly as interested in shedding your blood as her companion. 

She stands as the only obstacle between you and Daniela, who notices you stirring and immediately shoots you a wink that causes you to jump. You are bleeding from your earlobe, drops of blood splattering on your collar and you reach up to feel the wound. 

She has torn a piece from your ear. 

There is a small chunk missing from where your skin ought to be, and you feel yourself begin to lose the frankly slack grip on the reins of your composure.

So much has happened in such a short span of time. Your mind is decomposing inside of your skull, you feel reality smashing itself through the recesses of your animal brain, trying to access that sense of logic you know you have. 

You did not calculate this well, not well at all.

Chapter Text

You are—as a personal rule more so than a trait of character—rational. 

You regularly have to evaluate your own sanity, in regards to your perception of visual and aural elements, and you may be somewhat liable to a savage disposition. But you are rational. You are stupid, but you are rational. You have been left to fend for yourself in the stagnant watercourses of a wretched community, you have been raised into a church that maimed you. You have seen the only person who considered you pardonable nailed to a wooden post with his innards removed for no reason at all. Through all of this you have been, in some capacity or another, rational. 

It is double-edged to you now. You cannot rationalize this, and in turn you are unmended. 

You sit, or more accurately, you hover in your chair. You did not realize you had backpedaled so far, and now you are pressing yourself into the back of the upholstery like everything beyond it was toxic. Your good leg is folded underneath you, the other hangs limply over the side. Your mouth has fallen open and you feel froth coming to your lips and blood where you have bitten your tongue. You clutch your torn ear, as it is the reminder of what world you have stepped into. 

That and the dead woman at the foot of your chair. 

There is a difference between thinking you understand violence, and being forcibly and suddenly confronted with it. With death rubbing itself into your face, unritualistic, not even remotely premeditated, not caused by your hand, and by unnatural means; you balked, you nitwit. You balked and now you are confused and brainless. 

“Cassandra, you're scaring her. Put the sickle down and let’s be polite.”

“Me? Me? You bit her and killed off- (here she snaps her fingers and points at the maid’s still warm corpse) this one, whatever her name was.”

You are sucking in as much air as you can manage. You are wounded. You are progressing towards shock, but your mouth moves before your mind: “Why?”

It is your voice that asks, but you do not recall ever sounding so breathless nor so plaintive. 

Both women are looking at you now, Daniela with her brows upturned in what might have been something resembling pity, if pity had taken a dark turn towards hunger and barely restrained delirium. Cassandra—you assume, and your assumptions count for jack shit—is vacant, her expression a void to you and as a result, greatly unsettling. 

“What?” she asks, twirling her sickle expertly in her hand. The blade makes you flinch in memory of the maid, you refuse to examine her body too closely, but you know Daniela’s is painted with her blood. How they managed to cleave through tendon, muscle, and vertebrae in a single swipe is beyond you. It should not be possible, and yet the evidence lies before you. There is no chance of a particularly potent hallucination on your part, the body has been affected, you are bleeding, and therefore everything that is happening is not a mere extension of your faulty mind. You have never regretted confirmation of reality so much in your miserable life. 

“Why?” you repeat, stupidly stuck like someone had struck you so hard you could no longer claim coherence. 

Cassandra huffs, slicking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Daniela, you broke it.” 

“It’s fine, aren’t you, human?” 

You are not fine. You are so incredibly and mind-bogglingly not fine. 

You cannot use the revolver, it has been intended for one use only and revealing it now would be your least creative attempt at suicide insofar. You cannot stab them, you cannot fight back or put yourself in a position where your intentions should be questioned. You can do exactly nothing. 

And you are doing nothing when a hand finds itself questing on your shoulder. You freeze, and then you look up. 

So, there is apparently a third one. 

In contrast to her sisters, she does not say, imply, or do anything to terrify you. 

It just comes naturally. 

Her eyes are owlish and feral, burning and burning and burning into you. Wide and consuming and unblinking as she stares down at you from behind the chair, irises small black planets in a galaxy of shifting liquid amber. The galaxy rests within a universe of sclera, white and foreboding. 

You had not heard her appear, you had not sensed her. But you understand she is the one who crept behind you in the opera hall, there is no other presence so suffocating. 

She leans down in an awful moment—her proximity bothers you most of all—and licks your fingers where the blood coalesces in the gaps between your knuckles. 

Daniela makes a shrill sound. It is not loud, and it does not last long, but it perforates your ears and makes everyone in the room simultaneously wince. “Bela! Mother said we weren’t to drink from her!”

Bela—and you are assured in this because there has never been a name more befitting—runs a hand down your front. This would have, in any other circumstance, sanctioned death. But you are stiffened in panic, unwilling to so much as twitch your nose while she maintains contact with you. Her voice is nothing in comparison to any other combination of volume, pitches, or frequencies you have experienced. It is a voice that echoes within itself, and within you. You almost do not hear her, so low does she speak: “And you weren’t to attack her, yet here we both stand, insurgents.” 

She does not pull her eyes, those terrible eyes, from you. 

Cassandra groans, and that is all the warning given before a sickle whistles through the air, aimed straightly and with uncanny and unbelievable precision. You did not perceive the weapon nor Cassandra throwing it until it had embedded itself into the upholstery where Bela’s head once was, the pommel swaying no more than a centimeter from your temple.

Bela disappears from behind you, reappears in front of Cassandra, and begins a process of arguing in her low, reverbing voice. Daniela joins them, with her screeches and cries. You feel a migraine beginning to throb in the depths of your head. 

This is, as you understand it, your crucible. 

This is your apex of disaster. This is all your mind has been engineered to handle. You have found the limit of your tolerance and hit it so goddamn hard you might as well have heard the comedically timed bang and seen stars circling round your head. 

You are geared up for self-destruction, when somehow—because you are forsaken—it gets worse. 

All three of them suddenly go rigid, all conversation dies, and where you had been the hare in the hunter’s trap, the sisters become the foxes raiding it, pausing like they had only just heard the baying of hounds. They are delayed in time, save for their eyes, which all turn upon you in one horrendous movement. 

And then they dissolve. 

You watch hundreds of…flies, squirm and writhe around the room, into crevices, under the rugs, beneath the tablecloth, into the plants; and they are gone. There had been no noise, no sound, just two seconds of something impossible. 

Because you have been shattered, you do not process this, in part because you simply lack the ability and in another because you are not given the opportunity. 

There is the distinctive sound of heels on wood, and you think everything in the castle inhales. The sole source of light, a candelabra mounted in the corner, grows ashamed of itself, flickers and hushes. Somewhere, in the back of your mind, you hear the church bell tolling. 

You hear this from too far away, and each clack sends a new lance of anticipation through your system. You are well and truly hyperventilating now, you swipe your hands against your trousers, fingertips slick with sweat. 

The world stops for her, you know it does. The gigantic floating rock in space that bends to no one rolls and tilts and barks for her, in this moment. 

Or maybe you are just more spineless than you thought. 

She stoops to enter the doorway. 

The doorway had cleared the highest hair at the summit of your scalp by several heads. You cannot comprehend this, you cannot rationalize this. Her body unfolds from itself as she enters, and she doubles in height. She is larger than your consciousness of her, and somehow it seems fitting—how she absorbs everything in the room, how your space is now her space. How you are now, inexplicably, hers. You are entangled, so helplessly and unforgivingly within her presence alone.

Her shadow stretches to meet you, engulf you, eat you. You allow it, because it is all you can do.

Because it is all you have ever been able to do, and all you will ever be able to.  

Her eyes slide to your own, and some part of you dies. 

Your heart is between your teeth, your lungs careen towards collapse, your mind has already given out; the rest of you will follow. Your body does not behave, it is not your own. The bell is louder, the yoke swings in an invisible wind, the clapper crashes into the brass mouth—it screams and screams and screams that golden hymn in your last hour. And you will yourself to run, to give up everything, to neglect your immobility and to abandon it all. You are a worm, in the eyes of the Lord. 

But you are crucifixed to your place, paralysed from the neck down when she looks down upon you. Your mortality is here, she is your reaper. 

“Well,” the countess says, and if Bela’s voice echoed, hers is a garrote upon your soul. “You are certainly not what I expected.”

You are stupid. This has been addressed numerous times prior, it is a regular revelation. You have been stupid since conception and in every waking moment since then. You are stupid in the same way a dog is stupid: running in circles and chasing your own tail, only to catch it and yelp upon discovering, to no one’s surprise but your own, that it hurts when you sink your teeth into it. Discoveries are painful, and like a dog you humiliate yourself to any audience in the vicinity when you bite down on something you should have already known would bring you harm. 

She watches you, as you come apart. You think she must be able to see within you, to know what you planned, and the realization that you had failed long before you even began. 

She steps forward, and the sound of her heels makes you keen. She sees the maid’s body, strewn somewhere to the side, and her eyes narrow in something contemptuous. When she stretches out a hand, to reach for your ear, you open your mouth. 

You realize nearly too late you mean to bite her. 

You snap your jaws closed, now grinding your teeth together, schooling them into obedience. If she notices, she says nothing; she is absorbed in your wound. 

Her lovely nose wrinkles with distaste, and you are diffident of your ear, of your blood, of your distress, and of how animal you are before her. You know from your letters that she dislikes the smell of your blood, it is nothing in comparison to the ichor she consumes, it is spoiled fruit hanging sourly from a dead tree to her. You cannot stand the magnitude of her disappointment, it will destroy you. 

That is not a line of reasoning you examine as closely as you should. 

“How did this happen, my dear?” she asks, rubbing her thumb along what remains of your earlobe. Concern is a stranger to her voice, however, like she forgot to pretend to genuinely care. 

“Pardon?” you bleat, the single word not on your tongue but underneath it, as if it wishes to crawl back down your throat. 

“Your ear.”

“I, um.”

“Something bit you, it seems, pet,” she says, and you hear a faint and anxious buzzing. She pulls away from you and addresses the room, thunderously: “And the only things in this castle with teeth and a tendency to bite, I recall ordering explicitly not to .” 

And the room shimmers. 

Those same impossible two seconds are reversed, the flies swarm into dark curling clouds, the humming becomes deafening. From this impossibility, the sisters form, heads bowed in the sort of submission that calls too familiarly to you. You understand, in an uncomfortably personal manner, their fear.

And you hate it.

The countess turns to acknowledge them, and the tempest within your ribcage wanes in a small way now that her attention is momentarily pulled from you. It sits too heavily. You cannot bear the weight of judgement, not from her, and not like this. 

“Now,” she presses her gloved hands together, and straightens her back, raking her scalding eyes across her daughters slowly and deliberately. “Let’s start with clearing up any potential mishaps on my part. I so desperately want to believe that between the four of us, and all of these long years together, that we have established methods of clear and effective communication. We speak the same tongues, you have proven yourselves to be capable of higher reasoning, and we’ve talked quite a few times about the behavior I wished for from you this afternoon.

“So, by that logic,” here she makes a grand sweeping gesture towards you, and you are not ashamed to say that you reel back. “This should not have happened. 

“Daniela, sweet girl, tell me, what did I say to you all not a quarter of an hour ago? Do you remember that conversation?” she asks, tilting the head of the girl up to her. “I know you do, darling.”

For her part, Daniela is surprisingly calm, which leads you to the conclusion that you are, in fact, spineless. 

“You said we were having a guest,” she says, and with her mother’s encouragement continues. “And that she wasn’t to be harmed, which was defined as, but not solely limited to: biting, chewing, scratching, clawing, poisoning, bludgeoning, hanging, electrocuting, terrorizing, burning at the stake, stabbing, or otherwise torturting or physically damaging any part said guest.”

“Very good,” the countess says after this, as if the girl had just announced she had been properly housebroken. Her grip on Daniela’s head is a soft caress, until it is not. 

It becomes violent in the way a bear trap does, with no warning or chance of escape. She lifts Daniela into the air, who is entirely unprepared for her sudden farewell from her center of gravity. 

“So, enlighten me as to how it is that your dentation has made its way into her ear. I am incredibly curious.” 

This is, to you, an unreasonable demand. With the grip the countess has upon her daughter, the specific placement of her fingers and palm against the mandible, the pressure being exerted and the clear strength that is exhibited within those phalanges—down to her metacarpals, actually—there is no way to answer her question. 

Daniela is a moving mass of limbs and distress, legs kicking in fruitless endeavors beneath her, all prior composure lost in favor of panic. 

You may have sympathized had she not placed you in the same situation a few minutes earlier.

You fully expect for this interaction to be rhetorical, the countess answering her own questions while her daughter writhes, but she does not speak again, only maintains her silencing grip while Daniela looks for all the world as you must have: a rat between the jaws of a lion. 

But it’s not rhetorical, and Daniela breaks her own jaw. 

You hear the way it produces a nauseating pop and the muffled groan that follows, how the countess does not lessen that crushing pressure and the structure of her bone is compressed and released. Something beyond your understanding of human constitution happens, and her face and neck—you cannot phrase this formally—fucking shifts to match the force. 

It does not happen swiftly, and you hear too much bone. 

If Daniela is speaking a language, it is not one you know and it is punctuated by sundry instances where she chokes and spits out teeth that clatter to the ground. It must be satisfactory for the countess, however, because she lets the girl go. 

Daniela swarms immediately after she is dropped and before she can hit the floor, rushing from the room in a dark cloud of flies and blood. 

The two remaining daughters keep their heads obediently bowed, and neither flinches as the countess turns her quiet ferocity to Cassandra. 

She is grabbed by the throat, but not with quite the same force as she demonstrated with Daniela, leaving Cassandra to weakly grapple with her mother’s hands upon her neck. 

“And you, dear, were meant to watch over your sisters, keep them from getting themselves into mischief,” the countess says, still fauxing maternal. “I didn’t expect that you’d disappoint me as well.” 

Cassandra sputters, which you consider to be fair. 

“Go,” Lady Dimitrescu says, motioning  towards the door and the blood Daniela left in a splattering trail behind her. “Clean her up and make her presentable. You have fifteen minutes before you’re in the same state.”

She is dropped with the same absence of ceremony, and just before she too bursts into a swarm, you swear you see Cassandra’s eyes flash in something long and sinister. 

You fully anticipate the legacy of Assault on Windpipes to continue with Bela, and so it is to your bafflement that the countess breathes an exaggerated sigh and merely places her large hand upon the girl’s head. Bela glances, doe-eyed and perfectly innocently, up through her haze of honey hair while her mother ushers her out of the room with a gentleness in stark contrast to the power displayed not even a full thirty seconds before. 

And then you are alone with her. 

This is the part where you shoot her, but you are electrified with hesitation and cowardice. 

She looks at you over her shoulder as your hands stutter towards the buttons and clasps on your jacket, you do not recall having it closed. 

Throughout the entirety of her brutality she hadn't once spared you a glance, her back was to you, and so you had no indication of her temper. Her tone was steady, calm as if this was her natural state of being, but when she looks at you now; you see the cooled ashes of flame behind her eyes. 

“I must offer my apologies,” she says, turning to face you in full. “I had not imagined I would be so blatantly disobeyed. They’re normally much more tame, I assure you.” 

You do not enjoy being lied to, but you have little choice aside from accepting it, in this instance. 

“It’s quite alright,” you hear yourself say, because only within Castle Dimitrescu may you have your ear bitten and torn into and speak those words in response to such an incompetent apology. 

You do not take stock of your mind in the uncomfortable silence that follows, you fear attempting to analyze any singular event or circumstance would send you down an extensive spiral from which you would likely never recover. There is simply too much to digest, and within your mental stomach, you are tender. 

The countess unnerves you. 

She has taken perch upon the oversized chair you had noted prior, and is staring at you. She does not speak, nor does she move. You only risk glances from your peripheral, to ensure you are not imagining this. Her shoulders and chest do not rise with noticeable breath, and so she has come to resemble a very large and very evil statue. 

“I—did not imagine you to be nearly so tall,” you say, haltingly. You have never been talented at conversation, and you have never had to be conversational with the person who killed your only passable definition of family. If this had been covered in the Homicidal Invalid’s Guide to Surviving Dinner with Murderesses, you had conveniently skipped that section and focused mostly on the bread breaking thing.

The countess unstatuifies and laughs, only it is the sort of laughter that does not truly seem to find anything particularly funny. There is a sense that you are gaining, that a fair percentage of the emotions she expresses are fictitious, which contributes greatly to the unnerving. 

Once she has concluded her peal of performative humor, she graces you with a response, which you wholly did not expect: “And I did not imagine you to be so uncharmingly bland, and yet here we are.”

You are, again, reminded that this is when you are meant to shoot her. 

“You are much more reserved in person than in writing,” she remarks. “I hope I haven’t given you cause for shyness.”

“I suppose I’m simply still in awe, my Lady.”

This, at least, seems to genuinely garner her attention; but you are not wholly sure you want it. 

“In awe, little heretic?” she asks, and that name is going to grate on you for the rest of your rapidly shortening existence. 

“Your—” (Here your breath fails because she shifts forward in a movement that demands your eyes make their first proper acquaintance beyond four milliseconds and you are rendered instinctually inarticulate.) “Castle is lovely…baroque, I believe?” 

“Somewhat, yes.” she responds, and you have the awful impression she is waiting for something which is followed by the even more awful impression that you know what it is. 

Shame is a luxury. You cannot afford it. 

You force yourself to stand—which is an accomplishment of skill and nothing less—and despite everything that your cortisol soaked circulatory system screams at you, you cross the distance to her which is, admittedly, not very far at all; but you do it without your cane, because it would have been pointless given what you are about to do. 

Up until this point, you have cleverly avoided noticing the damage to your leg since Penance, and even more so given that it has mostly only gotten worse. You have strips of bandage and gauze wrapped round the length of your calf, but the damage is more internal than external. Something foul has happened to your tibia, you understand, and something important muscle-wise is suffering under your poor care. 

This is all to say, when you drop to your knees before the countess and her stupid chair, you deserve for her head to roll itself from its shoulders in reward for not absolutely shrieking your vocal cords raw with the pain. 

“It is a castle that flatters you, my Lady,” and you are aware of your voice and how you cannot mask your agony, both from your leg and the sheer wickedness of having to praise someone you would like to have drawn and quartered. “I am undeserving to be—your guest. I have never been worthy of your presence, I fear I sully these halls with mine. I-”

She has watched this display with mirth, which makes you trigger-happy, but then silences you with a gesture before holding out her relaxed hand towards you. 

It takes you a moment to realize what she wants, and you are suddenly in jeopardy of throwing up on her shoes. 

Regardless of how wicked it is, regardless of how vile it is, how sickening, how presumptuous, how egotistical, and how much you would, frankly at this point, rather die , you take her proud hand within your own miserable one. 

You take her hand, guide it to your lips, and you kiss it. 

You kiss it with all of the reverence and religious fervor you have ever been possessed by. You kiss her hand like it is all you have ever dreamed of for a hundred days and a thousand sleepless nights, as if you would blush to dream of kissing it, as if you would girlishly squeal to even conceive the idea in your fantasies. 

When it has only ever been a thing of your nightmares. 

Chapter Text

To summarize, in terms more delicate than what is deserved, the church’s congregation did not like you. 

There had been some general wickedrey going on behind the scenes some years prior, some threatened turmoil and gentle disparity, unthinking minds had come together and made mischief of holy interpretation. 

The village is a devout immune system, you had been—in your clueless infancy—a wayward pathogen. 

With no knowledge at your disposal, with no concept of injustice, nor any defense of cynicism, you had been thrust unhappily into this system of overzealous fanatics. There was something inherently venomous about your existence, to God. And you were depraved, unrighteous, and unworthy. 

You have always been sick, and it was this sickness that painted a red bullseye over your heart. Because you were so incurable, so diseased, it could have only been a symptom of devilish powers put into play. You were suddenly a vessel for unholy mechanisms, and were appropriately burdened with stigma. 

They tried to bring you into the graces of God, through water and fire and ash, through pressing boulder and sacred knife and rusted steel. Through prayer, through penitence. Through—

Well, it doesn’t matter now. 

As it turns out, sometimes children are sick; and it is unrelated to their relations with religion. And sometimes it takes two years and a million nights spent running on a lame leg, frostbitten, from black robes and Reverends that would see you anointed with flame. Purified men who would drown you in place of baptism, because it was too near the end of their insanity that it was proposed killing you might be a mercy. You did not know how to die, all those years ago, and they could neither heal nor end you. You were in broken purgatory at the hardened age of nine. 

Such is the catastrophe of mold. 

You recall all of this, unbidden, as you kneel before the countess. You kneel in posture you have not held since you were a blindly praying child, and depraved. You feel as one now, as she slides her hand from your own, yours like a newborn grasping with a fist around her smallest finger. You realize at some point had over-familiarized your lips with her gloved flesh; more than what is considered respectable. You still feel the phantom of it lingering, and in another timeline, not so far removed from your own, you think you may have taken that hand between your restless teeth and ripped skin from bone. 

“How obedient,” she says, and you turn your eyes upon her. She is intoxicating to your comprehension, and your tolerance is low. She burns you, and you have only ever wanted to return the favor. 

“Although, you are rather cruel around the eyes. Not the sort of thing to inspire confidence in a lady.”

It has been a longer time than considered acceptable since you have held the company of anyone for an extended period of time, and perhaps your face has developed its own will in your social absence. You quickly rearrange your expression to neutrality, or as much as you are able. 

The countess, at least, is amused. It is considerably more beneficial to you if she is humored rather than suspicious, but in truth she insofar has only derived entertainment from watching you make an ass of yourself, and maybe making an ass of her daughters as well. 

Which you cannot say you find surprising, all things considered. 

“Stand,” she says, and you receive immediate confirmation of this theory when you flail on the floor for a moment before gripping the edge of the table to right yourself. “You are rather unagile, more so than most of your ilk.”

“I am not quite able-bodied, my Lady,” you reply—you with the cane, limping gait, and visibly damaged appendage that would provide context to you being not quite able-bodied. “Forgive me.”

She considers you, pensively, and you nearly squirm before she says: “It will be of disservice to you.”

“Disservice, my Lady?” 

She makes a motion as if she is physically brushing you off, and you take it as a cue to return to your seat. You have made a mess through the bandages, and the blood pools into the once clean gauze. 

The countess eyes you as if you had just pissed on her carpet. 

“I—am graceless, my Lady. I did not expect for my injury to be so bothersome or I would have never requested your honor.” You have never had to fumble through an apology for your leg, and it burns coming from your throat and flying off your tongue. “I know my blood disgusts you.”

“‘Disgust’ implies some deep and passionate loathing I have for your fluid in particular.” (Which you did not think was true, because you had been disgusted before and never passionate, for instance: you were disgusted with the fact that the maid was still politely decomposing in the corner, unacknowledged, but did not passionately expect anything otherwise.) “And you are far too—and I mean this gently, dear—unimportant to feel ‘disgust’ towards.”

Your teeth find the slippery inside of your cheek and come down. Hard. 

“I am grateful for your valued time at all, my Lady. I admit I have thought of nothing but this meeting since I first wrote to you.” You are selling absolutely fuck-all, what with your flat voice and barely contained hatred. And so you have to play it up. 

You make some attempt at bashfulness, at embarrassment, or the shyness she seems to think you proclaim. You cross your ankles and dip your head in the way you might have crossed your ankles and dipped your head when presented with someone telling you that you were slightly less dreadful than advertised, when the only thing closest to it had been her saying your eyes were cruel. 

“If it is not too bold to say, I have dreamt of your favor, my Lady. All while I penned those letters, I wished for nothing else,” you say, doing all you can to soften the blade of your tongue. “I have—only ever wished for your favor, since I was young.” You say this as if ‘favor’ were trying very hard to be replaced with ‘fellatio’ or something just as obscene. To your own ears, you sound like someone is bumping the cold barrel of a pistol next to your temple and giving you cards to read lines from. Which is to say you are indeed very bad at pretending not to viciously dislike someone. 

She smiles at you then, and it’s one of those smiles that does not make sense within the face it is pressed. It makes her beautiful—which is a description you have conveniently been side-stepping—lifts into her cheek and in candlelight she is gloriously painted in violet and honey. There has been a lot of talk about such smiles and how they reach the eye, whether to indicate something underlying or genuine, but in the countess’ regard, her smile neither reaches her eye nor makes her any less convincing in that she is truly deriving some joy from you. 

What bothers you is that you do not know whether it is a smile that enjoys you for your flattery or for some secretive undoing she has plotted. It is a smile that could so easily say: “Look! There is a scorpion upon your back and you have not yet seen it, and you will not know it is there until it stings you and you are convulsing on the floor with its toxins.” It is that sort of smile. 

“And what has made you so inclined to me, little heretic? You know as well as I that the only favor you should be so eager to curry is that of-”

You are capable of a great many things. You are capable of so much, technically. You could have only lived as long as you have by being capable. 

You are also not capable of many things, and one of them is hearing Her name. You cannot bear it. So, you weighed your options and picked the lesser evil. 

Which was stopping the countess before her mouth could wrap round the syllables of her next words. 

“My Lady,” you say, albeit shakily. That hidden-scorpion smile fades and gives way to open astonishment, and you believe that you very well may have been one of few people to interrupt her, and that anyone else who might’ve dared is already buried and rotting. You swallow with some difficulty. “I know of my sin, yet I can only claim human affection as the culprit. You have captivated me, and I am more than willing to die if it means I do so while praising your heel until my last breath leaves me. If it were to be your name—and yours only—that I speak while being undone, then it would be a beautiful death. I would still be undeserving. My obedience would never be worth sacrifice, not in the face of your gentleness.

“I am weak, my Lady. I live my life heavy with the knowledge I am blasphemous, but if you see fit, then let this weak and unholy life be at your kindness. I know something of God, and I know something of devotion—reverence is all I am, I could show you iconography. But I also know what it means to be removed from the promise of Heaven, and that is not what awaits me when I inevitably expire. I am irredeemable. I cannot do aught but fall lower, my Lady. I would yet fall in grace to be beholden to you.” 

It is the longest stretch of unfiltered, uninhibited, fully-versed utter horseshit you have ever spoken. And you are quite proud of it, your breath is spent, and your cough is made uncomfortably loud in the pause. 

The countess steeples her fingers and leans towards you. You are still unaccustomed to her stature, how something so simple makes her daunting with no effort at all. 

“Why shouldn’t I kill you, dear? I told the girls to refrain because it is not their place until I give the order, but you talk as if you are already dead, a cold body is of little use to me.”

“I have no argument against it, if that is what satisfies you, my Lady. I only ask that it might be done in some place where my blood does not defile your floors.” 

“We have a cellar.”

“Wonderful. Would you guide me?” 

She studies you, and you do not flinch beneath the scrutiny. A large hand separates from its counterpart and comes to cup your cheek, her thumb running underneath your chin in a way that makes your skin crawl. 

You nuzzle into her palm as if it were a natural place. Her hands can break you—would not hesitate to—but you throw yourself into this lethal grasp, even when your pulse races as you notice her claws pricking against the feeble barrier of your skin. 

“I would be grateful to be anything to you, even if it happens to be a corpse tossed to the wayside—at least, for a moment, I had the privilege of your attention.”

“We don’t waste corpses, girl. Your body would never see light beyond these walls again.” 

“All the better, my Lady.”

And then the door crashes open. 

You startle and recoil from her as the girls reenter, a chaos of insectoid bodies and furious movement that somehow comes to reform them into an existence outside of a murderous cloud. You cannot even begin to understand how this works, or why it does, and you honestly believe you might aneurysm soon. 

Daniela skips from this disaster of matter, jaw no longer demolished, and with a smile that reveals teeth that had been spat out only a few minutes prior. 

She slides herself fluidly into the seat next to you before anyone might consider that she is the reason you are down half an earlobe, and you in turn push yourself to the edge of your chair, body leaning as far from her as you physically can manage without falling off completely. 

She offers you her rapacious grin as a gesture of her demented interpretation of good humor, which in contrast to her mother’s, hers says: “Look! I see the scorpion upon your back and I am the one who placed it there.” 

“Don’t worry, human. I’m all better,” she comments, because you were now apparently anxious for her well-being. “If only you could heal yourself the way we do, then maybe I could have another taste-” 

“Oh sister,” Cassandra says, depositing herself into the seat opposite of Daniela. Her expression has fallen back into long-suffering exhaustion as she slumps against her chair. Perhaps she has aged a few hundred years in the minutes they were gone, she seemed twenty to you upon her entrance and has now morphed into two-hundred. “You have only just regained the use of your jaw, why not let it rest somewhat before Mother tears it off completely. I can only help you put yourself back together so many times, dragă .” 

“But-”

“Let it rest.”

“It doesn’t even really-”

Cassandra makes a strange chittering noise, one that you do not truly hear, but rather feel. It does not vocalize from her tired mouth, but emits from her body as a whole. You do not understand it, but Daniela does, and in response she does still her jaw, proving to the world that she does have the ability to exercise some degree of self-control. 

Small miracles. 

***

The countess has not yet placed you in her evil cellar, so ten more points to you. And dinner is not horrendous, or at least, it is not as horrendous as everything else that has come before it. 

You speculate it might have something to do with the countess and her need for at least some aspect of her daughters’ lives to be orderly; everything insofar has suggested the opposite. 

It proceeds in fashion to what you would have expected of non-insect women and mothers without dark claws and staggering heights. The maids come into the room when called to collect the fallen of their ranks, and to your astonishment, do it quietly and without the circumstance chipping away at their equanimity. At least outwardly, you do not think adapting to this environment with its blood and unjustified death would leave anyone completely sound. 

You have been here for under an hour and you are already guaranteed a greater lack of soundness, which is concerning because you were not sound to begin with. 

They also dress your wound at the countess’ behest with some sort of foul-smelling salve, which leaves you with the settling acceptance of what has happened and its irreparable damage to you. 

You are served a first course of unidentifiable origin, a soup, you theorize. You do not know what comprises the broth, nor what exactly is floating within it. The countess is cannibalistic, which is not news nor truly affronting to you, but it does mean that anything and everything in your courses may disease you. 

And you eat it anyway, because what else are you supposed to do?

There is conversation, but not for you.

With Cassandra’s earlier chitter dissolved any chance of you understanding what is being said between the three women. They communicate almost exclusively through a rhapsody of alien sounds that would not be compatible with your vocal range. You think there is likely a fair bit you do not hear, simply because you cannot perceive beyond a thin range of frequencies. This is only interrupted periodically with a clipped phrase or short bark of a word e.g. ‘naturally!’ was exclaimed at least thrice and was often followed by ‘well, no’ and ‘almost’. And so you are left to push your theoretical soup around with your spoon and occasionally sip at it, which is not totally disagreeable with you. 

The countess says nothing, but appears to be capable of following the conversation in some way. Which was significantly better than what you were managing. 

She watches you, though. A glow from beneath the shadow of her hat, analytical and lacking in all humor from before. She looks down at you from the side of her vision, and you recognize it as contempt.

You are abashedly human unaided, and made even more so under her eye. You feel your gooseflesh race itself along your spine, down your arms, to your legs. You are under a combined stress, the hidden revolver feels like thirty pounds of steel strapped to your chest—and with the countess not understanding the concept of eye contact typically needing to involve two parties to avoid being bizarre—you feel like you are being scraped raw. 

This culminates in you almost striking her when she leans down to whisper in your ear, the one not bitten.

“I would think someone so eager to court my benignity would be heavily interested in my trade, don’t you, pet?” 

You think even if you had come into the castle eager to court (and you are not at all fond of the way she kisses out that certain word) her benignity, you would have long since adopted a change of heart after learning how mortified your personal space has become. 

The wine had been poured with the first course. The signature, because you were in the company of a certain breed of individuals that did not seem to particularly care for any personal morals you may have held—likely because they lacked any themselves. It is a thick, syrupy looking thing that leaves a clinging residue to the sides of the glass; and you want absolutely no part in it. The dark and terrible redness in that liquid tells you everything you need to know.

But you are cornered with the full bluntness of inquiry, a challenge to your good will and question of gratefulness to her hospitality. 

You reach out to grasp the stem of the glass and bring it to your lips. You do not afford yourself hesitation, nor a second to brace. 

You just hold your breath and drink. 

As it is quickly discovered, this does very little to make the experience less horrific. 

The girls have abandoned their previous subject in favor of this new entertainment, watching you in sadistic joy. There are now eight mustard eyes fully invested in how you handle this breach of virtue. 

Surprise. It tastes like blood. 

It has warmed since being left to the air, which leaves you swallowing an undignified amount in a short span because if you let it sit in your mouth you are going to gag and if you do not drink enough it might be deemed as rude. It is as rich and viscous as you had imagined, and sweeter and more floral than you did not. It’s all the metallic death that you taste in your own and then amplified tenfold because it is not your blood but someone else’s—which makes the whole experience considerably discomfiting, to put it gently. 

You fight very, very valiantly to grab your mind’s reins and forcibly steer it away from the aforementioned diseases and bacterial dangers this single act presents, and it works somewhat, until some wine coyly slips down your airway. 

Then you are coughing and feel it in your sinuses, because if there was a way to fuck up drinking blood wine, congratualtions, you have found it. 

One of the sisters (judging by the vague notes of something rattling internally and the high-pitched ‘Eeeee’ sort of sound she makes you assume it to be Daniela) breaks into laughter and the rest of the table follows shortly with varying degrees of hysteria, while you wrestle with not spitting the whole affair out onto the tablecloth. 

The tips of your ears are aflame as you dab your napkin against your mouth. It comes away red. 

“How crass,” the countess remarks, because this is an observation that requires vocalisation. 

“Apologies, my Lady,” you say quietly. “I was never well-versed in wine. It was a new experience for me” (“Evidently,” Cassandra says) “I hadn’t expected the—intensity of flavor.”

“Oh, I meant it rather fondly,” she replies. “I would never expect the peasantry to have any history with anything of this caliber. I find myself curious, what poison do you prefer, sweet heretic?”

You would like to say that there was a stinging remark you had prepared, to retaliate from the embarrassment, but all you manage is a self-conscious: “Alcohol generally tends to disagree with me, my Lady. And the church-” 

You close your mouth, which is what you should have done after your utterance of ‘my Lady’ . The church was dead to you, within these walls, and likely outside of them too; which is a statement to be investigated privately and away from any and all things golden. 

The countess lifts her own glass to her lips, and you understand with the single arch of her eyebrow that you need not finish either your sentence or your wine.

However she has judged you, it has already been decided. 

***

Dinner mostly proceeds in uneventful sequence. You struggle with each course, though you are starting to grow suspect of whether you are actually eating anything human. You do not hold out hope, but nothing tastes particularly amiss—not that your palate was refined. 

It is while you are poking at some unidentifiable herb on the side of your plate that you decide you need to do something before you are sent home with nothing but a torn ear and the empty feeling that a month of preparation has gone to waste. 

The sisters are still amongst themselves, and the countess no longer finds your face interesting. You need to get her alone, or everything fails. 

You find your hand wandering to her own, which is delicately placed in her lap. It is a risky area, for so many reasons, but you steel yourself with the confidence that you will both be dead soon. 

She glances at you, and not yet with disgust, which is hopeful. You have re-learned your countenance over the span of dinner, and think you may understand the correct expression needed to not appear horrific. You attempt this scientific exploit, try softening your features and making yourself submissive in posture. Your glasses are shoved to the apex of your nose, and you—hideously—bite down on your lip. You have read about this. 

“My Lady,” you say, quietly enough that you have room to hope no one else might hear. “Might I have a word with you…privately?” 

The countess makes no large change in expression, and instead takes a long drink from her glass. “Whatever about, pet?”

You swallow. 

“There is something I’d like to ask of you, if you were willing, my Lady. Something that—requires your expertise alone.”

Whether from amusement or genuine curiosity she obliges, and your pulse, sensing its cue, immediately jumps to action.

“Excuse us for a moment, dears,” she says, pushing up from her chair while you follow suit. “I shall return momentarily, do not do anything reckless in my absence.”

There is a brief chorus of  “yes, Mother”’s and all of their eyes burn into your back as you leave. 

The countess leads you out of the room and you limp shortly behind. If there is any remorse within her character for someone with an inability to match her freakish stride, it is not present for you, and you find yourself working to keep from straggling as she leads you through the castle. 

“Tell me, girl,” she says, and you are horrified because you hardly have enough air to breathe, let alone carry conversation. “Why me? Why not dedicate yourself bodily to any of the other Lords?”

“With due respect,” you wheeze. “I haven’t known any of the other Lords to be truthfully worthy of the title—I beg you not look upon me that way, my Lady, I know I blaspheme—none so worthy as you.” 

“What makes me deserving, in your mind?”

“Your understanding, my Lady.”

She pauses at a flight of curling and ruby stairs that makes you cough before you even set foot upon the first. 

She hums. 

And then she climbs them, leaving you at the foot to scramble for breath. 

“What understanding?” she asks, once she reaches the landing, gazing down upon you—idiotically struggling your way up the case. 

“Perhaps of many things,” you reply, breathless. “But I suppose what I mean to say is, of humanity, our nature.” 

“Take your time, pet,” she says, because you have to stop mid-way to double over, tasting (your own) blood in your mouth. 

“Forgive me, forgive us , my Lady.” Your vision swims, but your mouth runs as water, and you are ill-equipped to stop a tangent. “Where God may be the constitution of faith, She trusts the right of penalty to your will, as her First. I would never mask my intention: I would rather kiss the boot of the executioner than leave my soul to the jury. You know, more than any Lord, more than God—” 

And you look at her wholesale then, brokenly beside yourself, unable to even mount a flight of stairs. 

“—that we deserve to burn.” 

She watches as you clamber your way to the top, and you walk in silence, you are never able to reach a gait that would allow you to limp at her side. You are always several paces behind. 

The countess’ chambers are not removed from the rest of the castle in terms of design. If it were meant to be any more grandiose then you have failed to take notice, you cannot compare levels of luxury when you have little experience with it in the first place. 

The only thing that strikes you as strange is the contraption on the wall opposite to you and adjacent to the fireplace, a metal clasp that is parted like two curved silver jaws and the long, raking marks that run next to it. 

“Curious?” she asks, startling you. 

“I’ll have no party in questioning business not my own, my Lady.” 

She smiles. Your mind is unreliable, but her teeth seem—longer. 

“Good girl,” she says, low and fluttering, sauntering to close the distance between the both of you, and something electric happens between her voice and your body. It is a movement coupled with a phrase that in any other context with any other person may have been sensual. To you, it is as threatening and ominous as the bell. “Now, tell me what plagues that humble mind of yours.”

“Not much, my Lady.” 

And it is true; you do not think. How different the world might be, you ignoramus, if you ever stopped to truly let yourself think for once. You have passed so many opportunities between this moment and the million before it to take the puzzle pieces handed to you and slot them together to make a whole image—maybe even one incomplete would have been satisfactory. 

But you draw your revolver and cock the hammer, pointing that cold muzzle at the countess’ head. 

Your worms and ants and spiders and larvae all clamber over one another, each jockeying eagerly through your blood to reach your brain, squirming and writhing and biting and chewing through you. You are decomposed from the inside out, the only purity left is the white of your bones and even those are twisted. You are flayed to tendon and sinew. 

And goddamn, your only regret is that you did not get to lie your tired corpse at the foot of her piano. 

“Just you.” 

You pull the trigger.

Chapter Text

At a point in your youth, it had come out that you had inadvertently been consorting with Satan. 

You were about seven, and bedridden with a juvenile version of the Lung Thing lapping at your strength, and it was the last peace you had ever known. 

You were apt to believe every dark word said about you, and about your misfortune. 

'Rău’ was so often the only thing you could ever make out in scoffs and murmurs. That word was both prayer and hex in one, and you were slow with language, but you had always understood that slur of syllable. 

What you had not really understood was why it was you whom this weight fell to. You were a victim of circumstance, and as the years grew sodden and molded within you, you realized that circumstance had swung its impartial finger through a room of people and it had stopped pointed at you, declaring: “fuck this one in particular” and ever since then you have been haunted by it. 

And that was all the justification you would ever receive for your existence being as unhappy as it was. 

You, to this day, to this moment, and to this second, are unable to shake the consideration that you deserved it. That in some past life or turn of bad karma—you learned gunmanship through trial and error, and sometimes error involved a round of buckshot in places it shouldn’t be—you had, of your own hand rather than circumstance’s, done wrong by God. 

But you were satisfied, in being within the arms of someone who cared for you, of someone willing to ignore the layers of poor cards circumstance had carelessly dealt you, of someone who may have once looked upon you fondly and called you ‘alright’. 

How desperately you wanted to be alright. 

How desperately you just wanted to be able to correct this one thing, this one evil that should not have been. 

Because circumstance killed that man, and only did it because it was so tenacious in making sure you were miserable. You were a bomb, and killed by proxy. 

But because God is deaf to you, and because circumstance does not frankly give a shit about your feelings; that bullet, that magnum bullet that had brought down a roaming vârcolac last winter—because you weren’t cutting corners or risking a chance of this woman’s brain being left whole—, that bullet you had lovingly loaded into the chamber an hour prior.  

That bullet meets the countess’ head.

And then it does something spectacular:

Jack shit. 

The countess snaps her head back when it reaches her. And then she elegantly reaches up and adjusts her hat back into place, as if a pleasant breeze had swooped by and shifted it. 

The gun lets off a thin stream of smoke from the muzzle. You had fired it, you heard the shot. You did not miss. 

You did not miss.

“Are you quite finished?” the countess asks, completely humored and good natured as she smiles at you. Her teeth —

You did not miss. 

You did not miss.

You did not miss.

You did not fucking miss. You shot her in the head. 

You cock the revolver, and you pull on the trigger again; only this time nothing happens and it dry fires. The revolver holds five rounds. Four are unaccounted for. 

And this is where you draw your figurative line. 

Up until this point, you have held tightly to the single, encompassing thought that has comforted you for weeks: that you would kill the countess and then likely yourself thereafter. You clung to this thought like an infant to a woolen childhood blanket. You clung to this thought like you did the old man’s pocketwatch. You clung like a spider to silk and a roach to darkness. You have lost it all, and saw a thin thread of promise to draw you out of your rancid, foetid pit of self-loathing. You have seen yourself rot and wither over and over and over again, and yet held your jaws clamped and stubborn to the hope of vendetta. 

You have watched a girl lose her head with the swipe of a blade. You have lost part of your earlobe. You have been bitten. You have been touched. You have tasted blood in your mouth for half an hour. 

You have suffered through impossibility after impossibility, things that should have snapped you clean into two halves, you bottled away. You bottled your inevitabilities away like sticks of red dynamite into a chamber of monoxide. You smuggled them there, having been promised you would not be around for the nitid flare of the fallout. 

You cannot do this. You absolutely and fundamentally cannot do this.

The countess is smiling at you. You watch her chest expand with breath. 

The scorpion stings your back.

And the timer on that dynamite hits a digital zero.  

You howl. 

It is a tangled, high-pitched, bloody, child’s cry. You scream with every bit of oxygen you have, and all of what you do not. You screech and caterwaul with the full force of your soul, mortified down to your atoms. You scream and your throat is raw with the sheer force of volume. Your lungs are hot, you feel Hell’s breath in your face. If someone were to light your body aflame you could not grow more shrill, you could not bellow louder. You do not sound human, you don’t even sound animal. You sound like nothing you have ever heard. 

You scream with the fear of a dead woman. 

The revolver hits the floor and so do you. You shove yourself backwards, back flush with the door and leashes of spittle hissing from your petrified mouth. You shake bodily, you shiver and tremble like you had been inflicted with hot waves of fever. 

“My, for someone with such a poor pair of lungs, you can certainly make a ruckus.” 

Or at least, that is what the countess may have said. It is somewhat difficult to hear, presently. 

She allows you this eternity of collapse, until you physically cannot continue any longer and your voice gives to a sputter and then a bout of gasping hiccoughs. Something cold slithers through your chest, and strange shapes and shadows bend and furl in the corners of your vision. You still have your mouth parted in bemused shock and terror, unable to stop the tremors that make hell of your composition. 

“Now that makes this whole event somewhat worth it,” she says. “I have maids here with functional bodies, and none of them have ever quite sounded so much like a tortured creature. And they are, in fact, tortured creatures.”

You are incoherently babbling on the floor, reduced to nonsense and stupidity; too far gone to be humiliated. And it is beyond you to understand in any capacity what you are saying. There is some horrid mix of vowels and terror that amounts to nothing articulate. 

There is something very lethal to mental processes about watching someone eat a round and not die, especially when you are very used to things dying when you shoot them. 

Because that is how guns work. 

You do not perceive the countess again until she is kneeling before you, and your face is snatched into her grip with so little of the earlier restraint—and you understand all at once that she is going to kill you. 

You find your voice again, hoarse and desperate as it may be, and you writhe in her hold, shoving at her arms and snapping your teeth at her gloves. You squirmed when Daniela held you; you are prepared to break your own body to escape when she does. 

“Oh, do shut up,” the countess says, exasperated as one might be with a particularly noisy dog. “It was amusing the first time, it wears thin on my patience now.” 

You do not shut up. 

She places her thumb beneath your jaw and braces her forefinger on the bridge of your nose and—to your fear at the strength required—presses up, effectively rendering your mouth closed against your own control. 

“Now, let’s be reasonable, pet,” she says to you, who does not, at the moment, even process half of her words, much less the concept of reasonability. 

“We’re going to have a conversation, you and I. Or rather, I am going to speak, and you are going to listen. All it takes is one more sound from you, and I will slit your throat before you can even drop to your knees in a final prayer. Understand?”

With little choice in the matter considering her colossal hold upon your mandible, your body makes the executive decision to freeze entirely, the feverish shivering notwithstanding. 

“Good,” she says, releasing you. “Still so obedient. Such a shame it’s rather moot now.” 

She uncoils to her full, terrible, height and easily crosses the distance to her vanity in two strides, plucking a cigarette holder from it. You still have the sense of mind to find it both heavily metaphorical and painfully ironic, and it is all you can focus on as you blankly watch her lift it to her lips for a long, theatrical drag. She pushes the smoke out in a wispy stream, her back to you. 

“You’re rather young, are you not? There’s something about youth that can make you so incredibly stupid, don’t you think?” she says, and you do not have an answer. You cannot recall your age, for how little it means now, to her, to you. It was not youth that made you stupid; it was hubris. “Your type is always so neurotic about the details, so quick to act on half-witted plans. So preoccupied with the physical. 

“Expand your mind for a moment, imagine yourself in my position. I have been alive for over a century, girl, did you know that? Can you fathom the idea of being so encumbered with the weight of time? I can.” She looks at you over her shoulder. “You do not possess even half of my years, and considering present circumstances, you likely never will. You cannot begin to conceive my level of—how did you put it?— understanding .

“Now, imagine yourself a shepherd, that may make this whole analogy somewhat easier to digest, and that you have a small flock of sheep within your care. A somewhat conscious flock of sheep; they know that you reap from them and what it means to be taken to slaughter. You keep them carefully. They are but animals, but animals that face slow harvest—animals that do not wish to die.”

She takes another drag and ponders the holder, turning it between her long fingers. “You cannot expect the animals you kill to adore you, pet. That would only come to pass in some sickly thing, one with no concept of self-preservation. Only something demented would ever praise its tyrant. Or—”

She breathes smoke from between her teeth. In your strange vision, in the flickering shadows, in the chill of death, she is not human to you. 

The derisiveness of acceptance settles down into your bones, the final acknowledgement that she has never been. 

“—you must consider the possibility that one of your sheep has turned rabid.” 

You swallow.

“You were never meant to favor me, none of you were. What good is your favor to me? The only thing—and take note of this so that if you live you might walk from this with some greater knowledge—that will ever keep a flock under bit and spur is fear, and fear alone. Suspicion, poor understanding, and lack of information maintain power. One ewe talks to another, and they whisper in darkness of blood and missing lambs. The rams confuse themselves, run in circles and generate their own horrible ideas, their own rumors, their own nightmares. And that flock knows nothing for certain, there is no stability in hearsay. Uncertainty is the mother of all terror. 

“The moment you professed your fondness of me, you failed. And then you proceeded to fail several times again by having absolutely no idea, rudimentary or otherwise, what you were getting yourself into. You were all too focused on the wrong thing, pet, because you knew nothing of sheep and shepherds. And you have yet to learn anything of terror.” 

You recoil as she reapproaches you, in your frenzied perception every action towards you is to kill. You are defenseless, unarmoured, and diminutive. You have never felt so fawnish, so far removed from mercy. In some part of your diseased mind, you are seven again. Seven, and circumstance is pointing at you. 

“Don’t worry, darling, I’ll teach you.” 

The countess snaps her fingers and you bite down some instinctual noise as buzzing resurfaces, and following that tell-tale hum the girls form, each with wolfish grins splintering across their faces in unnatural expressions that are no longer human, like wood being pressed to a breaking point to accommodate something it shouldn’t. 

The countess holds out her hand and Bela steps forward, placing something into her palm. Because you are stupid, it takes you longer than necessary to realize your bullets have been confiscated, and have been for longer than you were aware of. 

Things start to click in your scrambled puzzle.

She inspects them. The silver is humiliating in her hand by comparison. Why did you ever think they would be enough to end her? 

“I suppose the question is what to do with you now, isn’t it?” 

Daniela electrifies in her skin and swarms, reforming with her hands grabbing at the countess’ dress. “You can give her to me, Mother!” (You have never wanted anything less in your entire life. You would sooner stab yourself, and the idea is more welcome now than it had been an hour ago. Note: it had been genuinely welcome an hour ago.) “I promise I won’t make a mess this time, and I won’t ask for another-” 

“You say that every time you’re given a maid to play with. I find it difficult to believe you’ve miraculously had a newfound change of heart that allows you to make good on that particular promise,” Cassandra interrupts, and she has never appeared entirely interested in you before, and you did not know to be grateful until she looks upon you now. “I’ll at least keep it tidy.” 

Bela does not verbally join in on this bidding round for your apparent torture, but silently creeps to her mother’s side, and for the first time you notice something hanging limply from the corner of your mouth. You recognize it as your hair, and true to your earlier estimation, your follicle as well. It may have been a greater disturbance to you if you were not already on the ground due to prior unsettlement. 

The countess assesses her daughters as you have often assessed your weaponry, with a slow methodical process of considering each one and the relative damage they might cause. She regards Daniela the way you would have a chainsaw. She regards Bela the way you would have ammonia. She regards Cassandra the way you might have regarded a land mine, or maybe it would be more befitting to say a grenade with the pin already pulled.

And then she regards you. And she regards you as you have often regarded the dead things the local feral cat dragged along by the hind legs: broken, small, and most likely missing a critical part of its intestine. She regards you like you ought to be hollowed and buried. 

“No pleas for mercy, miel ?” she asks, because it is within her range of character. 

You would rather peel away the filmy layer of your own cornea with your dirty fingernails. You would rather scrape off the entire epidermal layer of your skin and then be wrapped in salt. You would rather cut your tongue out with a rusted scalpel and fill your gory mouth with hot coals. You’ll kill yourself—and do it better—before you ever, ever drop to the unspeakable and repulsive, naeusating low of pleading for some unreal mercy. There has never been mercy for you, you will die without ever having met it. You did not even know how to beg, not for your life, not for pity, and never for mercy. 

If you want anything approaching charity, you will create it alone. 

This is what smashes you back into your mind, as quickly and sharply as someone pulling back on elastic and snapping it against your nose. 

You yank your functioning leg up to your chest and shove your hand within your boot until you feel the hilt of your dagger in its sheath. There had been three lining the inner pockets of the overcoat but you did not trust that they had not also been taken during Bela’s skimming of your torso. 

Death by exsanguination is not painless, not immediately. There are too many varying complications when it comes to blades, and the most effective way happens to be inconvenient due to positioning. You do not fret about peril, but if you fail to sever your spinal cord, you risk not only living but also living with something severely fucked up from the neck down. Being alive within the clutches of the countess is terrible; being alive and paralyised within the clutches of the countess is unthinkable. So, your target is the carotid artery, and you have entirely too much practice to not hit it.

You cannot fuck this up. 

This is the appropriate time to not think, which you happen to be very good at. You have not passed muster, but you do not have to fail for a second time. Fifty-percent of something done right was not zero, and you have to be satisfied with not-zero. 

You move with more assurance than you did with the revolver, and the revolver was more your hand than the actual manus itself. 

You are intent, you are swift. You are so entirely and excruciatingly done with this castle. 

You feel the press of steel to your neck, you can visualize exactly how far you need to push. 

“Mother-” 

And you forget one very important bit of information, which is that you have a singular talent: 

Fucking up something unfuckable. 

You still just as the dagger bites into you, that first stinging nip of pain brings you into perspective, and elastic snaps at you again. It is not the pain specifically that gives you pause, and you cannot specifically pinpoint anything describable that causes it. You stop for no reason at all, a trickling of red sliding warmly down the column of your throat. 

You look at your cold hands, at the cold dagger, and finally up into the heat of double suns. 

The countess is taking another drag from her holder, and her daughters wait for an order, whether to rip your larynx out before you could stab through it or to stop you from it entirely so they could pick you apart and break you down on their own terms. 

The smoke she breathes obscures her in a translucent haze, and all you see is aureate Hell. 

“Well?” she prompts.

You try—honest to God—you try. 

You send out the series of nervous signals to force that dagger into your soft and waiting muscle, and your hand does not respond. For all you mentally push, you physically resist. You do not dread the pain. You did not suffer through this just to trip and bust your ass at the end of it all. 

But you cannot bring the blade to bear. 

It clatters from your hands, and you give up, surrendering it out of dazed stupefaction. 

“You know,” the countess starts, and you burn as her children make no attempt to disguise their laughter. “I had to wonder, after you killed me, what you intended to do next. Surely not run , you had to have realized you wouldn’t get far. Then what? Fight your way out? Hide until you could find an opening? How does the limping rabbit escape the castle? I considered letting you think I truly had perished just to see what would become of you.”

She then heaves an enormous sigh, an authentic and real exhaustion. She sighs with something immeasurable and impossible. 

“I’m grateful I didn’t bother. The reality was unimaginative. You ultimately amounted to nothing.” 

She tilts her head and the girls swarm around you, lifting you underneath your arms while your legs are left limp against the floor. You allow this in your state of yielding. 

“And I think that would be an appropriate punishment, don’t you? I’ll leave you with nothing. And you’ll molder in these halls until your body is nothing.” 

And you are discarded, sent sprawling out into the hall.

Circumstance giggles at you.

Chapter Text

Understand, you are not unused to this.

You have been and lived as an inconvenience. You have been kicked down to the ground and trampled, and then when you braced yourself on your elbows and struggled to breathe through the dust you were left in, someone would kindly come along and stamp a boot down on your head so you might choke on ash. You and being thrown to the ground were old acquaintances, the kind you’d see walking in your direction and shut your eyes in prayer that you wouldn’t be recognized. But, for some reason, you had come to figure that you were beyond that segment of your life, brief as it had been. 

As you lie, curled on your side like some dying thing, you are greeted uncomfortably with the realization you had never really gotten out of it. 

The good news: you had landed on the side with your good leg. The bad: you had landed harshly, and you were not equipped for a fall. 

You know you are bruised, where and how badly is not your guess to make. The entirety of your right side aches like fire, and you had been unhelpfully clenching your teeth around the inside of your cheek before you landed which resulted in your swallowing down a small chunk of it. 

Nothing quite hurts, aches, or suffocates as terribly to you as the stinging, lashing, viscous shame that spreads through you. It starts from the top of your scalp and riddles you with gooseflesh down to your calves. 

It is a luxury you had thought was too expensive for you, but you have found a way to buy it back. And you now know there is no way for you to escape it. 

You have severely and acutely ruptured your ego, and you did not think you had any ego left to rupture. 

You do not know how long you lie there, but in the end you find the mountainous task of getting up to be beyond you in that moment. You cannot begin to understand how terribly you have been damaged, from within your mind to the state of your poor physicality, in such a short span. Until now, you thought the only person who could ever unmend you so skillfully was yourself. You had practiced. You were so good at it. 

If you could find every last way possible to bring yourself to Hell, and survive it, what was left to hurt you? 

Too much, apparently. You had accounted for nothing. 

You think that if you had the ability, you may have sobbed, but you hadn’t cried in a very long time; and you honestly think you did not properly remember how to. If you did, you would be stuck in a perpetual state of fuss and watery eyes. You had all too much to weep for, and so little reason to ever stop. That is something you truly would never be able to afford, and perhaps you did not cry out of the sheer simplicity that you were scared to submit to the final vulnerability that would reduce you back to your infancy in full. You might have curled your knees to your chin and sob like you still smelled of milk and powder. It horrifies you to shuddering silence. 

You hear, from somewhere, a clock chime the sixth hour, echoing inside of its box and startling you into a tighter coil. Some inner part of you scoffs and retches at the idea of starting at a clock chime, and you have to remind it that you once started at church bells, and now you will now start at the buzzing of flies and the clack of heels. You will start at anything, you idiot, because the curtain has been pulled away over some cruel magician’s trick, and in dramatic fanfare it was revealed that you are scared to die. 

Which is the most embarrassing thing you have ever had to admit. 

Something kicks you. It’s not quite a kick, actually, it’s more like the motion one might make trying to roll a particularly troublesome patch of dirt out of the way. Regardless, you do not process it as anything other than poor luck and hike your shoulders up to your ears. You think you will die in this spot, in this pitiful position, and in this wretched castle. You think this quiet occasion of being able to hate yourself while you bend your body into a debilitated ball is all you have left in the way of tranquility. You do not want to lose it, too. You are willing to be content on the ground, waiting for something new to scare the irresolute piss out of you. 

“Taking it hard?” asks the owner of the shoe that kicks you. “I suppose that’s fair, all things considered, but frankly self-pity doesn’t look good on you. I don’t even mean that personally, it doesn’t look good on anyone, except for maybe Mother—you can’t tell her I said that by the way or I’ll gut you if I don’t do it tonight—but it especially doesn’t look good on you.” 

“I’d rather you complete the gutting now as opposed to after you finish speaking,” you croak to your sleeve. 

“It’s best if you preserve that sentiment for later, it’ll make everything a lot easier.”  

When you do not respond, she kicks you again. 

“You’re not fun. I’m starting to think bribing Bela for these was a bad decision on my part.”

There is no other feasible way you see yourself being able to resume mourning your lack of ability to mourn, and so you uncoil and squint at Cassandra. 

Her hand darts into the field of your clear vision and four of your bullets gleam in her palm. You pluck them from her, and sit upright, staring blankly at them. You do not understand. 

“Why are you giving me these?” 

“Not out of empathy for your cause, that’s for certain. God, that was hard to watch, I should take you to court on account of cringing so hard I nearly created a vacuum,” Cassandra says, gagging in mock disgust. “I’m still rather peeved Mother didn’t just give you to me, we would’ve had such fun with your beautiful pain tolerance. You’re wonderful for that, honestly. But you’re off-limits at the moment, albeit not for long. Mother thinks your blood is awful, you’d be foul wine—her words and most definitely not mine—and contaminate what we’re draining in the cellar. So it’s been decided you’re going out in a bad way. If you’re asking why I’m giving you these, it’s because I think you might blow your head off before seven. Also, I wonder about what would happen if you didn’t. They’re not incredibly useful, anyway.” 

You blink at her. “So much of what you say does not make sense.”

“Yes, well, not much of what anyone says will cater to whether you comprehend it or not. If you haven’t noticed, ‘guest of honor’ is a title entirely of sarcasm.” 

“The irony was not lost upon me.”

“Good. Then you’re already miles ahead of the last one.” She steps back and takes stock of you, analyzing you in a way you are starting to become familiar with. “Personal recommendation: you’re harder to find if you’re still and quiet. Not hard, mind you, just hard er .” 

“Why would I need to hide?”

Cassandra shrugs her shoulders lazily, rolling them in a way that betrays the implication of muscle beneath the fabric. “Who knows. In any case, I really am bored now. Explaining things is the worst, oh, we threw your things over there.” 

She points to a space behind you and you follow her finger, making out blurry shapes that you figure to be your gun and cane. It had never occured to you how terribly those two things clashed when being held by the same person, then again, a lot more was occurring to you now, most of it relating to clashing.

You turn back and there’s nothing left but air. 

You subject yourself to the brief humiliation of glaring at the floor, reaching out for anything solid until you find your glasses. You grab your cane and load your revolver. You contemplate it for longer than you have ever thought you would. You had never thought of it the way you do now. 

You lie down and spin the cylinder. 

You hope it discharges. 

***

To the disappointment of Cassandra as well as yourself, you do not blow your head off before seven. 

And even more disappointing, your back begins to ache after ten minutes, and you pick yourself up. That is the worst part of being knocked down, physically, the act of having to stagger back onto your feet. You had once been armoured with the idea that any given time might be the last, but the unyielding reality is that if you have been put on the ground once, you will inevitably find your way down again in some form or another.  Ribs 1-4 complain. Ribs 5-12 wail. 

Your sabbatical on the floor granted you enough time to staunch the wound of ego, but did very little to assuage the restless little creature in your brain that liked to remind you that you were now hostage to the person you had failed to kill. In a nicer world, you would have taken one defeat and molded it into fuel for ambition, for a different outcome. You might have brung your palm down against your own cheek in fortifying violence and rebounded with renewed energy and vigor, more determined now that you had been struck down, knowing that you had hit a low and could only climb up from that point. 

Realistically, you do not know how to rebound. You don’t even ricochet. You get up entirely because your back hurts too much to keep lying down. Your resilience relies on some form of aspiration that you might eventually find yourself in a better place. You cannot even have a pipe dream. 

The castle had gradually gone quiet to you while you were prone, and you had drifted into a state of semi-consciousness, barely registering the way someone might have stepped around or over your limp form. With so few windows, and none in your current surroundings, you have no idea what time it is nor the particular relevance of seven. Considering that the accursed clock had not yet shot you out of your skin for a second time, you are fairly certain you are at least past the half-hour. 

You lift the hem of your shirt and run your fingers down your side. You are not yet purpling where you made impact, but you feel the soreness there. Touching it does nothing, gives nothing, and tells nothing, but you linger in assessing your own skin. It is the second step in reviving yourself from the floor: assessing damage. Procedure is all you have left, and so you robotically tap, rub, press, and pinch your side until you are reddened where you examined. Nothing is broken, not that it would be. 

You shift your grip on your cane, and breathe in through your nose. To your name, you have a single revolver with four rounds, a dagger—you skim through your overcoat pockets in a slow firing of neurons and confirm the others are in fact missing—, your glasses, a cane, and the clothes on your back. You are entirely too chickenshit to lethally wound yourself to avoid any forced sadism, and so those rounds likely would not find their way into your skull properly. You’re too scared of failure to even tuck the muzzle between your teeth and test if your finger slips. 

The castle is monstrous and convoluted, while you understand some aspects of your location relative to others, it is not enough. Your current mission is largely to not die, because you think you might have a repeat of your earlier wailing if you did and you cannot physically bear to witness yourself split your mouth open to create a noise so viscerally debasing ever again. 

The door you had been politely tossed from is shut to you, slammed behind you before, and likely locked now. There was a definite sense of finality in the way you had been handled which suggested the countess no longer had any interest in your murder attempts nor anything you might concoct in general. You have no interest in returning to that room, in either case. 

You have free roam, but there is a reason no one returns from Castle Dimitrescu. The first lesson of shepherding is that you must always close up the pen; the entrance doors are locked and sealed to you as well, if they had ever been open after your arrival. 

Regardless, you stumble your way down the flight of stairs and through the dimming hall until you find those heavy fixtures, and stupidly try anyway. If you had even a fraction of the countess’ might you may have been able to place your shoulder to the frame and burst through. But you are unwieldy in your little strength, presently more than ever. You could try the windows, but the shattering of glass would be alarming to anyone within earshot. Moreover, you cannot trust them in any regard. There is something that keeps people here, if there was an escape to be had via an unprotected entryway it is a trap and nothing less. But there is a keyhole to the entrance doors, and that is an honest obstacle, one you would rather place your wager with as opposed to the uncertainty of windows and whatever unseen guard prevents bypassing. Keyholes beckon keys, keys beacon to attempted thievery, attempted thievery begets a countermeasure; something greater than what lies beyond the frosty curtained windows. 

Perhaps you have a kindling interest in the countess’ room after all. 

You skitter through the castle like a rat flushed out from its hole, looking for a fault in some shape that might grant you a chance backwards. How far would you be able to scurry from the countess? Her reach was a trouble for you, in that you did not understand how far she may be able to stretch to have you dead—or worse, so much worse—brought back into her clutches with a heavier sentence. To rot was a privilege, she has been kind and patient and sweetly lenient with you. Between your insult to her twisted order of hospitality and the sheer gravity that accompanies escaping a place deemed inescapable, she would drag you back to her by the hairs prickling the back of your fragile neck if you dared. You would be made into an example, and her example would see your carcass strewn from the castle doors down into the church shrines, your heart at God’s offering. 

If she could catch you, that is. You might yet flee from the village and stray from whatever she sends to hunt you. You could operate on chances and risks and run with your tail tucked between your thighs, wobbling and airless as you fled her wrath with her creatures baying after your blood and singing for your head. You would hide for years, and live your life as prey. 

Or you get a grip and do exactly what you came here for. 

Nothing is indestructible, and certainly never anything that too closely resembles human. The countess may not have seen scathe at your bullet, but she consumes, she answers a higher power just as you do. She is cryptic and terrifying, but she is not unkillable. Either you run from her, or you gather your wits and pieces and play her game. Because in holding such power there is never not a game, there is always a sport to entertain those with everything, there is an infallible attraction to gamble, to lust for theater and circus—in contempt, with perfectly wrinkled and upturned noses, but lust nonetheless—always something for them to stake for more, for the thrill of leisure. She is not so beyond you, not yet, and you being left in her halls speaks to her aloof criticism. Her punishment is opportunity. 

And, of course, you could also be reading too deeply into it. 

The grandfather clock bellows, and your body makes a strange shudder that pursues your nerves from the tenseness in your neck to the closeness in your leg. You slot your rounds into their chambers, less in an act of sudden preparation and more to give your hands something to keep from idling; nothing can be trusted to die to a bullet anymore. 

It’s seven, and something changes. 

You are not the most intuitive nor the most instinctual thing. Your brain would fly itself into glass doors and die if you let it, and you have to equip yourself in large ways for small changes of position. Everything has a slot, a gear with its toothy absences and the interlocked sprockets that slowly churn in your head to keep things running smoothly. But you cannot always manually push these mechanisms to their place, some part of you operates without governance and is trusted to keep its shit together. 

It is that part of you that answers to the low, blood-chilling sense of horror that peels back your dermis and wriggles into your veins. And, no, it does not keep its shit; because you haven proven to be poor at it lately. 

The castle sighs and grows warm to you, and there is a hush that washes over you, over your germ and bacteria and over your rodent heart. All of the quiet hair on your arms and neck and legs prickle, rising in demonstration of poor evolution to alert whatever lurks in the dark that you are unsettled, and that unsettled things bear fearful canines. 

And you know you are watched. 

You lift your head, snapping it to the darkest hollows of the entrance hall, looking for whatever stalks you. Things shift about you, in the fuzziness of your peripheral, in the unreliability of your vision. You press your body flush with the doors, swinging the muzzle of your gun around in the dark because you cannot think of another option. 

You hear the chittering before you see her eyes, and it is a wonder you saw them at all.

They shimmer with the reflection of unwelcome light, strange washes of blue and yellow playing hell behind her retinas and shimmering in two spectral dots of light at the top of the staircase. Her tapetum lucidum is all that gives her away, and otherwise in that silence the only knowledge you had of her was in that you were stricken with game paranoia and prey anxiety. 

Your sprockets and cogs and gears do not have their shit together, but they are joined in the cause of knowing when to spin faster. 

She knows you have seen her, and so she approaches cordially. Cordially melting into flies and back, moving in liquid advance as her distant hum of filmy wing-beats enters your system through air. Cordially deforming into something neither human nor insectoid. Cordially coming to end you. 

Her cloak billows wildly around her, creating a membrane background, larger than it had been at any other point. There is no wind to push it into the ripples and twists it forms itself  into. It becomes a living frame for someone’s screwed mental portrait.

Two points of glittering malice descend to you, a slowly orbiting belt of connected peril circles them. She is a patient hurricane of movement, the drone of insect chorus louder than your pulse. This chaos was only contained in a loose shape, in a faceless mass of three hundred teeth and twenty tongues and a million battering wings. 

Those teeth gnash and pull apart when they collide into each other, reforming from the centralized darkness and repeating a slow destruction. The tongues slither and dissolve between the canines, splintering at the incisors. Yet, there is no mouth to the monster.

You may have wondered which sister it was that broke your simple peace, but in the face of this hungry amalgamation you did not know how to think. Later, you would recall that only one of them would so openly come to claim you. 

Your leg is not broken, just very, very, unwilling to be walked on.

It is easy to imagine how it responded when you ran . 

The adrenaline numbs the horror of your strain, because the last thing your body is truly capable of is sprinting, but you are offered no other alternative. You may not have run in years but you are reeducated quickly. You swing your body around every corner and bend like you have been trained for it, like you can breathe and like you have not just left a cane clattering in your frenzied wake. 

The thing behind you screeches, howling into the castle and clambers after you, scrambling on the marble and scratching into the wood.

You know immediately you will not be able to outpace it.

Your body does not complain as you demand more than it can give, you are wild in your haste and clumsy in your panic. There is so little hope for you here. You run all the same, raking in breath and swallowing down the metallic taste within your mouth. 

Firing at something Hell itself had spit back up would be pointless, and you have been warned as much. Your finger itches for the trigger, though, even as you slam your shoulder into an untidy corner and grapple briefly with your coordination. 

You cannot outrun it as you are, no matter how desperately you wish otherwise, you are incapable. Your only choice, the only sensibility, is to use what is left of your brief advantage and to hide. 

Hide and beg God’s forgiveness; pray through terror that it will not find you. 

Your body dives low as you turn out into another wing, your hands scrabble at the ground as you struggle to push yourself vertical again. Doors line the wall. One of them must be unlocked, otherwise you die here. 

You slam yourself into the first one you approach, your sweaty palm yanking savagely at the doorknob. 

It does not give. 

You hear her flies and those teeth crowing their nearing victory, louder and more awful than in the entrance hall, and it sends a heavy cold from the base of your spine down into your ankles. 

You haul yourself to the next door, sharply twisting and threatening your wrist with an idea of a fast and ugly break. Your body topples into the room, and you slam it behind you. 

You had fallen into a lake once. An irrelevant experience, but you had. You were probably four—and stupid—and balancing on ice that had been deemed unlikely to break. You were light, you were careful, and you trusted the ice. It was steady beneath your boots, and you were calm. You were calm as you moved across it, you were calm as hairline fractures broke out underneath you. You were calm when it gave. 

The first thought that occurred to you was not that you were drowning in that frigid water; it was that the ice should not have broken. It was so close to peace as you stared through the chill and into the sun, muddled through blue. You simply could not process how something so terrible had happened so quickly. 

And when you turn to take stock of the room, and lock eyes with Cassandra, her eyes wide with hazardous bright yellow and the infinitesimal dot of her pupil telling of her newfound insanity, you did not think anything other than this ice also should not have broken.

Chapter Text

You have a few moments of something approaching repose. 

When you stare at each other, it is in that stillness—the kind right before a hare jolts out of shock or when a tiger crouches deep in long grass—that you also assess each other. 

She is wild to you, hunched defensively over a body that teems and purls with her flies, bloated with larvae and discolored in livor mortis. Her jaw is reddened and dripping, parted to offer the faintest glittering of shiny blood-teeth, but the kill is not recent. 

Her head is unsteady on her neck. 

It jerks and shivers in sudden attack-beat movements, tiny muscles straining and slithering under the skin of her throat. Rabid twitches that throw her hair and scatter her flies, most of them drop in quiet death to the floor. The twin moons of her eyes split horrifically open in wide feral uncontrol, in the half-light they carry their own violent luminosity. Those eyes hunt you in your frozen terror, flashing down to the gauze of your leg in recognition. You watch the animal mathematics behind her gaze, and it’s a simple equation with a simple outcome: you are trapped . 

The woman who claimed imminent death due to second-hand embarrassment has been replaced with her fuck-off second personality monster that has made ruin of its hosting cage. Whatever tentative pity she had offered you before is dead now. 

Your nose flares to the rot of corpse—so thick and sour is the heat of it—and you cannot help twitching your hand down to your dagger in response to her instability. It is this that ends you. 

She lunges quicker than you anticipate, eating the distance between you in two staggering bounds. The force of her body crashing yours against the door knocks the wind from you. She snarls blood spittle into your face and you hold her at bay with only your spare hand shoving against her neck on instinct. She throws herself into your hold on her, snapping her teeth electric atom-spaces from your nose. Her hands are unsure of themselves for a moment—mad with their suddenly realized opportunity—but find your shoulders and her nails become embedded into you, twisting holes past your jacket and into your frail skin. If she were not crazed she would have already killed you.

You fight the reflexive water from your vision and bring the dagger down into her eye, a half of you under the wistful hope that it accomplishes something while the other is mindless in primeval struggle and does not calculate statistics or likelihoods—just moves in self-preservation. 

Because her ravening face is so close to your own, lips pulled back over perfect bared scarlet and her wrathful bloodshot eyes boring into your own, you bear a close witness as she reveals her structure to you: The flies drain their flesh-color, splitting in concert and polarizing against your steel, parting around where it comes down and leaving you glimpsing into the hive of her—the socket black and shivering where the insects leave it barren. And when you yank your hand back, it is undone, the flies flood back into place and her eye returns just as manic. 

Your forearm is not strong enough for what you ask of it, and she will have her teeth upon you soon. 

In a fit of snap decision you put your last bit of adrenaline induced strength into pushing as massively as possible into her throat and kick your poor leg to her shin to destabilize her. She is constructed layer by layer of hidden whipcord power and those prior speculated hardened planes of muscle make themselves known to you when you throw your full force against her incoordination and only manage to gain an inch of space; it is impossible to win a grapple with a thing built for it. 

Still, she staggers against the brunt of your panic-strength, clicking her teeth together in irritation. It is enough for you to latch yourself to the doorknob and stumble back into the hall you had been so desperate to get out of. 

You make it ten wobbling paces before you careen forward, outstretching your palms to the ground to catch your weight and consoling your trembling legs beneath you. Your body cannot fucking believe the absudity of the past five minutes, and you do not know how to convince it that absurdity was now remarkably low on the list of things to not believe in. 

Your pituitary gland is traumatized, and despite its efforts the delayed pain is beginning to seep through the hormone concoction. 

And once it does you will be well and truly screwed. 

Cassandra bursts from the room, snapping her head. The flies fall from her as she advances, her thighs stiff and knees locked, limbs so disconnected and unpatterned as if a thousand tiny things had flooded into her and jerked through her skin to make a flesh puppet motorized and none of them agree with each other. Her arms thrash loosely at her sides, fingers strained into nubs at the knuckle. She is twisted at the waist and odd sharp angles now compose the lines of her torso, bent and beat into a form that is anatomically beyond your comprehension. Nothing is on the right way, as if she were a doll that had been dropped from the tall spires and put back together with flimsy tape. She screams open her mouth to let her long red tongue hang from her lips and the flies trickle from her parted maw, getting tangled and wet in the grip of the blood that sticks to her chin. This disaster of limbs and misapprehended bones shudders towards you, each leg cracking and dislocating itself from the knee down as she undoes the mechanisms of her body—all for the purpose of getting to you.

And through the furling curtain of her dark hair, the unworldly yellow static of her unblinking eyes are adhered only to yours. Nothing else. 

You realize, dimly, that she stares so intensely because she has lost her eyelids.

You do not piss yourself at the sight of this nightmare marionette, and for that you will never complain of anything ever again. 

You force yourself upright, drawing your dagger and backing from her in fearful steps. There must be someplace in this blasted castle that can be secured, a place where you can stash your indisposed body until you can think of a better strategy. 

Cassandra rushes, her body breaking along invisible fissures as she too coaxes her framework into a cataclysm of joints and ligaments that ought not to be pressured into tension. She does not quite run as much as she lurches down the hall towards you, hurling her body forward and leaving balance as an afterthought—an inconvenience as she manually throws each limb. Her hands reach, and the lines of her lips split up to the apex of her cheek so that you might see the boiling black pus that oozes from the new wound. 

In spite of everything that should be impossible, she is swift. 

You backpedal, unprepared for the sudden demonstration of mobility. If it comes to war between your broken bodies you know you will lose every time. 

You can do nothing except brace for impact and the inevitable. 

Only neither comes. 

The swirling hurricane of the prior girl collidles bodily into Cassandra as she leaps for you, slamming her into the wall and crashing her into the ground, sending that shivered body into a mess of dead flies and rearranging her spine in an order that should have left her drooling and dead on the floor. It does not. 

The freakish cuspids clamp down on Cassandra’s arm, tearing into what remains and beginning the brutal process of pulling her apart. There are worse ways to die, you think, but teeth seem to be reasonably close to the summit of that list. 

Cassandra does not seem to understand how to be murdered (a trend shared through the Dimitrescu lineage, evidently) and snarls her torn mouth boldly into her sister’s un-face, and you watch as her own fangs elongate. Thick slabs of fly-enamel slither down in an intricate formation that stretches to the base of her throat. Combat-teeth. She bites back with these weaponized canines, but where she closes her jaw there is only a quick dispersal of insects. 

Her body doubles her aggressor’s and she shows the impossibility of her power in each move she makes, but she is inaccurate, now ridden with some cryptic weakness, and nowhere near as fast. She wields her sickle in tandem with her teeth, slicing into the vortex of her sister and snapping down at anything near her mouth. But with nothing solid to bring her fangs into there is slim hope of retaliation against her attacker. The systems of their bodies that had perplexed you now work against her. That horrific malice of flies surrounds her as she pitches herself in an attempt to find something stable. She swallows flies in her gambit.

Despite the supernatural strand of them, the sisters fight the way you have seen in every aspect of common life. They are, at this moment at least, reduced to two mere competing factors. Two dark creatures in a territorial spat that, in spite of blood, will tear each other asunder. 

You are not one to screw with the allegorical gift horse. 

Gathering yourself, you flee with the new opening, shoving your palm against the wall for stability in the event you trip. You abandon them to their own mercies as they howl and screech in a strange  and sudden scramble for power; in these walls no fidelity of yours will ever lie. 

***

Y ou lose your mind somewhere, and it does not return until you have brought your knees to your chin and are wholly unstable within your skin. 

The castle’s geometry is nonsensical—there is no pattern to a labyrinth—and you have absolutely no idea where you are nor how far you ran. The clock had startled you twice in the hazes of your memory, and you had held your breath and body still in the occasions where one of those night-creatures had buzzed too near to one of your ad-hoc hiding spots. There had been stairs you had gasped your way up, paintings of women that watched you choke, a room with a pool of blood that you have been trying to convince yourself was a trick of your catatonic imagination. You have tasted nothing else since arriving here. 

Your nose drips, leaving damp spots on your coat. You swipe at your face with your sleeve.

You had barricaded a door with several chairs and painstakingly pushed an ornate dresser against it. The revolver is caught between your cold fingertips; if you attempt to shoot anything you are guaranteed to miss. You have spent a few unsteady years working with the recoil; and it would still ruin you as you are now. You have not stopped shaking since you collapsed against the wall. 

You have your teeth brought down harshly against your thumb, driving your force into the cartilige until blood pools underneath the nail. You need something to work your energy against—something to ground you—the adrenaline has run its course and your leg screams to you until you cannot physically think of anything else. The pain is loud, and nothing else is able to drown it apart from the rapid wet beat of your heart. It is a hot pain, and so you understand that you are doomed. You think if you check underneath the gauze you will not like what you find, and so you decide against it. You are only able to handle so many stressors at once. 

You swallow thickly, grinding into your cuticle. Genuinely, you wished you had your facilities about you, the capacity to think and formulate in the lay-time offered may make the largest difference between whether or not you die. You need, at the barest minimum, to reorient yourself and unfold the massive conglomerate of shit you’ve tallied up so far, and to organize it. You need to make sense.

And you cannot make sense when you are quivering so desperately. 

The drone of the swarms that hunt you are only partly generated out of paranoia; the rest are nightmarishly real. 

You release your nail from your grip, and the resulting ache leaves you with your mouth parted in a cry you will not give sound to. 

***

Or had you simply lost your tongue?

***

When the clock chimes for the eleventh time they find you. 

By this point, you had slapped yourself awake on three separate occasions and had only honestly needed it just the once. The room you cowered in had no windows, no other doors, and you had carefully arranged and rearranged your barrier several times because there was nothing else to be done. You had not relaxed, and your body was primed for death in any of its potential four forms. You were adjusted to being haunted by things both living and dead, and therefore had your procedure organized after the fifth hour spent trembling. 

You had secured some level of temporarily placed stability and your heartbeat was no longer concerning. You thought, for those few blessed hours, that you may have been somewhat safe. Behind your barrier of furniture and your quiet breath, you had escaped with only surface damage. 

And then the flies come pouring from underneath the door. 

It is similar to something like a flood—not that the village had ever flooded but you’d always fantasized the possibility—and you would picture it as a trickle of water slowly seeping into your floorboards. The trickle would turn to a stream, and the stream in turn would become a pounding rush. What happens with flies, as it turns out, is that the trickle abhors the idea of turning into a stream, and instead decides to become a surge that rips the whole affair from its hinges and sends splinters screaming across the room.

They buzz and writhe their way underneath, through the gaps in the sides, squirming and hissing through the fallen keyhole and murmur amongst themselves as they crawl and slither in a formation that spans the length of your room so quickly and so coordinated that you do not have time to process any of this; you are still stuck on the idea of flooding. 

The walls become alive with filmy wings, sticky legs, and red compound eyes. Your refuge becomes their hive. 

You fire two rounds into this sudden mass, because you are remarkably talented at finding new and extraordinary ways to make a situation worse for yourself. 

They wash over you like a violent dream, converging on you like you are a magnet and they are a multitude of tiny metal grains that crave your charge. That wave of dark bodies rises to tower meters above your head, a wall of living song. And when it crashes into you, there is just enough time for you to calculate how badly it will scar.

You did not, in that particular moment, have the time nor capability to break down exactly what happened to you when you were engulfed, but some while later in the dark you would huddle into your body and recount it in complete, holy detail. 

When the first part of the swarm alights on you, it doesn’t do much aside from cause you to fretfully swing your arms in a sad attempt to shake them. It becomes an issue when they spew their acids on you. 

Fly-acid is inconvenient when present in an individual—horrific in a swarm. When they corral you into them, those legs and wings and eyes obscuring your vision with the sheer number of them, their angry hum shaking your skull as they find your ear canal and jaw, you become wild. When they begin to eat you, you become berserk. 

They are squirming in your clothes, running up your chest, burrowing in your nostrils, stripping the sensitive skin in your ears, peeling the scabs from your lips to reach your teeth, and eating your epidermal layer little by little as they press their digestive saliva into the fine hairs along your face. Your back becomes heavy with insect as they scamper over your spine, twisting themselves up to the back of your neck where they start to nest. Every wound you’ve suffered, they find. They dig themselves like ticks into your flesh where it has been left unmended. They smother you in a threshing sheet of thousands of ugly bodies making a home along yours. 

If you were to scream, they would have your uvula. You bleed for them, and they take that, too.

You throw yourself to the walls, slam your palms down against your face, claw the bodies from your eyes and mouth, gathering green blood and broken pieces of wing underneath your nails along with your own skin. You peel off hundreds of them, and they return in wrath and greater numbers. For every ten flies you pull from your body, thirty more replace them. 

You would have nightmares about this, later. The sort that will jolt you out of sleep and will make you wipe your sweat on the damp pillowcases and howl your throat raw. There had been fervent sermons about Hell and how you’d burn and burn in a place beyond the sight of grace, where the fire would eat your hair and nails and suck the water from your eyes and mouth. How when you would scream the blaze would swallow the air from your throat and find all of it within you, a place you would spit and see it evaporated before it could sizzle on the coals. 

Hell is none of that, really. Hell is not fire or heat; it isn’t even squeezing your eyes and lips together and raking your face underneath your nails while you are being consumed from skin to cartilage. Hell is merely the act of whimpering into the dark where no one can hear you: “I cannot bear this” and the realization of it being true. 

Some part of you calcifies to atheism in that moment, with torment circling you like a nasty vulture and nothing to stop the way you spill your blood on the carpet that drinks it in because more bodies have dropped upon it than wine. Nature turns against you with these things, the ones that eat the carrion. Perhaps they prey upon you because you were already dead. 

You trip across the fallen door, scrabbling wetly with your bloody hands to pull your body across it. You do not trust your legs, they have concocted miracles and it was not enough. You drag yourself down the hall by the strength of your hands, feet, and desperation alone—and perhaps a fair bit of spite as well. The flies on your torso are crushed, but not defeated as you are. They follow you and your final strained attempt at escape. You may be moving on cadaveric spasms and would not be able to tell the difference.  

You have to open your mouth to breathe, to catch your panting breath, and they find the wounds of your inner cheek, the abrasions on your tongue. You close your teeth around them before they can reach the back of your throat. Your mouth is filled with cold strings of salty exoskeleton. 

You carry on like this for a small eternity before your arms buckle and you fall, prone on the floor. You don’t have the strength to flip yourself over. 

You would have died this way, covered in blowflies, face-down, and shivering. You were largely at peace, there was no fight left in your mind and your body never had any to begin with. The perpetual buzzing became background noise, and for once all was quiet within your head. It would have been remarkably easy to allow yourself to drift and welcome whatever awaited you in the end. 

So it was distressing when you were lifted into the air by your neck, hanging like a rabbit in a hunter’s snare. 

You open your eyes slowly, painfully, and regret the decision immediately when the countess’ nonplussed face is brought into your vision. You are exhausted, weighed down by sleeplessness and an extensive mental toil. You are dying in her grip, your air is gone and you are battered into near unconsciousness. Still, because you are deficient in self-preservation now more than ever, you reach your hands out for her—the tips of your fingers stretching out across the white pillar of her throat. You bare your teeth and growl at her. 

You wonder what she sees when she looks at you now, the flies fat on your blood falling from your corpse and the rest of it stuck to your forehead, trickling from your nose and down your lips, from your ears and to your neck, from your leg. You are spattered in it, the revolting, vile, horrendous, beautiful thing that pumps from your quieting heart. Your dead leg and malice-twisted face, so irrevocably, deliriously pissed at her existence, the scorn of it upon yours. 

You’d have kissed her squarely on that disgusted mouth if you could, shoved your bloody tongue down her throat and made her taste you. You’d have spit in her face so you’d die crooked when she dropped you. You’d have run a wet red stripe down the side of her head with your hatred, put your mouth and your body all over her so she’d remember you for the few minutes it would take for her to wash you away. 

But she holds you just far enough away that all you can do is try to choke her with your inefficient hands. Your attack becomes a caress against her skin, your warmth pressed against the cold of her.

She lowers you to the floor, placing you on your side somewhere behind her. Throughout all of it, your fingers do not leave her neck until she moves away and her face tells you nothing; she is disquietingly unreadable, blank in regards to everything that makes you shudder.

You exist somewhere between awake and dead, picking up on only bits and pieces of conversation between her and with whatever daughter had attacked you last (and it was a daughter, you watched her form from the mess of insects that departed you):

“Stop...had the whole night to end this…” 

“Cassandra…it was odd, but she had deconstructed most of her larvae…couldn’t even handle…”

“Where is she now?”

“Unconscious, she started a new…it isn’t working as fast as normal, but she’ll be fine, unfortunately.” 

“Wake her up once the…she needs to explain herself…can’t even handle something this simple…”

“Understood.”

“The census? I don’t even know where to begin …”

“...I don’t think any of the maids…it makes no sense…”

“...blood threw you off…I had a theory about that…”

“What should we do with it?”

“...keep her alive, I have something I’d like to try.”

You may have cared, several hours ago. But when you are picked up and carried, the world rolls on its axis and spins and spins and spins. 

All you know is gold.

Chapter Text

You wish you could dream.

You had a massive landfill of nightmares and a small gallery of dreams from when you were younger that you hardly remembered; it would be impossible to recall the last time you’d slept with the comfort of illusion rather than the sting of it. If you could select the specifics and parameters of a dream, you think you may have dropped yourself in a mirrored box somewhere, a place where you could have watched everything and everyone without them ever noticing you in return. Too often had attention done you harm. You found that many of your troubles were traced with a long winding red string back to being perceived, to attracting attention from someone who could look at you and desire your undoing. 

Hands were designed to grab, to pinch, to twist, and perhaps also to tear. Nails scratched and scarred. Eyes burned. Everything was quite a lot—when it came to witnesses.

God perceived all, but behind that ice-steel mask there was magic in play that blocked the rare hazard eye. No one could see Her if all heads were bowed over clacking rosary and clasped hands. 

At some point or another, people found it difficult to look upon you as well. 

It did not make you God, it did not make you anything at all. In fact, it made you nothing.

If you are not seen, you cannot be quite sure you exist. There is no one to say you are. No one to tell you what you must become or to guide you into the concept of those delicate social performances. How awful, to not understand whether or not you are allowed to be .

God aside from all of these clever things, of course.

***

For the second time in your life, you wake up in bed with someone else. 

The first time had been when you were small and blissfully denser, nuzzling into your mother’s side. It exists primarily as a memory to remind you that you are overdue for important research into the odd correlation between your demonstrations of physical affection and the untimely death of the receiving parties. 

However, for the present second time and very much unlike the first, you reach for a weapon before you open your eyes. When you come up empty you open them.

Daniela is perched on your thighs like a gargoyle, quiet as stone and unnaturally inanimate in expression. 

For a moment you think she may have entered some sort of psychosis, but when you shift yourself further up the bed you find that her pupils track you. It does not entirely eliminate the hypothesis of rapid mental deterioration.

You stop moving because you have the idea in your head that if you shuffle around enough she will break from her trance and eat you.

Which is, unfortunately, now a very real and prevalent possibility. 

“You have a lovely scream, did you know?” she asks you, unaware or uncaring of how unsettling the statement is when delivered inflectionless and deadpan. 

“I was not aware, no.”

“You do.” She lowers herself onto her palms and knees, one on each side of you while she makes the creases in the linen bend to avoid her finger. “Most humans keep within a thin range of frequencies, unless in distress or excitement. Your voice is rather low—you fluctuate between boyish and feminine quite often, actually—but when you scream you hit an entirely new octave. Do you sing?”

“I do not.” You bring your legs closer to your chest. 

“It would be a waste, I think. You wouldn’t be able to reach those notes prettily if you sang, though I hear there are some sorts that try to.” And because something in your expression must insinuate to her that you were in any way contemplating the idea of breaking out into a measure, she adds: “Spare your voice, no good fortune ever happens across songbirds.” 

She crawls the length of the bed to you, slowly and with a subtle caution you do not understand. Her mouth has since become smeared with gore and mixed crudely with some sort of lipstick that makes a ruckus of dark color from her cupid’s bow down to her chin. She smells of mildew, oddly. 

“What do you remember of last night?”

Too much, immediately. 

You lift your hands, recalling their state before you fell into that inky sleep. You twist them in your vision, stunned and confused when you find your skin unmarred. You run your fingers over your face, and startle when no textures of blistering or remarkably deep scarring present themselves. You are pocked in new places with strange indentations, and some spanses of your arms are uneven in random uncolor, but that is the worst of your damages. Your brain had yelped and hidden away the exact natures of what you’d endured, but you would never forget the way you’d burned. 

A fireplace crackles in the corner, and your legs are covered by sheets worth more than your existence. You recognize the room as one of the ones you burst through in your dissociation, although had not ever considered it beyond the fact that it wasn’t defensible due to the flimsy lock on the door and nothing within to hold it shut. 

You are upset by the discovery that, aside from a pit of dread coiling in your stomach, you feel perfectly fine.

“What did you do to me?” you snap. “I was-”

“Oh, certainly almost dead. You were not fun to put back together.” Daniela inches up further, backing you against the headboard. Your noses brush. The musk of her makes your eyes water; the whole of your olfactory system is flooded with decay stench. “But ‘almost’ is operative. We are intimate in treating the injuries we cause.” 

Which makes sense. What does not is them actively choosing to mend you, and apparently deciding to do it well. You were under the impression that you were meant to die last night; the fact that you nearly did and were stopped from doing so tightens your dread pit slowly and makes the Lung Thing reconsider your vow of anti-vomit. 

“You do not have to extend your intimacies in injuries to your relations with my personal space.” 

“It can be our personal space if only you let it.” 

And to your utter horror she takes your responding silence as an indicator to run the entirety of her blood-wet tongue along the underside of your jaw. 

You have been awake for less than five minutes, by this point, and lack the appropriate electrical charges in your brain to properly process being licked for the third time in two days. Your mind is overloaded by the incongruity. 

With your reaction time lagging roughly forty seconds behind you unintentionally allow Daniela to continue running the length of her tongue along your neck and mandible, focusing very intently on a nondescript spot behind her while you try to synchronize mind and body. 

This is the state the countess finds you in as she stoops through the doorway, wine glass filled to the brim: Daniela boxing you against the headboard leaving murky streaks along your face and you captured fully in shock while she does it. 

For a moment you all stop to look at each other; and then the countess inhales pointedly and Daniela dissolves and flutters her way out of the door. 

Being alone in the room with her shifts the gravity of the world upon your shoulders the moment she sets her eyes on yours. It is a talent you never wish to cultivate, but perhaps one you wish to study. 

You long to say you were able to turn your nose up at her and snarl your mouth. That despite the wound of your body and how she commanded power over your life with the airing of her hand, that in spite of you crawling hands and knees before her, and regardless of the mess her daughter so easily and carelessly marked you with, you were able to straighten your back and address her with the whole small burden of your dignity. 

You cannot claim these things, however, because you shrink beneath her attention immediately. Your courage evaporated back when you realized you were not dead, but you do manage to knit your brows and at least deny her the satisfaction of a pliant expression. 

She is smug when you flick your gaze to her, and you will kill her for it. 

“I apologize. Daniela is my youngest—the poor thing—and lacks impulse control.” She struts the length of the room gaudily, flaunting her confidence to your reactive cowardice like a particularly arrogant panther. “I trust she was hospitable?” 

“She licked me.”

“It does seem to be a recurring trend.” 

“Does smearing me with bodily fluids fit within your definition of ‘hospitable’?”

She lifts a shoulder half-heartedly in consideration. “In certain contexts, actually.”

You smartly do not request elaboration. 

“You were supposed to be dead five hours ago; I took the liberty of assuming you would like to know why you aren’t.” She is casual in the way she says it, and by all accounts there is no reason for you not to let yourself be baited. But she is haggard in a way you did not before comprehend, as you were preoccupied with the artistry of Not Dying. The dark moons beneath her eyes and the general tenseness that you see within her helps you understand.

You need to know, but it does not necessarily mean that you want to. You incline your head to her regardless.

“Hm,” she sips from her glass in a way that is not particularly thoughtful, but trying to be. “What do you know of Cadou?” 

“Little. I do not invest myself to the Mold.” 

“You’ve been exposed.”

“I do not invest myself,” you intone again. “It was through proximity, not direct…implantation.”

“None of you have been ‘implanted’ in years. Everyone is infected through proximity. Strange of you though, to recognize it. Who told you?”

“No one.”

“Someone had to, there’s no possible way for you to conclude it on your lonesome.” She raises a brow at you over her glass and smiles a conspiratorial grin that immediately makes you cold. “If you’re worried about me ratting, don’t. It matters not whether all of you know or none of you, it already has its effects within your body.” 

“You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t care. You were going somewhere with this, it’s impolite to derail.” 

She scoffs wryly. “‘Care’ is a deeply implicating word, pet. Bury your secrets if you must.”

“What do your Cadou have to do with anything?” 

“Plenty. The biology is tedious and also absolutely none of your business, but I suppose to understand my plight you need to understand that they can be implanted into a few sites. Ours were placed into the brain.”

Which explains quite a lot.

“They have the frequent habit of destabilizing, causing a few—” (Here she makes several smooth and incomprehensible hand gestures that make no sense to you.) “Complications, for lack of gentler phrasing.

“The girls’ are like clockwork, as they can be tracked and work almost predictably. Not quite, though. The result is what you witnessed last night, and ultimately is what makes things difficult.”

The falsified humor leaves her slowly, exposing the blatant frustration cloaked by it. “Their particular…tendencies can be forgiven, what cannot be is the impact it has on my staff numbers.”

You find it physically impossible to express your sympathy, entirely because it is nonexistent.

“I can take as many women from the village as I please, the issue lies within there simply not being any women to take. We consume faster than you produce, and the population dwindles; has been dwindling for God knows how long. It’s becoming next to impossible to replenish what we can lose in a single night.”

And she truly seems distraught about it all, so completely and utterly weighed down by the iniquity and concept of not getting what she wants. By her livestock not being able to keep up with the manic pace of consumption, the economics of her rotten cannibalism. She thumbs the divot between her nose and forehead, ruminatively and humanly upset. 

You are beside yourself in your silently creeping fervor. You bring your teeth down against each other.

“Bind them,” you hiss.

“Pardon?”

 “Leash your creatures. Keep them from their violence and spare your help,” You spit to her.

“I’ll not treat my daughters as animals.”

“The alternative is preferable to you then? You’ll pick the village clean simply because you won’t put countermeasures into place? Kill us all off because you won’t tether your monsters?” 

She swirls the wine, contemplating you now. “There have been countermeasures, we’ve always had countermeasures. Services were countermeasures, as were virtues.”

You do not understand what she means at first, and it is a testament to how deeply rooted within you is the tick of reverence. 

You let your expression fall into one of open awful horror. 

“I- what?”

“Aside from the opportunity to reinstate a hierarchy, you have at least once considered that the Church was primarily established to ensure ascendancy over your behaviors. Tell me you have, I placed a wager with Cassandra.” 

You have to lower your head, not in response to her, but perhaps simply because it became too heavy for your neck with the weight of despondency. 

“We’ve always thought it best to encourage monogamous couplings, rather strictly actually, with the expectation that the thrill of taboo would see an increase in infidelity—firstly with adolescents, with the occasionally dissatisfied mid-aged pairing here and there. Reverse psychology, you’re familiar with it. More recently we’ve pushed for the shift of acceptance of pre-marital coitus, simply because it’s been more effective, although permitting it outright would be difficult. The priests would need to all be re-exposed to the spores, adjustments to be made to any sort of ‘scripture’; it’s a lengthy process and there’s simply no way to do it swiftly without arousing suspicion. Everything works so well because it’s discreet.”

She pauses to absorb the gratification from your discomfit.

“It’s also why we developed the punishments for…recreational pleasure. And also why we indicated against procreating with the weak and foreign—apologies again, I don’t mean to spite you specifically—and a thousand other orders to keep the numeric aspect of it all in check, honestly. It’s entirely possible that one might be able to keep books on the progress if they were keen. You can figure the remainder out well enough on your own, I believe. Just know we’ve always had countermeasures, it doesn’t immediately equate to them being as effective as we’d like.” 

She lets the information sink in so you understand that she does mean to spite you specifically. 

Your emotions regarding your religion were conflicted at best and absolute hellish turmoil at worst, and it had been that way as long as you’d lived. You, on a deeply personal level, understood how easily faith could be weaponized against you. It did not necessarily mean that you escaped the snake-hold of it. To learn that the maneuvers of yourself and nearly everyone within the village were the product of centralized power designed to feed you into the mouth of the countess and the Lords was the last knowledge you had ever wanted to bear in life.

You were cattle. And everything you had believed, willingly or otherwise, was the accumulation of hand-fed and carefully concocted psycho-agenda. 

“Oh, don’t pout. I haven’t even gotten to explain how you tie into all of this.” 

Your hands tremble, neither from chill nor fever. And, honestly, it is difficult to say they shake as a result of your rage either. You wish you were better able to master the tide of your emotions. You are beginning to callus, slowly and with difficulty, but callusing nonetheless. Hardened skin may soon grow over that sensitive vulnerability within your chest, and perhaps you’ll find yourself just as remorseless as the world and the powers that command this small part of it.

“Why bother telling me this?” you ask softly, quietly defeated in a way that is fastly becoming domestic to you. 

The countess tilts her head up, the shade of her hat making her iridescent to your vantage beneath her. You wane, small and humble within the cold of her shadow.

“You’re my new lure,” she replies, intentionally leaving you bated to her, it is a tactic meant to leave you desperate for her to expand upon her words, for you to be left asking questions and for her to be able to twist her answers. It is only distressing because it works.

You beseech her with the narrowing of your eyes, dazed by the crypticness. 

“Blood is a strange thing, when you cultivate it you begin to develop a palate for the variances. And as much as I’d like to believe I’ve passed down a refined taste to my daughters, I can’t deny that we deviate somewhat in that field. 

“Where I find you repulsive, you do nothing but attract them.”

The outcome you never fucking wanted. 

“You intend to use me as a distraction when they destabilize,” you say, flat and bitter. “They’ll hunt me rather than your maids.” 

“Precisely, miel . They were relentless, as if the rest of the staff were nonexistent. They smell you and go absolutely feral. The time they spend tracking you is time added to that of another maid, time given back to a mother, time that births a daughter. As long as I can tempt them with your blood, I have my countermeasure.” 

You move before you think, throwing the sheets from your body and hauling yourself to stand, leaning your weight onto your good leg and limping the dead one. You cross to her, while the burn of her gaze follows. Your hands grab fistsfuls of the luxury of her dress, and you think to shred it for a half-second before reeling yourself in because you would not stop at the fabric. You stare up at her, your jaw red and your teeth bloodied, deathly quiet when you whisper:

“I will unmake you. I am going to pull you apart so slowly and so awfully you will forget everything you’ve ever known about your existence before pain. I will tear you down into your components and put you back together wrong . You cannot, and absolutely will not, keep me contained here as your bait.”

The countess sips her wine, sucks it through her teeth and takes the time to observe it.

“Oh, does it feel any better, by the way?” she points with her free hand to your leg, not looking at you. “Some of the damage is genetic. I've concluded it’s a reaction to the Mold along with poor breeding and there’s nothing to be done about it, but we’ve tended to the bone. It’s a clean break, strategic almost.” 

She lowers her colossal hand to your head, terribly, and wraps the whole of it around your skull. You are shoved forcibly to the floor, sprawled on your ass, and her heel is applied directly into your shin. 

You refuse to give her the satisfaction of screaming. 

“You are my tentative plan, until I can conceive something better. But don’t misunderstand,” she puts more of her weight down and you gasp, clutching your knee and fighting the water from your eyes. “You are useful to me, living or otherwise. Presently, the scale tips in favor of alive as opposed to dead . But harvesting blood from a cold body is arguably easier than taking it from the living. The moment I think you’ll suit me better as a corpse, I’ll make you one. That is, if my daughters don’t first.

“You tread thin on my patience. And, pet, I will destroy you and not put you back together at all. Make all the threats you see fit, but you’ll always remember to take the growl from your voice and bow your head with a courteous ‘my lady’ tacked onto the end of them.”

She lifts her foot and stomps down upon your leg, and you curl yourself lower to the ground, hissing ragged breath through your teeth as she begins to lean her weight onto your body. You threaten to snap underneath the basest of her power, and this makes you insane as you shiver your hands around your captured limb. 

“Live, die, it doesn’t matter to me, really. But you’ll know your place no matter which you choose,” she opts to look down upon you now, and you meet her eye through the hurt. 

“Do you understand that you stopped being entertaining after you fired that gun? Do you comprehend how absolutely minuscule your life is to me in the mass of lives that intersect mine? I will be the grandest thing to ever happen to you, darling, how terrible.” 

“Let me go,” you sputter. You murmur it weakly on repeat, a record scratched and broken, trying in vain to pull away, to give yourself the distance you have always needed from this place. 

“Finish your sentence or I’ll crush you, I’ll sever your leg and then take your larynx if you don’t learn to address me properly. Either you will speak correctly or not at all.”

You are hot, livewire and panting with the heat of your kindled fury. You are wronged, here. You have been wronged for an infinity and yet the infinity orbits and crests around this moment that is spliced and rolled out before you. You were imperfect, seeing wickedness and repeating it in turn, but the origin of it remained unchecked and unpunished. Where was the retribution in all this? If not for you then for the sinless, then for the ones with crow-eaten eyes in the vineyard and the ones who lost their heads in the dining rooms? You were the furthest thing from altruistic, but you came from the dredges and bore the scars as unproud badges and you had to know if there was something other than offering supplication to the ones who ate you. 

Why could she break you? 

And why could you not fight it?

“Please,” you mutter. “Please, let me go, my lady.” 

You will not strain your neck to look up at her, to see the shit-eating grin or the unrighteously dignified gold of her eyes. Or even worse, sheer blankness. For as long as you do not lift your head, she may well not look upon you with apathy. 

“Never. But I will release your leg, if that’s what you’re asking,” she replies, and takes her pressure away from you, her steps vibrating through the room until she pauses at the door. “You need a brace, not a cane. We burned it for firewood this morning.” 

The old man had crafted it for you, back when you were younger and sicker, and had just learned you would not die due to the chronic nature of your illness. The wood of the coffin they had cut for you was repurposed into an instrument for your mobility. 

It was one of the few kind things anyone had ever done for you. 

Chapter Text

How does one describe something absolutely and completely indescribable? It’s a sort of tricky thing and even trickier further when you attempt to delve into the specifics of what falls under ‘indescribable’. Is it a thing without a name or a face? Or is it just merely composed of things too complicated to break down for the one describing? And then is it ‘indescribable’ or is the speaker simply too stupid? And then, furthermore, what does that make anyone who can describe said thing? 

Daniela is indescribable, by her own merit, when she destabilizes, and does frequently ponder what that means. 

Cassandra becomes mutated in a simple way; she just goes absolutely insane and puts everything into her arms and teeth, drains the efforts of her brain in favor of blind power. No strategy, no tact, she just means war and goes about in the most ass-backwards way possible. It really fucking sucks that it works, and quite effectivley. Daniela thinks it’s a sort of high for her, a break from poise. 

Bela is different for a small infinity of reasons. Daniela could fill a library with all the things that makes Bela different and it would honestly be pointless because there'll always be something new and strange that pops up to add pages to the books. An infinite library of change, and perhaps that’s the best way to describe what happens to her. She works strangely when she destabilizes. As much of her mind is available, she utilizes it. And it presents the question of if she’s actually destabilizing at all if that’s the case. Where she goes and how she goes about it shifts, it's hard to explain (not indescribable, mind you, because Daniela could if she cared enough to) it would just take some time that she never cared to spend thinking about how Bela operates. 

Daniela can’t decide where she falls, because Mother always said she was destined by pragmatism to be a weird hybrid (fuck-up, but she didn’t say that part) between the two of her sisters. That’s always what it seems to canter back towards, in the end, Cass and Bela. Daniela isn’t really anyone at all, just the odd string that ties two opposite ends together because her siblings were too strongly ‘themselves’ to be ‘sisters’. There needed to be a middle ground so one could point at the lot of them and deduce the spectrum goes from cold to warm and then to hot; rather than from scalding to tundra with no gradient. There’s always a need for medium. She rebels against this when she destabilizes, because she can claim incoherence, and become whatever she wants; which typically results in something horrific and shapeless. 

Mother didn’t really approve of their wild variances, initially, but Mother also didn’t approve of them hunting the staff initially either. But there’s three of them and one of her, and she’s in charge, but it’s democratic in the end anyway because she can’t rule her little artificial family the way she rules everything else.

Daniela has sisters by name and forced acclimation only, they all bleed green but it’s confused blood. From the moment she was invented they’ve only ever been, in some way or another, in a pissing contest that’s lasted a few centuries too long. Cassandra’s winning, because she’s blunt and smart and looks too much like Mother, but not in the way she wants. Bela doesn’t know she’s competing at all or doesn’t care (it’s definitely the latter but there’s still comfortable room for doubt), and Daniela lost by default because she showed up late. 

She wishes they would fight normally, in the physical and bloody way that they handle most of their lives. They don’t though, and it’s only halfly because Mother forbids it. No, they do it kindly and with conversation and trickery and wine, the result is tension that leaves residue on the smoked windows and polished floors with how thick it is. Daniela thinks that if they were permitted just one full on brawl, it would level the mountains the castle was built upon with all of that slow-boiled pressure between them. Oh, they have their spats when they’re destabilized, her and Cassandra at least. But Cass is in a sort of mental purgatory whenever that happens and she’s far too focused on holding her body together to really savor it. She wants to fight when they’re all on level playing fields, when there’s nothing to lose and nothing to gain, just a space to breathe and then when they’re all beaten and have blood trickling down their noses—she wants to talk about all of the things they can’t normally because Bela’s so tight-assed and Cassandra’s so jaded. 

You are the most unspectacular thing to ever wander past the portcullises, and you’re causing more problems than you understand. 

Daniela can describe you easily, it takes two words, observe: paradoxically undecided. You’re bizarre and she throws that word around a lot because it’s her favorite one in the whole of human tongues. And when she calls you unspectacular it’s because you are. Nothing about you speaks to her outwardly, you’re as gray and washed-out as every other pebble that kicks around the village, nothing about you is colorful nor gallant nor particularly attractive. You’re quiet, not in voice, but in presence. You don’t realize how awful your posture is, how you shrink in a room, how small you make yourself nor how easy it is to simply forget you’re there at all. You also don’t realize that you use that smallness as a weapon. What makes you paradoxical is in how such a tiny thing could possess so many large opinions, and you’re undecided because you don’t even agree with yourself half of the time. 

Daniela adores you, adores you because you’re unspectacular and delicious and new. She adores you because you, in another way that is separate from her own, create your own addition to the gradient of them. And perhaps also because she longs to love all the stray things Mother collects. She was designed to tie everything together, the sheep-dog of this patchwork family, and that includes you now. 

She makes herself indescribable to you, she hopes, because it means you’ll struggle with her. And also because everyone else already knows how to match words to her; she wants new ones. She wants to see which ones you come up with, in that small chaos of your human mind. She needs to know before she kills you. 

Chapter Text

You do not wear the brace for two days, because that is the length of time you allow your anger to pervade over the practicality of it. You hate it powerfully and everything it now means to you; and then you hate it tenfold because it is a significant and undeniable improvement to the health of your leg. You seethe at it, and you pulled it apart and threw it the morning of that first day only to find it reattached to you the following. 

It is tight above your knee and beneath it, holding your leg stiff and keeps you from remaking the similar damages that had kept you from healing. Twin bars pressed into the sides of your calf and joined beneath your arch. Several clasps and straps needed to be tightened to hold it in place and on the whole you felt robotic and unnatural when you had it strapped to you like a dead snake. You will never walk normally again, but you do it without the great throbbing pains that you once bore, and this maddens you. 

You were designed to hurt, you kept yourself broken to combat and counter the mechanisms of your mind. It is by awful structure that it should be within these walls that you are forced into healing, for the sake of living. Neither of which were things you had intended to do for very long. You did not want to be repaired. You did not want to be fixed. You wanted your control back, and even though you were warm, you were warm against your will. You were recovering against your will. You were breathing against your will. 

The fourth night you spend in Castle Dimitrescu you think to amputate it yourself, which is not nearly the most violent solution you have bred.

You jerk into consciousness at midnight when the grandfather clock petrifies you, tepid trickles of sweat falling down your ribs and slicking your hair to your forehead, fresh from a loud sleep that stole your peace and made it hot with the unconscious fear that clung to you in waking like tar. 

You took up residence in the room the countess allotted you, choosing to sleep underneath the bed and far from where the ornate rug in the center might stretch beneath it to lessen your discomfort. The smaller space dissuades you from startling at the shadow creatures that play in the corners or from the ghosts of spiders you see scuttling eight-leggedly down the walls. It doesn’t matter, in the end, you barely rest and when you do it always ails you. 

You cannot stand the brace and how they have adjusted you so you may attempt vitality, and you are bleary when you blink down at it in the dark. You want, in just this little way, to restore some sort of agency over what has become of you. You are hungry for it. 

You move yourself to sit, bending your knee and bringing it close. You fashion the linens into a tourniquet and your dagger into a risky scalpel. You wonder through the daze how long it would take them to notice something was incorrect with you, to smell the charge of your blood in the pints you will lose. More than hemorrhage, you are terrified of anyone stopping you, of anyone touching you or remaking the image of hands into something used to pick up your pieces and pop you back into your sockets and pistons. 

Let them break you, and let them rip the bones from your brittle skeleton, but, God, never let them correct you. Never again. 

You bring the dagger into the skin above your knee, pressing the steel there until it drinks a drop from the slim split in your flesh. The pain no longer startles you, in the mayhem of pain and starts you cannot afford to flinch at the self-imposed red lines you might draw in experiments. But it does wake you up, which makes the shackled part of your brain that considers self-preservation something more than a cousin to ego remarkably upset. You are growing weary with not being able to go through with little things. 

You think, quietly and for several hours, until the sounds of scurrying maids echo to you; which is the only way you are able to know it is morning while you rot in this room. 

You wander the halls with the sheets still knotted above your thigh and with the dagger in your fist, hunting for something scarce and difficult to you: patience. 

***

The countess had informed you of why her daughters destabilized. What she neglected to tell you is when they would. 

In the first two weeks spent aimlessly dragging yourself through life, you were attacked nine times, six while you were in your room, two when you were in the halls, once while you were rustling through the kitchen after you became aware that the food within was not human-based and you could break your three day fast. There was, now that you consider it, a tenth instance that you could not rightly label an assault. However it was so deeply unsettling and caused you the most mental unrest and so became an unofficial adjunct to the category, which was when the countess plucked you from the tornado of Daniela (who was working her way through the skin of your navel on that particular occasion) and flung you within the tub of of blood in the Hall of Ablution, which is the name you were provided with later for the nightmare basin. 

‘To mask your scent…somewhat,’ she had claimed, leaving you soaked to your sorry teeth in red, crawling out and sloshing blood on tile before four stony witnesses. You highly suspected she was simply generating an excuse to throw you, and your suspicions came to a head when you were found again a few minutes later and fought with every ounce of strength within you to rid your body of flies. 

It becomes so much less significant to you now, the utilization of everything you have just to exist. You drop dead underneath the bed when you have reprieve, you grow ill with some unfortunate mixing of bloodborne pathogens and fever and fight that too. Everything that breathes wants to contend with you, and you are feral as you fight it all with the extent of your meager power, pushing yourself right up to the boundaries of limiters and finding new ways to kiss a scythe without cutting your lips. So frequently it is not enough. So often does the countess take hold of you—which is truthfully the worst bit of it all—and rip you thrashing from one death and then another. So frequently must one conscious sister pry you from the teeth of a destabilized one. So often do you bay in your awful gnawing horror, your nails become your twisted claws, your teeth become your yellowed weapons. The dagger is an extension of your red knuckles and you swing the blade at anything that approaches you from behind. You become cattish within the castle, terrorized and panicked to the point of utter hypersensitivity. Your sleepless eyes stretched open and the length of you crunched into a frightened coil. You crossed by a mirror once and attacked your reflection, which is how you learned that your need to escape this place had tripled. 

You learn in that following month to survive. 

Survival comes unnaturally, you do not like it initially and it would be inaccurate to say you ever became well-adjusted to the prospect of intentionally maneuvering yourself out of harm’s way. You’d never been suicidal, understand, you were just nihilistic. But nihilistic people cannot exist within the belly of Castle Dimitrescu, entirely because it is impossible to approach the speculation of existence philosophically. You forgot philosophy and theory when women started to eat you. You forgot how to wax rhetoric when you couldn’t shoot yourself. 

Regardless, you’d decided on that fourth night that you did not want to die this way, not here and not to the basests of the Dimitrescus. And this led you into the development of resistance, burning vile resistance that had you kicking and biting and screaming for your life on a near nightly basis.

You were scared to question it, to wonder why you were so frightfully electrified to exist when you had made such a strong point against it priorly. You, against everything, were grateful for that embargo on philosophy, for the restriction of deep intrapersonal thought. You did not need to think, for those long hot winter days spent boiling in scarlet ichor, you just ran and fought and, occasionally, screamed. You scamper through life with your acid-scorched throat and peeling ribboned knuckles and braced leg, coughing viruses and squirting blood from your nostrils and licking bone from your gums while the countess watches you from beneath the shadow of her fucking hat as you survive—watches you learn to hide and hold your breath and make yourself imperceptible at will. You hate her just as desperately, but it is directionless and cold now. You understand her methodology too well:

The only way you could live is if you become invisible. Crawl and flee and tuck your tail, there is nothing more you can do. 

Your life would have been far simpler, in the end, if you had actually let yourself believe that. 

***

Within the junctures of the sporadic turmoil that is your adjustment to the castle, your relationship with the countess’ piano becomes somewhat strained. 

You had not thought much of the instrument, as living was a feat that required the majority of your attention, and when you did think of it you found it incredibly difficult to regard it as fondly as you once had. You revere it for the craftsmanship and because you revere things with the same frequency ghosts plague graveyards (or scarecrows). It reminds you now so much of what you had been before you realized the old man died, and it feels uncomfortably important with how it was one of the last things he’d touched. You can not yet decide whether you hate it or cling to it for sentiment, but in either case you are drawn to the opera hall between bursts of violence.

You commonly find yourself huddled beneath the dark curved legs of it, or seated at the stool with your scarred arms drawn into your fraying sleeves so you would not be tempted to reach out and taint it with your touch. Your hands are always so filthy, you notice. You’d washed and washed and washed until your palms peeled and bled with soapburn and could never find them quite as clean as you’d prefer. You tremble to be near to it, and tremble to think of accidentally brushing against it. You often shake yourself from the sludge of mental fog to find your breath misting the wood, when you could swear you’d deposited yourself underneath the bed. 

You attempt to condition yourself to associate it with comfort, trying to reignite the spark of something approaching normality, something that might tether you in a small way to your life before everything went to utter shit. It does not quite work, but then again it does not backfire wholesale, and so it was preferable to you that it simply remained an almost-reassurance as opposed to something that made you shudder to look at. It grounds you, somewhat, to allow yourself to occasionally pretend you are a piano tuner again. You would grovel and drool and plead at the foot of the first person to let you simply become whoever you were before—as ‘before’ is swiftly becoming a distant concept; your mind will start to see before as a series of letters and numbers and confused releasing of hormones, blurry nostalgia for creaky baseboards. 

Bela catches you while you are curled beneath it, one evening, and you watch each other for some odd length of time that finds a home between two hours and two minutes. The candlelight is the most frequent of the sort, and it does strange things to her shadows in the center of that dark room. 

“And do you know how to go about playing it?” she asks, or rather, the flies ask, because it is not one voice that speaks but several hundred, you realized a few nights ago. She flits about the length of it, running a fingertip through the layers of long settled dust. It makes you shiver. Not in discomfort. “For all the time you spend staring at it, have you managed yet to learn anything?” 

“I’ve always known.” You sneeze. “To a degree.”  And then, because you are deeply and irrationally terrified of self-importance, you add: “I am not talented at it.” 

She stops, her whole body suspended in time, like she diverts all of her power into contemplation. Her finger twitches on the edge of a golden engraving. 

“Play something, anyway.” 

The castle is uncomfortably warm at a default setting, there is fire to be found everywhere, and sweltering at the notch above that. You go cold now. 

“I won’t.” You recoil at the thought of it. You shake your head, for what was supposed to be once and then you continue because it has been difficult to master your body in recent times. “I won’t. I won’t.” 

Without good reason, you would not lay your hands upon it again, to play it hadn’t even crossed your mind.

For whatever reason—and one you do not end up discovering later on—Bela does not accept your response. 

You breathe and she is behind you, kicking you from under the piano and wrestling you to stand. Your boots scramble on the floor; you do not understand. 

“Just play something, a scale even. Why do you dislike it? Do you hate it? It is a mere instrument. Put your hands here like this- stop that, you’ll hurt yourself. Did you lie, do you not know how to play?”

When in distress you are moved beyond typical human communication and instead turn to making yourself as difficult to keep hold of as possible. Bela’s nails dig into your arm, five deep pricks of pain squeeze and burst the little vessels and capillaries beneath. She is strong, which is something you are familiar with now as all of them are stupidly piss-takingly strong, but you are not used to this form of her strength. She moves your arm towards the keys, using the insidious power in her fingers to stretch yours from their fist. 

Such a little thing. It is not worth whatever she will do to you, and even though you cannot explain the depth of it, for some reason you fear touching it. You are scared, irrationally, that it will strip your soul if you have to press your body to it. You are exhausted of everything and of how you have become so pliable. 

There is a limit to how much you will allow. 

You twist your arm against where she holds your wrist. You feel the jut of your radius, hear it cry, and then you push against the pressure. 

Bela carries you screaming through the wings. 

You hang limply over her shoulder, clutching just below the break. Your world is swimming and distorted through the pain, but you register her muttering, mumbling tersely to herself in a language that rasps the hair along the back of your neck with its vibration. She is jittery in the excitement she has worked herself into. You have come to understand Bela is the most composed woman in this castle, and she is fearful of something, which naturally makes you panic further. She skitters up the stairs, each step making you grow louder and more desperate to be free of her. She does not feel natural and mostly because she is just a hundred insects hiving together to make a human suit. 

“Quiet, quiet,” she coos to you, her eyes frantic with her void pupils blown wide. “It cannot be worth the breath, little one. It is but a fracture, I can mend you, but you must be quiet. Mother will hear. You were not meant to be harmed in this way. Do you understand, human? She punishes for misdeeds and she is wicked with a knife, so you must be quiet for me.” 

And she slides a hand over your mouth to trap your air and muffle you. You chew it, flinching at the taste of her flies. 

Bela stops in a hall you’re not familiar with yet, swiveling her head and all at once you feel the small muscles that knurl her back tighten. Your mind has a separate filter for the buzz, so you hear it at the same time she does.

“Ah,” she says, and then, more aptly: “shit.” 

When she flees, she bangs your hand against her waist and you nearly tear a hole through the center of her palm in your agony.

It hurts. 

It hurts. 

She peels away into the maze of the castle’s interior, no longer invested in keeping you quiet and just as negligent of your broken radius. At a certain point your brain can no longer fire the appropriate pain signals, they all meld together and you simply devote yourself to kicking her in the stomach. 

“You’ll be fine, I’m sure. Just until I can resolve this, yes?” She places you on the floor, leaning your back against the wall. In your haze her eyes gleam a single kaleidoscope gold. 

“I hadn’t really meant for any of this to happen, so bear with me.” She parts her mouth, and you can only stare as her teeth come alive, shifting and moving within her jaw. Incisors shorten, cuspids length then, molars shift back, she forms a small chip in one of her premolars. “But, if we’re being fair, you did instigate this.” 

She leans forward and bites you squarely on the clavicle. 

And then she does it again.

And again.

And—

—again.

She bites you from your neck up to your jaw and down to your arms and then again right on your wrist. You stab her, kick her, bite her back. You claw her with your nails until you both bleed, shiny verdant rivets that run down your arms like wet veins. 

You invent new words for the pain, ones you cannot mentally conceptualize but begin with new vowels made up entirely of your hoarse tight-throated screams and end in the burning image of Bela’s fangs in you. 

And then she leaves you there, heaving and spent on the floor. Running while you die, again, for the tenth time. 

Your view on the world shifts every time you suffer, for anguish is the best and most primitive teacher you will ever have. You gain one more level of insight into existence each time you are laid out supine and bleed your thirsty blood into the floor. And the world shifts.

Earth is spinning for you, orbiting and turning and rocking frantically on its hinges and one day it’s going to fall out of the universe and into your palms. 

You’ll crush it into moonpowder.

***

You take your retaliation to the library, stretching on the tips of your toes to reach for the hardback cover of a book that will not contain the information you want. 

You’ve destroyed it. 

The enormous flat paned skylight bears down enough of the muddy sunlight so that you have to observe the wreckage. You’ve turned over two shelves, knocked down the tomes and papers from another four of them. Some of the most old and valuable anthologies you have ever seen are wrinkled and yellow underneath your feet. You have rampaged through with your hands skimming over titles and ripping open ancient colorbled books that nearly dissolve underneath your careless fingertips. The age-grime is thick and clogging, making the lightbeams clouded and visible, and you stop every few minutes to cough the dust out of your throat.

Cassandra lounges atop one of the shelves as you upturn the room, reclined on her back and with one leg kicked up over another. The living black free material of her cloak is rucked around the summit of her pale thighs. As much as you wish her presence was negligible, she occasionally whistles a note sharply, a result of having learned your distressing sensitivity to sudden sound. She relishes when you jump, a slow smug smile twitching across her face each time. 

You press your fingers to the book’s spine, scrabbling with your nails to find a nook or nich to latch to. When you fail, losing your balance and stumbling back, you grab the whole shelf by the sides and knock it over. 

You bend your good knee and rummage through the collapse until you find your book, which glares up at you with: The Extensive History of Gluemaking Techniques . And you throw it halfway across the room. 

“Oh my, someone’s in a bit of a tiff,” she says once the dust settles into your hair. “No one seems to have an appreciation for literature these days. You’re so rough-handed. Some of this is erotic, you know. You might regret stomping all over it.” 

“Fuck off,” you say, because you’ve needed to say it for a few weeks now. You’ve been in a mood since Bela wrapped your wrist, and every blood drinker in the castle has cataloged and exploited that mood. You’ve been teased twice about your ovulation cycle.

“Well, I mean, congratulations. You’ve successfully made havoc of the reading room; I’m sure that won’t reap any awful ramifications.” Cassandra, true to character, does not fuck off and instead slips her way down from the shelf with a silent cat-pad grace, landing directly atop a pile of thick botany tomes and sends up a new cloud. She lopes over to you with a slinking gait, long and sleek.

You pick up a fallen encyclopedia, skimming through it and pointedly ignoring her approach. You’ve come to learn that if not given enough attention, sooner or later Cassandra will make herself scarce. 

She drops a lazy arm over your shoulders and plucks the book from your hands. You round on her with your hands tightened into fists. 

“Give it back before I snatch your eyes from your empty skull, you devious blood witch,” you spit with little venom. 

“Naughty girl. You know how much I love when you talk dirty to me.” 

You reach for it, but she is six feet tall and you do not match her length when she holds it tauntingly above your head. Her eyes sparkle with a petty victory, and you decide you despise her now, too. 

“You won’t find what you’re looking for in this,” she says. Her voice is slow and easy, drawn like she pulls her words through her teeth and stretches them out like gum. Everything is sort of hissed when she speaks, turning ‘find’ into ‘ffffind’ and ‘for’ into ‘ffffor’ and you ffffucking hate it. She is in no haste for transparency. 

“I’m not looking for anything.”

“Silly little lamb, of course you are.” She tosses it in the air and catches it, flicking through it one-handed in a show of dexterity. “You make it so easy to tell. You mope around for a month, dragging your feet to do just about anything. Wailing in your sleep and far too broken-hearted—” (“I am not broken-hearted, I am injured ,” you reply) “—to even be upset. Then all of a sudden you spring up like a June flower; and you get angry. So you run around turning everything upside down, poking your head in places you’ve never bothered with before, like here. You think you’ve found a way out?” 

You sniff and turn your nose up at her. “You must like to think you know me.” 

Cassandra tilts her wrist back, letting the book slip out of her hand and fall behind her. “I like to think we know each other, but more to the point, I know you’re trying to kill me.” 

You physically bristle, feeling each of your muscles tense in response. You reach for the gun, waiting for her to snap out of her slow contentment and into the wild thing that will attack you. 

But she laughs. 

“So reactive! You are a marvel, aren’t you?” She rocks back on her heels and grins at you. “You massively fuck up your murder plot the first time and now you’re going back and doing it again, only this time you’re even less prepared and now everyone knows .”

If you had been a different person you may have flustered at the way Cassandra mocks you. But you stand before her and stare her in the eyes until she finishes, snickering for the sake of your embarrassment and not out of actual pleasure. It startles you, to realize this. It is the second worst factor that is shared amongst them all; the false humanity and the way they pretend emotions to you. It is so incredibly mathematic, and that is why it makes your skin crawl. 

“It is impossible for anyone to know,” you say. “Someone would have stopped me by now.”

“And lose the opportunity to watch you crawl around on the floor and cry again? No, no one’s going to bother with trying to slow you down, I’m afraid.” 

And, for no reason at all, this is what slithers under your skin. 

You pick the encyclopedia up from where it was abandoned, clip your teeth together, and turn away from her. You neglect the concept of object permanence; if God held any pity in Her heart for you Cassandra, along with every other Dimitrescu, would cease to exist if you simply could not see them. 

“Absolutely not ,” she says, because God is dead. You feel the ice of her hand dig into your shoulder and lock you into place. “I did not sit in this disgusting library for two hours, watching you ravage good and innocent publications, just for you to limp away from me.” 

“What do you want from me?” And you make the mistake of whining your words, in your total desire to get as far as physically possible away from her. 

She paces around into your vision, hands folded neatly behind her back. “You’re trying to dissect us, looking for a soft spot to strike at? Oh, don’t look so surprised, we all cracked that little code the first day you started sniffing around the cellar—also, don’t do that again, I’m not taking out any more Moroaică for you—I don’t think you realize how unsubtle you are. 

“Nothing here is going to help you. Most of these books,” she kicks at one, “Are completely useless.” 

“Highly unlikely. You have titles here that date back into-”

“It doesn’t matter,” she snaps, suddenly. “How negligent of us would it be to leave important details of our physiology lying around for little girls with ambitions of quadruple homicide to find? There’s nothing vital to be found in books or ledgers. Any research you want you’ll have to complete yourself.” 

You cross your arms, and it is not a motion that is natural for you. You fix her with your glare, searching her for those signs of practiced manipulation. “I refer back to my first question, then.”

She flicks a fly from her hair, sending it dead to the floor. “I’m opening up trade. You tell me something I need to know, and I’ll let you tear me open.”

“I can’t possibly imagine what information I have that you’d want.”

“And that’s because you’re very very poor at being imaginative. I wouldn’t ask you something you didn’t have an answer for.” 

You contemplate her, from the hot ever-shifting metal of her eyes down to the slow rippling of her cloak. It is a bad idea, perhaps one of the worst ways you have ever been propositioned. Cassandra is intelligent and fiercely defensive of her mind, and you cannot understand her. You fear what you do not understand. 

“Fine,” you hear yourself say. 

She claps her hands together once, unceremoniously. “Perfect. Now—”

She grasps the wrinkled and abused collar of your shirt harshly, pulling you in close. In her fingers, in the glint of her smile, she swiftly conveys just how aggravated she is. 

“I have my own suspicions, but I need confirmation. Who broke your wrist?”

You swallow. And then you think.

“Daniela.”

“And that’s the truth?”

“Of course.”

She drops you and retreats half a pace. You breathe much easier for it. 

“So, Bela then?” she asks, running her fingers idly along her midriff. 

“No,” you respond immediately, feeling the way your throat tightens traitorously around the lie. “No, I said-”

“Ah, there’s your issue. You think people only listen to what you say. We smell you.” She taps her nose. “We smell all of the things you say and everything you don’t. We know too much about you. You can’t account for that, and it’s why everyone knows what you’re doing before you even set about doing it. It’s why you’re never getting out of here. But, ah, that’s not really important.”

She turns back to you, bright and lazy. “I still got my answer. I’ll consider it fair. Want to poke around in me?”

“Ew.”

She parts her cloak for you. 

Bullet wounds work like this: there is an entry point, an exit point, and a tunnel of garbled gore inbetween. Where the bullet goes through, there is a rend in tissue, fat, muscle, and skin. Anything in the way is conveniently destroyed and it only gets worse the further the round travels. By the time it bursts out of the exit point, that hole is doubled in size and horror in comparison to the entry. 

The wound in Cassandra’s stomach looks like it is composed of two exit points. 

Her flies swarm around the  absence of body. There is a multitude of pale wings fluttering in an injury jutting from where a chunk of her torso should be. 

You find yourself disgusted and intrigued, both emotions swirling and adulterating each other in your own stomach. 

“What happened?”

She offers you a smile, one that pulls the edges of her lips up and jagged into the apples of her cheeks. It is not sad nor pleased, nor any other identifiable expression that would be considered natural, but you hypothesize from it, somehow, that there is perhaps something you are missing when it comes to the strange apparatus of power and how it moves within the castle; all you know for certain is that at the center of it is—

“Mother. You’ll come to learn that Bela is very clever, and likes to invent new ways to save her skin.”

Chapter Text

You hate Cassandra, and you want that on record. You want it immortalized in your cartilage and scrawled into the stone of your grave. You hate every Dimitrescu, all of the ones that hunt you and all of the ones before that bred them. You hate this castle, you hate their wine, you hate their money. If they elected to adopt several hundred orphaned children with no ties to the family aside from the name, you’ll hate them too. But you will forever loathe her with a very pinpoint specularity, in a way that will only ever be applied to her and her alone. 

“Harder. I’m not made of sugar, you can get rough with me.”

“Shut up. You talk so fucking much for absolutely no reason at all.”

“I’m merely offering a bit of friendly advice, it is good and effective, and you are in desperate need of tutoring. Here, do you want me to show you how to move your wrist? I suppose we’re both glad you didn’t fuck up the dominant one. I can put my hands over yours and then- ow! You wretch, don’t slap me! I’m not nearly as masochistic as you think I am.”

“There is no amount of tutoring you could give that would ever be worth the immense damages you are causing to my equilibrium. Do not touch me under any circumstances whatsoever.” 

“I also said the same thing my first time with a woman. Are you one of those giving-only types? You know, the dysmorphic traumatized girls that won’t let anyone ruffle a hair on their arms without getting all miffed about it? Or is it just that you think I’d be too good for it?”

You yank your hands from her wound, shaking off the few flies that cling to you, and begin to pace unevenly, nibbling at the scabs on your lips. Your face is hot, burning with a certain awful shame you had not ever thought you would be party to. 

She insisted on being naked. 

And you are not immune to it.

You do not take yourself for prudish, because it would be ridiculous and even approaching conceited to grow bashful at bodies of all things. You are not unfamiliar with the anatomy, you know skin and nerves and bones and muscle. Everything is just a skeleton wrapped in a layer of meat. You know meat. But you do not know…curvature. Not beyond your own. There is no person in the entirety of the village that would ever disrobe for you, and so you had never encountered nakedness that was not the clinical way you washed yourself. This is what throws you, perhaps. You are taken aback by the brazenness of her waist, the rocky jut of her hips, the sloping shadowish implications of pelvic bones that guide the gaze naturally downward and—oh dear.

She’s strong, and there is strength in her sexuality as well. In the way she watches you half-lidded and sinful, burning you alive. She watches you like she truly believes her eyes are fire; and she wants to melt your clothes off. In how she presents herself to you, adulterates you with her exhibition of the lionish tangle of her muscle. So unashamed, so lonely, you note.

Cassandra knows too much, she’s said so, knows exactly what you’re about after you broke your composure at her undress. From the moment you reluctantly let her lead you into a bedroom she has plotted this and you knew it but followed her anyway because to say no would be forfeiting your only opportunity to understand her body.

Oh, God, her body. 

Something dark and bitter within you screams for recall of the church, pleading for you to remember sermons and prayers. For all the long hours you’ve spent in blessed places you emerged tainted and disfigured, down to the weird pillars and scratchy foundations of your mind. You desperately want your rosary. You are unholy, but there are levels to sin and, God help you, you had not thought you were capable of pricking yourself any deeper. 

You are confused. The situation is a combination of heartache for your old life blended with a strange coping mechanism for loss; you have grown too accustomed to feral living and it is now leaking putrid droplets into your rational brain. You can trust instinct in any other field, but this is too far out of its scope. No, you are confused. You are too devilish, and are drawn into something equally as immoral. 

Her body is immoral.

Cassandra folds an arm behind her head, her chest lifting and sinking with breath. She cocks her head at you, that knife-point smile eeking out like black oil across her face. She is very much like a deeply satiated tiger, full and content and purring, assured of its massive power but contemptuously quiet with itself. 

“You don’t need to breathe,” you conclude. 

“Oh my, we’ve escalated rather quickly. I’m not particularly keen on the whole choking thing, myself, but if it—” (She makes a crude gesture with her fingers.) “—does something for you I don’t mind.” 

“No,” you enunciate, slowly. Because she hates that and your mouth is too dry. “I mean I’ve examined your chest cavity and you are lacking in lungs. As well as ribs. As well as pretty much everything else that would otherwise belong in a chest cavity. You are hollow, mostly. You do not have a respiratory system, so stop…lifting your chest. You’re not even imitating it right.” 

And then she holds herself still. For the first examinable time, she is well and truly frozen. You’d seen it with Daniela and hadn’t considered it deeply, but watching it with Cassandra, who is considerably larger, revealed just how little life there was to her. People breathe, jitter and itch and twitch and grow anxious, even when they do not mean to—they perpetuate motion. She does not.

“I can’t understand why you’re bothering to help me,” you say mostly to fill the silence. You are anxious with quiet, it offers too much space for something to happen suddenly. “You didn’t really need anything from me, in the end. Or was this just an excuse to get me into your bed?” 

“I never need excuses to take anyone to bed,” Cassandra replies, tossing her head in a very real show of umbrage. 

You bite your thumbnail, finding the wall much more interesting with how her hair no longer covers her chest. “I wouldn’t have come for anything other than practicality. You know this, so you created a situation that enticed me, but for what? Did you genuinely just want me to touch you?”

“You’re simple.”

You turn your head back to snarl a retort at her that likely would have proven her point, but she’s still very bare and you are still very cowed by nakedness, and so your words run away and leave you to keep your mouth quiet. 

“It was never about helping you ,” she says. “But you didn’t think about that. You don’t think about a lot of things, and that makes you a little bit stupid. There are power dynamics and politics within this castle that are older than you. But you can't imagine a world that doesn’t have you at the center, can you, draga ?”

“I could very easily say the same about you.”

“Untrue, but it makes sense that you think of it that way. Look, shall I break it down for your little deranged human mind?”

“Oh sure,” you drawl. “I’m sure all of your big fly-brained philosophies and theses are going to be well-constructed and coherent. You’ve lived your whole life in a crumbling marble cage seated in a cold dusty corner of the world, and so you must know very much. How many of your insects are devoted to brainpower? Four? Or is it just two now that you’re missing half of them because your sister is smarter than you?” 

She hisses at your back, and you smile around your nail.

“Cunt.”

“Whore.”

You steel yourself after she’s stopped audibly seething, victoriously crawling back to her, straddling her at the waist, with some difficulty, as you were before (her thighs are powerful and, mercy, she is far too lithe to be undressed) and tap her lips. 

“Open your mouth, I want to see your tongue.” 

She relents to you quietly, which is surprising and gives you a thrill to have her obey you. It gives you several thrills, actually, because whether or not it is truthful, she is playing at vulnerability (she parts her legs under you, you keep your eyes locked on hers for fear of seeing something you were not yet ready to). The shift in dynamic makes you wrathful in a little way, and you tug the white and writhing muscle that pokes out from her mouth. 

“Can you actually taste anything with this?” you ask. It had been pink before, and normal, but when you hold it between your fingers now it is slim and long, branching out at the end into two separate tapered tails that curl curiously around your fingers. You pull on it again, to see where it attaches in her throat, and the whole thing simply falls out of her mouth, strung up in your hand. 

You cannot help a strangled gasp as you drop Cassandra’s tongue, and then watch in panicked astonishment as it dissolves into seventeen flies that de-morph themselves from odd shapes and turn black, buzzing back into their hive. 

“You ask boring and not-at-all invasive questions,” she replies in a strange voice, reaching a hand up to correct her jaw (she brushes a hand over her chest on the way and you swallow thickly). “I thought you were trying to figure out how to dismantle us, not perform a gustatory examination. What happened to having your hands in me?”

To be honest, you were genuinely unsure of why you had done it, you were simply exploring her in whatever progression came naturally, but what you said was: “Bela did something odd with her teeth before she bit me.” And: “I wanted to know why your tongues change.” 

This gets her attention, and you watch as Cassandra perks into seriousness for the first time since you left the library. She sits up, her body tensed as she shifts away the bedsheets like she means to spring at you (there is so little hope for you, at this point). Her smile is well and truly gone, which almost has the effect of startling you. 

“What did she do? What did it look like? What do you remember?“

“Am I supposed to supplement you with a full and detailed account? I could scarcely see straight,” you reply, indignant. 

“Don’t be an ass, I’ll rip your tongue out and it won’t regrow, tell me what happened,” she says, and you decide against mentioning that being an ass was inherently a characteristic of her personality, not yours.

“She moved her teeth around. I don’t know.” You turn your head and pull her lips open for the second time. It distracts you (from flicking your eyes down).

“She pushed these back.” You tap at her canines. “And sharpened these.” You pull at a pair of her incisors. 

Cassandra snaps her teeth shut suddenly, and you are very nearly separated prematurely from your index finger. 

“Ow,” you say, even though she had not even managed to break skin. “That’s all I can remember. Then she bit me.”

Cassandra growls. You did not initially recognize exactly what was happening until you felt it. Her snarl is not audible, but you feel the rumble everywhere you make contact. She grabs you, suddenly, and swaps your places, with you trapped by your wrists against the bed.

Your adrenaline begins to trickle, and you struggle for a weapon. 

“She mimicked the arrangement of my fucking teeth ,” she hisses with some strange humor, almost delighted. She is now every bit of the large and imposing coil of hot strength, a tiger no longer dormant, that you remember from your first night. She is not gentle where she holds you down, but her anger is not for you. She stares through you, somewhere in the future where she is dripping with her sister’s blood. Her flies grow agitated and restless, breaking whatever formation holds her together and swarming into the hole in her stomach. It knits itself back together, filling up with her insects that turn themselves pale to match the cold gradient of her skin. 

“No wonder Mother wouldn’t hear me out,” she says, softer now. “I’ll have her neck for that. Oh, poor Bela. Poor Bela.” 

“You still owe me a proper analysis. I wasn’t finished.” You writhe one hand free, stretching for the dagger in your pocket. “It wouldn’t be fair if you left now.”

“Hm.” She clicks her tongue. Her eyes blur back into focus, disinterested in you now as if she were just remembering you were there. “I never said how long I’d let it go on. You wasted your time, that’s not my fault. Mood’s dead.” 

“I told you about Bela, and that has to be worth more time.”

“That wasn’t part of the first agreement. I asked a question and you answered, just because you do it a second time does not warrant you anything else.” Something she sees in your face siphons away some of her coldness, and she quirks her dark eyebrows upwards in an amused sort of condescension. She presses a finger to your lips.“Silly girl, you ought to know better than to make assumptions. Don’t try to keep performing one trick and expecting the same prize.” 

“Let me go,” you say, incensed at her, at her touch, at the unfairness of it all. “Get off of me, you awful fucking overgrown bitch.” 

“Play nice.”

“Get off .”

“I know you’d like me to, but you’ll have to work for it. Now don’t get fussy, that’s a turn off.” 

You mean to stab her, and have your dagger lifted in the hundredth time you’ve had to brandish it since coming here, you’re growing sick of the dagger and sick of being touched. 

Cassandra knocks it easily from your hand, batting away a nuisance without anything besides automatic reflex, and it shoots off somewhere to the side where you hear it ruffle the curtains and make a noisy metal ping against the glass of the window. 

And something extraordinary happens in her eyes. You would not have noticed, nor given it any amount of attention, had you not been so determined to keep your gaze on hers. All of their reaction times are minuscule, from the moment something happens there is no space between how they respond to it. So the instant you hear the sound of metal on glass, you see the pinpricks of Cassandra’s pupils become wide, black moons of an emotion you had not hitherto ever seen in any degree amongst any Dimitrescu: fear. 

She jolts, her body taking on a physical and noticeable ripple as all her flies briefly dislodge from one another in a large motion, like a heartbeat visualized. And then Cassandra settles, all of this having taken place within the span of two seconds. 

“It was a one time thing, I’m afraid,” she says, merrily and at a scratchy pitch in her voice as if nothing at all had happened. Truthfully, you may have imagined the entire sequence, you do not sleep well enough to be confident. “Take care. I wouldn’t recommend-”

She pauses and lifts her head, a few of her insects busily flitting around the halo of her dark hair. 

“ Fuck .”

The door slams open and the both of you are wreathed within a storm of bodies, black and green and quick. 

And so, so, hungry. 

***

For the first time, and God willing the last, you seek out Daniela Dimitrescu. 

You are ragged with planning and thought, you’ve been thinking more frequently and it is doing something foul to your brain. You are a bundle of statistics and calculations, clockwork pieces mismatched together. You had to ask around for an hour, between the maids’ misinformation and your own there were entirely too many places that she could have been and not enough places she should have been. 

You had flushed Bela out of the library, and she had been all too happy to point you in the wrong direction. Cassandra would have been your second resort, but your plan revolves around her not knowing what you were doing. And because the countess is far too clever, you had to wander the castle for quite a while before you managed to find what you were looking for: a terror room. 

The corpses are old and twisted in the mangle of decomposition locked into the final contortions before their demise, purple blooded and blue lipped bodies that are entwined within one another, intestines strewn in nonsensical patterns across the hardwood. Long rabbit-pink tubes of stomach entangled in broken ribs. Faceless necks and peeling skulls that grin nakedly and bone white where the skin is made apart from the jaw and cheek. It is a butcher of appendages and organs turned inside out, a court for skeletons to divorce their meat. Where there is no blood there is gore, and where there is no gore there are flies. They squirm within the dark flesh, they are born here. Where joints are pulled from their homes, maggots make their nests; they suckle the vicious fluid from milky sclera and gnaw holes in the bones to drink the marrow. 

The smell burns into you, the castle bears the shadow of this smell, this room is the fullscale power of it. There may be words for the sight of death, but none at all for the smell. There is a reason they bury bodies six feet down, having known putrefaction so familiarly you would never find six sufficient; you want everything down nine. It is mildew. It is rot. It is decay. It is sulphur and meat gone pus-yellow. You gazed into an incision in the castle’s breast. 

You vomit into your mouth somewhat and swallow it. You choke it down. 

You should not have been able to.

You rap your knuckles on the open door, and she forms from the harrow of it all. The flies spin into the air, circling each other and piecing her together from the inside out, clumping together, attaching and changing their color. They form her mandible, and that is the only structure that makes any sense at all to you. When it is complete, Daniela stands before you, grinning in genuine delight and—awfully—charges you into an embrace. 

“Human,” she says, throwing you off balance and nearly sending the both of you to the floor. You have gotten better with balance due to the brace, and you resolve to rip it from your leg and burn it in a fire after all of this is through. All of you wants to burn until you are clean. “So terribly rude of you to interrupt a girl when she’s napping. I love you very much and so I don’t mind, but how crass of you.” 

Her hands smear red down your shirt, marking you, tainting you. You had beat the bloodstains out of this single fucking shirt in the basin eight times until the water turned heart-colored. There would be a ninth but not a tenth because by that point you would not have any threading left to hold it together.

“Should I take that then to mean you’re not interested in why I’ve been trying to root you out?” you say, holding her back at arms length away from you, implicating mischief in your voice. And you are mischievous. “It was quite a bit of work to find you, but I’ve needed you terribly.”

She sparkles with this, her eyes growing wide and her body chittering with her poorly-concealed excitement. Of course she would be. How wonderful it is, to be desired . 

“And what ever would you require me for?” She flutters her dark lashes at you in a way that snaps at some distant part of your animal brain in much the same way Cassandra does. You are going to have to investigate this thoroughly, later. 

“A favor. A bargain, really.”

“Oh no, human.” She shakes her head, all of the red of her hair flaming in the wave of motion. “You bargain from positions of power. What you are asking for is a deal, which is a gamble you take when you’re trying to equalize your standing, Mother says so. You are quite desperate aren’t you? I heard you’ve been getting restless.”

“Semantics,” you hiss, audibly clicking your teeth. “I’m bargaining. Nothing is contingent on whether or not you agree to it, and I am not desperate for anyone,” (“Hah. I never said that, why so defensive?” she asks.) “I came to you because I thought you to be agreeable.” 

“Agreeable for what?”

“I need to spend the evening with you. Ask any invasive questions and I will leave.”

“How bold! Certainly you’ve no ulterior motives whatsoever and merely wish for the pleasantness of my company?” 

“That counts as a question.”

“And yet you’re still here.”

You glare, and she smiles redly at you. 

“Oh, loosen up. It’s not worth all of that scowling you do. Every time I happen across you there’s always this perpetual look of ‘Why God? Why hath Thee suffered  this gigantic fucking stick up my ass?’ and it’s giving you tension wrinkles.”

“Five times out of eight when you happen across me it is for the purpose of attacking a vital organ of some sort.”

“I bet you actually did the math, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” she repeats back to you in a ridiculously high-pitched voice. You decide, at this point, that you will kill her slow. “And what of the other three?”

You flick open the old man’s pocket watch, snarling at the second hand. “You have a nasty habit of existing very close to me. I can’t help that it sours my mood.”

“But you want to spend the evening with me?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

“With the understanding that I do bite?”

“Naturally.”

She giggles, a weird sound that involves a trachea that you do not think she has and several flies getting caught in said nonexistent trachea. She spins a red strand around her finger.“What if I say no?”

“You can’t.”

“Oh? But it’s so easy, look, no . I refuse. I don’t want to and you can’t quite make me,” she squeals, bouncing on her heels. It isn’t a denial in the sense that she is opposed to the idea, merely her deriving joy from a little newfound power she has invented. A small child learning that they have free enough will to do the exact opposite of what they’ve been told. 

And you had anticipated that. 

Well, not really, you just decided there always needed to be a reserve plan; because if you’d had one before you would never have needed them so keenly now.

You tuck your palm between your teeth and bring them down, one quick motion. A little self-destruction is manageable if it means you can make yourself persuasive. You bite until you taste the sharp bitterness of blood. It has lost its power to your palate, was it not mostly water anyway? 

You pull your hand away and find that Daniela has ripped the lock of hair cleanly out. It dangles oddly between her fingers. She is transfixed on your hand and the toothy wound upon it. 

You stretch your palm out to her, beckoning her closer, away from her death-room. Out of her fly nest. 

“I’ll make it worth your while,” you say. “Your mother won’t ever find out.”

“You can’t guarantee that,” Daniela says, whispering in a low fear. Her pupils squirm in their irises, unsure of whether to be excited or terrified.“She always knows.”

But she inches towards you anyway.

“She can’t.”

“She might smell the blood.” She takes another step.

“Then drink fast.”

“She might see us together and figure it out from that.”

“Then take us somewhere secluded.”

“She might wonder where we are.” Another anxious step.

“Then let us be quiet enough that she forgets.” 

You curl your finger toward her, the way you’ve seen it done before, by the countess. You court her closer, tipping your hand so the blood wells into your cupped palm. 

“Quickly,” you say. “Before anything spills.” 

And she is upon you then, mouth working against your skin, no warmth, only the cold motions of her lips and tongue. She drinks from you in a way completely separate from the gnawing of her violent flies; this is soft and chilled, only open-mouthed gasping kisses. She is completely depraved in her thirst and you hate it. You hate it so terribly. The sounds she makes teeter on the border of sexual and the feeling of having her in your palm is erotic. You are drunk immediately on the sensation of mouth on skin, burning with enough body heat for the both of you. You loathe it. 

You hate it so bad you smile. 

Chapter Text

Look, there are just some instances where she can’t get poetic, and you comprise at least half of them. 

And Cassandra doesn’t mean that in the kind of bubbly remorseful way that you talk about newborns, still lathered in filmy afterbirth with their wrinkled fingers, big swollen eyes and red little disgruntled faces that you know will eventually, in a few days, go from maggotish to slightly more handsome. No, you have a good few years’ distance apart from being freshly squirted out of a womb, and you’re not getting any easier to talk about. Not any time soon.

Fuck, it starts to sound like she’s putting thought into this. But, really, she doesn’t. 

The issue with families and companies and governments and religions and businesses and everything else in the world that involves at least several people sharing airspace is that someone needs to be at the head of power. Maybe it's hard to consider it in some instances, where everything is casual and loose, but it doesn’t matter. In every environment, there’s a kingpin. There has to be hierarchy, someone commands attention, someone’s glowing in the room, someone is roaring, and there’s always someone on fire, whether it's an inferno or a candlewick someone’s running a bit hotter than everyone else. That’s the power, even when it’s supposed to be equal, someone always gets just an inch more. And you can spin an inch into a century, if you really want to. 

That doesn’t sound as cool in her head as she wants to believe it is. She’s not a fanatic about metaphors, but she’s started to spend too much time in the library. And sometimes you have to get figurative to make sense literally.

But, anyways, behind that big burning flame, there’s someone slinking along in the shadows making sure they’ve got kindling. Someone who's taking the falls and doubling down over lies and backstabbing to keep the party going. That's also a characteristic of hierarchy. 

Bela was supposed to be the tinder to Mother’s flame, the ringleader, tamer of the circus cats they've all become after being trapped inside a little baroque big-top. A menagerie of lions, tigers, and leopards prowling around in lab-rat bodies and hunting fowl in a preconstructed maze. Bela was supposed to put the wheels on the wagon and use her blood and spit to glue them there. She was supposed to snap her little skinny fingers and be able to get both of her sisters in line and ready to play big happy family whenever Mother came calling. She was supposed to be Mother’s second rung of authority, sitting tall and broad-chested at the head of their rabid frothing dog pack.

But Bela ran off, to her books and weird shadowy places. She was originally meant to be the lionheart, but ended up a panther. Why? Who knows, well, maybe Mother does but she won’t say. Some things got shuffled around when they were born, there were ‘complications’ and some decisions were made and the operation rolled over to rest on Cassandra’s shoulders. 

She’s bigger, stronger, (hotter) and ultimately designed for crowd control. She was made this way to fill the fissures Bela left behind. She’s the mature one here, always growing so much faster, always having to re-figure her fly-bone structure to accommodate her size. The muscle is nice until it isn’t. Until she’s having to spend days howling on the floor of her rooms while the massive wound in her deltoid can’t be filled because she just doesn’t have enough flies. It’s cool until every rib in her chest gets shattered because her heartbeat is too powerful. It’s great until she rips off arms or shoves her tongue too hard against her teeth and pokes out several bits of enamel. And it’s wonderful until her body starts deteriorating because it just can’t handle her strength. 

She’s too much. 

But Mother is their leader, the human-gone-vampiric sovereign of them, and all fire absolutely must have its kindling. There needs to be someone willing to make sacrifices, and rarely is it ever the person who happens to be in the most logical position to do so. Because when you're strong enough, really strong, you don't need to handle the unromantic parts of strength yourself. 

Cassandra is unromantic by creation. There was a deliberateness to how she was put together, someone saw Bela and knew Daniela was coming and clued in immediately to the fact that they needed a muzzle for the encroaching discord. Because Mother, oh, not even she would always be able to keep up with the little workshop horrors she’s made.

The first thing Cassandra was ever taught was how to destroy her sisters. She had been, what, six? And Mother had whisked her aside, holding her hand (she was always so warm to the touch back then), and told her that she was going to have to learn, far before anyone else, how to break bones. And she did, but they were her own first. She couldn’t throw a punch against air without shattering every bone in her hand and forearm. And even if it was too much and she was too little, Mother would clasp her hands at her front and pucker her mouth a little way like something was sour and draw her eyebrows down in an expression that said, louder than the rib-breaker of her pulse: ‘It isn’t enough.’

And she wasn’t. 

So she learned to shatter. If she worked out how to do it properly, she could control the damage. She taught herself to confine the ripple of backfire to particularities and lose only half of her arm instead of the whole thing. She was educated on remaking her ribs into weird, contorted structures that adapted and changed, but let her heart echo free and uncrushing; vulnerable without the cage but just as strong.

Once upon a time, Mother screamed when she bled. She’d pick up Cassandra’s broken body, writhing with wild strength and pain at the unkind age of ten and would cradle her against her chest while she muttered and seized. She’d lay her across her lap, left Bela to fuck off, and the world was theirs for a few hours. She’d hum, always so prettily, and card her fingers through Cassandra’s hair to hold the panic at bay. There wasn't any disappointment, no expected reciprocity. And it wasn't beautiful, or even really all that sentimental on her end. She loved Mother, but she’d always loved her, she was made that way. And she’ll never admit it but she remembers, in little flashes here or there, her life before. And so she knows there was a time before life, a time where she hated her. But she knows for absolute certain, down into the bowels of her Cadou that to have Mother’s affection is the sole purpose of her existence now. Regardless of what it meant on a cynical level. 

When Daniela swung around it became clear Bela was to be the golden child, unhindered by her sisters. One ragged with power she couldn’t control and one too finicky and unagile, both too far from perfection. She was so poised and careful, studious and collected in the weird ways Bela used her big shark-eyed charm to tactically skip her way into Mother’s graces. She was everything Mother wanted in a daughter, and effectively she became Mother’s daughter more than any of them. 

And she did indeed take after Mother, because every time Bela did fail there was always one of her imperfect sisters to take the hit for it, no matter how heavy. 

Cassandra found Daniela wonderful, because at least there was someone else scorned along with her. But Daniela was little, such a small glimmer in the dark screaming wings of the castle, and Mother had actually only raised one-and-a-half daughters. She needed more guidance than Cassandra could give, and the weight of her spark became the ignition to Cassandra’s Hell. She loved Daniela, just how she loved Mother and in the way she (somehow) loved Bela, through the fiddling done with her brain when she was being created, laid out on a metal sheet under hot fluorescent lights with the bloodless skin on the cap of her skull pulled away. 

Oh, she almost forgot about you.

She doesn’t love you, there wasn’t anyone counting on you, or programming you into her head. She can’t love you, and that doesn’t matter; the only love here is the kind that was made in a laboratory. She won’t talk about you specially, and she doesn’t remember about you often. But when she does it is fondly. Yes, that's the word, she’s fond of you, of the mindless ambition you carry like a feathered arrow jutting from your spine. She likes the way you gnaw the arms of your glasses and bite your nails down, and that you run your finger under your nose every once in a while because you're so used to it bleeding. She likes you in the same way Mother does, in the same way she likes to watch bullied little animals sleep in their cages. You don't know how she unmends her bones to touch you, even in the most fleeting casual way. And you don’t know how she had to pry your bullets from Bela’s hand, snapping her apart for something you would never effectively use. 

And while you don't inspire poetry from her, she is forever consumed by the new limping girl that lives among them, unboldy and creeping, subtle like vines grow. 

Or maybe more like a pocketful of snakes hidden in the branches. 

Chapter Text

You do not make a habit of tempting wolves with trapped rabbits, it is a bad idea (in a similar way that establishing the monsters of your life as predators tend to be, you’ll get far too used to describing them as superior). They get entitled to your rabbits and by juncture your traps as well. Then they are not your traps anymore, they’re the wolves’. It’s within the same line of reason as not poking bears or leaving your shoulders bared around pastors. You do not want trouble and therefore you should not create a catalyst for it. And, typically, you would have remembered this. But when you let Daniela lick your palm you let a wolf rob your snare, you stab a bear with a twig, you flap your skirts at a pastor. And you fully expect Daniela to take your hand off, which is why you bit the one with the broken wrist anyway. 

You flinch when she drags her odd tongue over your wound, waiting for her teeth. 

But she just whines. She whines and waits and licks, not squeezing or pressing your blood. She isn’t taking from your trap (the metaphorical one), she merely begs for your quarry. It makes you shiver, from the balls of your feet to the very top of your scalp you are electrified. 

“You’re very good,” she murmurs to your skin, tonguing after the words. “You don’t know- you don’t know how wonderful you are. Brilliant. It isn’t sweet, it isn’t strong either, you’re just right. Perfect. So perfect, human. No aftertaste. The mold leaves one, but you’re pure- ” 

You snatch your hand away. Shaking. You are shaking. 

“That’s enough,” you say, pressing your unconfident fingers into the welled bite mark for assurance. You let her words roll over you like water. If you stop to process them, you will drown. “Are you accepting my offer or not?” 

“How could I refuse?” She purrs, nuzzling against you. She shoves her head into the space between your jaw and shoulder, sniffing for another open wound. You are not fooled into thinking you have tamed her. “You’ll allow me another taste later, yes? No one is to turn tonight, but I’ll keep you safe regardless.”

“Keep me safe from what?”

“Whatever might seek to harm you. A straying Moroaică, Mother, yourself. I’ll keep you company, and I’ll keep you whole. All I ask is that you don’t deprive me,” she does pull her lips back to run her teeth along your cheek, gently. You are reminded instantly of exactly what she is. She grazes the sensitive scarring there with the faintest hint of her enamel. “I just want to taste you once in a while is all.” 

You huff air from your nose, a laugh that died before it reached your mouth. Miscarried humor. 

“Fine.”

And she keeps uncomfortably true to her word. Wherever you wander Daniela trots a pace behind, hands folded easily behind her head as you make yourself known to every entity that haunts the castle. You stumble into several maids, tripping over their shoes and muttering bitter apologies as you go. The two of you being seen together so soon after Bela’s attack makes her nervous, you know this in the way she snaps her head back to crane over her shoulder, in the swan steps she takes when you lead her too near to her mother’s chambers.

When you let her feed she ducks you into new hideaways within the castle’s format that you had not known, and she kisses the blood from your bandaged hands, does it after she pulls away the wrappings from your neck, and runs her tongue along your bruised lips. And though you wrinkle your nose at her and talk warnings of ‘mind your fangs’ through your teeth, you let her softly drink her payment from all the dark abrasions you have not yet healed. It is not an entirely clinical process, she tested her tongue past your lips once and promptly corrected herself after you bit it, but it is not entirely intimate either. Whether she knows what you’re after is irrelevant, ultimately unimportant in the bliss offered through your blood. 

You are sick, and she is drawn into you, they all are. The way she breeds within corpses, she wills the same unto you. But where her bodies are dead, you still carry enough bloodbeat, enough warmth, to be alive. You tread the line so finely that it becomes the perfect alchemy for her flies. To you she is a rot-eating crow perched on your shoulder, tipping hourglasses with its talons, waiting for you to die and so shudderingly pleased that you haven’t yet. It’s vile. 

And also convenient. 

“I’ve wondered something about you,” she says, offering you her hand in a surprisingly aristocratic show of consideration, as you ease your way down the stairs. You bat her arm away. “How did you end up here?”

“I was held hostage by four cannibals who weaponize dead women with Mold parasites after a dinner invitation went sour,” you reply flatly. “Pick a better question.” 

“Where were you born?”

“A clinic.”

“Parents?”

“Alive, somewhere,” you pause to swallow and shut your eyes for a moment. When you open them you continue. “Irrelevant. Move on.”

She whistles. It does not sound right. “Touchy.”

“Quite. I don’t owe you answers. Don’t expect any.” 

“Fair point, but typically your sort tend to enjoy talking about themselves.”

“There is evidently a strong discrepancy between myself and ‘my sort’. I don’t want to talk.” 

“Aw,” she says, pouting her lip and raising her eyebrows apologetically. “It’s very unfortunate that I do.” 

When you look at her, and your face has been proven to be transparent regarding your irritation unless otherwise checked, she laughs and recoils before you can consider taking your last shot at her. 

“I jest! My God, you are difficult, human. Is this not what you do to bond? Share aspects of your life with one another to form some sort of history-based camaradiere? Do you not talk about your upbringings and all the different colors you enjoy? About whether or not sugar is superior to salt? Mother says that we didn’t retain nearly half of the…social aspects. But I am simply trying to make conversation. Certainly that is tolerable by you?” 

“It isn’t. It never will be.” You round on her, hotly. “There is no universe, neither in this timeline nor the next three thousand, that I will ever find idle conversation with any of you tolerable . Do you understand that you have ruined me? I am run from my face down to my ankles with the wounds you’ve caused, I have not rested in a month, you have stolen everything I could dare to breathe as mine and made it wretched. I am kept as a pet to a heathen, made prey of by monsters that haunt me even in sleep. I am,” you laugh, although it is not as much a laugh as it is a wheeze of noxious air. 

“I am so fucking sick of you.” 

And you walk through her, forcing her flies to disperse around you as you pick your way down the stairs, roughly knocking your glasses up your nose. 

“Mother says,” Daniela calls to you (and how ill you are starting to become at any statement beginning with ‘Mother says’ ) “that virgins are meant to be mild-tempered. So why aren’t you?”

And you are so taken aback that you step on the untied laces of your boots and put a tragic end to your flared temper by tripping down the last flight of stairs. 

It is not a long nor a hard fall, but when you grit your teeth together so hard you fear they will break, you understand that is the world laughing at you. 

A new bruise aches on your shin. 

***

The evening ends unspectacularly, as you had hoped it might. 

Daniela became excitable and dug her teeth into your shoulder when you took too long to pull your sleeve away. You put the full force of your strength into prying her jaw open, your nails scrabbling in the tender wetness of her mouth, and subsequently wrestled her away. She had snarled at you, enraged on a primitive level you do not think she could rightly control. Not destabilized, just too entitled to something that was not hers and having that something actively telling her ‘no’ . There was no one to break up the fight, and you were now home to a sore well in your stomach where she had landed her first punch. Your lips are kiss-bruised and bloody, the dark pools beneath your eyes have become a mix of sickly purple and weary black. You have lost your dirty bandages, and the gallery of Dimitrescu bite marks are openly splayed into your skin, across your neck down to your chest, each with their varying stages of scabbing or infection. At certain points they overlap and create a full ring of teeth. The sickle scars should not be discussed; if you bring attention to them you will recount the times you’ve received each one and end up huddled on the floor in your daymares. 

You are worn, and hurting acutely in several different ribs. Your heart aches. It is the closest you have ever been to relearning how to sob. You occasionally wipe at your eyes, expecting water. None comes, however, and this is more distressing than you want to admit. 

It is in this state of misery, with the sun setting behind smoky curtains and spilling through boarded up windows, that you hear music. 

And you have not heard music in so long. 

Against what you think to be rational, you reroute and follow the sound, placing your palm against the peeling wall and lifting your head to the faintest growl of a low brassy trumpet. You follow it with your ear, slowly trying to transcribe it into notation in your mind. You drag yourself towards it, tired, and dead in your legs. 

When you stumble into the drawing room, you do not know what you expect, but it is not to see the countess reclined on a chaise lounge with her head tilted towards a phonograph. 

For a moment, you are confused. A candelabra sits mounted behind her, lit and waving in warm gesture. It makes her reds redder and her golds glitter, makes the room casual and open to you, and there was no place in the castle that had ever felt open. She sits with one long leg crossed over another, a wine glass halted at her lips marked with the paint she applies to them. The dark hair that is usually kept so rigorously tightened into its curls is free and loose around her face and neck. She has taken leave of her hat, and it feels as if you are looking at her without armor. Her posture reads comfortable—and quiet. The music is too chipper for this place, too inviting and too normal through the wizened crackling of the vinyl. 

The room makes her look far too alive. 

You take stock of each other, and you see your own expression reflected in hers, somehow. Exhausted. The usual sinister brightness of her eyes is muted into a flat hazel. 

Her mouth tightens up into a wry smile, and she tips the glass back. 

“You do enjoy standing and staring,” she says, and it is delayed speech. “If you keep still enough do you think no one will see you? You must have the mind of some little creature.” 

“I’m in no mood for your quips,” you reply, already beginning to slink back into the castle’s darkness. Away from the warmth. 

She gazes profoundly into her glass, lifting her shoulder. “You came to me.” 

And this is true enough, so you say nothing. 

She takes another sip of her wine and lets her head fall back against the rest. She looks at you in a way you do not understand, with such a subtle expression that it could so easily be a product of your mind and nothing more. Her brows are pinched, and never before have you taken such extensive account of the age-marks about her eyes and nose, how proud the bridge is nor how tired her jaw. She looks at you like the sky has crumbled into her hands and you were the one who ordered it fired down. 

“Come here.”

You flinch several paces back, immediately. 

“Oh,” she says, woefully. Something that careens far too close to sentiment and pain crosses her face, and if it had not been for the several thousand evil things that have expanded between you and her, you may have felt apologetic. But you don’t, because she is deadly and will kill you just as quickly as you would her. That makes apologies something impossible and foreign. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m far too intoxicated to be bothered with whatever you think I’d do to you. Don’t you dare shy away from me as well.” 

You hold your ground. You will not go any closer, you will never take another step in her direction. You will not walk into her viper-pit of an atmosphere, no matter how vulnerable she seems, no matter how lonely her eyes, no matter how terribly your pulse beats, and no matter how much it seemed like—for the first time in your life—someone is beckoning you close. 

When you do not move, she visibly uncoils. She rolls her strong shoulders and turns her head forward, leaving you gazing into the black river of hair that cascades down her neck. 

“At least you’re consistent, dear.”

And perhaps it is because you are so terrified to accept that you are profoundly alone, so deeply and pitifully isolated and so strongly in denial of your fear of it. You’ve always been so scared of being alone, because it is when you are alone that you are at your most susceptible to hostility. You cannot face the world the way you are now, with the deep scars of circumstance and opportunity and loss and bad dreams chipping away at your soul. Your shelter was broken—murdered—and all that is left is a den of unhumans. A castle of formulated-monsters and her, their maker. You could neither trust anyone nor stand to be without anyone, which created, like precious crystals formed under time, pressure, and heat, the worst possible double-negative. You hated anyone to touch you, and the countess looked hungry enough to touch you. You were hungry enough to let her. You were starved. And though you knew that hunger made you insane, awareness alone has never given anyone the strength needed to ward off insanity. 

You were also incredibly tired of being predictable. 

You looked into that golden room, with the Lord drunk and open on a chaise lounge, with the sticky jazz music pulling you close, and you let yourself be hungry for her. 

The countess masters her face well, in a way you will never be apt to, but her eyes widen and she lowers her glass away from her lips and onto a side table. Her smile is gone and her attention is only for you as you creep towards her, and you were not yet bashful by it. You took each step with more hesitation than you had ever walked with prior, and you felt so harish in the way you rounded your shoulders and nearly bared your teeth. You were so wary of her that when she sat upright too quickly you startled and scampered back a half-step. Reclaiming that ground took triple the time, but she was patient, and let you walk to her. 

You are stupid, letting yourself reach out your hands to her. You are doubly stupid for letting her pick you up, wrapping those bloodied fingers around your waist and pulling you into her lap. It takes a combined effort from both of you to get you settled comfortably with your leg, and when you are she looks down at you. She has never before seemed unsure, and it was not a word to ever describe her, until now. Uncertainty was terrifying for you, who had no idea what the fuck you were doing nor why you had ended up here with her hands on your hips and her phonograph playing trilling trumpets and keys for you.

You paw your way to her neck, undoing the clasps that hold her pearls in place, for want of something to do with your hands. She lets you place them to the side, only taking hold of your hand when it reaches for one thin silver chain that remains. 

“Not that one,” she snaps, and she is sober only for that singular sentence, her eyes unfog to demand this one particular thing from you. She loses the drawl from her voice, and the countess you have come to loathe cracks through the haze of wine to hold your gaze. And then she floats back beneath the surface, quiet again. 

You trace her green-blue veins down to where a gold ring lies on her clavicle, held up by the chain. Its diamond twinkles at you. 

“You’re married?” You ask, unable to keep the sneer out of your voice at the idea. It disagrees with you strongly, the insane concept of the countess ever allowing herself to be ruled in any form. Matrimony is for people weaker than her, who need someone else to tie them down with dowry and rings and ceremonies. 

She has her own miscarriage of humor, huffing shortly from her nose as she leans down to kiss at your scarred neck. You do not like this, and you wrench your head away from her. 

“At some point, I suppose,” she murmurs, distantly, either taking no offense to your dissatisfaction or pretending not to. She does not elaborate and you are strangely glad for it. “Don’t prod old wounds, pet. Not tonight. We can be civil, can’t we?”

She lifts a hand to cup your chin, holding your head in place. Her thumb prods at your lip, pulling it upwards until you are flashing your cuspid at her. She runs her gloved hand along your tooth, and you cannot help yourself, you bite her. 

She snarls and snatches her hand back, raising her claws to strike you on pure instinct, and you may have died if she had. You may have wanted her to. 

But she regains herself, her growl dying where it was born in her throat, and lowers her hand down. She retracts her claws, but only four of them. The tip of one still juts from her glove and she brings this back to your lips, pressing it into your bruise until you hiss. She makes a quick cut into the curve of your mouth, and you cry out more in surprise than pain. She wipes the resulting blood away with her thumb, even through the wine she wrinkles her nose at what you assume to be the smell. 

Her hands are uncurious of your body, slipping from your waist up to your chest in practiced motions that suggest what you already knew; she has taken lovers before. You flinch when she grazes your breast, nearly knocking yourself from her hold and onto the floor. You shudder when she places her large hand on the small of your back. Wherever she touches you, something deep and absolute refuses to let you settle. Your mind is crazed, but your body knows you are not meant for this. You grit your teeth and try to push away the idea that you are being watched and judged. 

“So tense,” she says, not unkindly but with no sympathy. She turns to reach for her glass and brings it to your lips. When you jerk away she clicks her tongue. “It isn’t blood.” And softer: “not everything I create involves death. This can be pleasant if only you’d let it.” 

“I don’t believe you,” you reply. And you drink. You drain the glass, whole and entire. 

The countess does not stop you, and you do not stop yourself. You want for it to be potent enough that it makes your mind quiet, you want to be dumb and ridiculous and able to be touched. You want to want her to touch you. You drink it like water, letting her tilt the glass up higher and higher so you taste every drop of it. You close your eyes, because she’s also trying to melt you with hers. She is right about it not being blood, you would have recognized instantly if it was, but it’s wine—her wine that she is so awful about. You are upset to discover how wonderful it is. 

When you are done, she pulls it away from you and you make some low pleading noise, reluctant to let it go. 

She takes it back regardless, leaving you panting and warm with drink. You feel the wine heat your throat and then dip lower, into your chest and stomach. Your pulse stutters when she begins to pull at your shirt. 

You help her get it over your head, throwing it over your shoulder and uncaring of where it lands. All you have left in the way of coverage above the waist are your shirtsleeves and the bindings beneath that hold your chest, which is more exposed than you’ve ever been comfortable with. The countess is not satisfied, and rings her fingers around your wrist when you cross your arms over your chest. 

“Shyness is unbecoming of you.”

“As drunkenness is to you.” 

Which is the way both of you are meant to realize that you cannot be civil. To be civil requires that at least one party is willing to cooperate, and you are only cooperative to the point where it benefits you. 

And so your shirtsleeves and chest bindings remain. 

You let her kiss your neck when she tries for the second time, because you are under the impression she is going to mar your neck whether you want her to or not. You slowly map out the boundaries you will allow her to violate and the ones you will battle her over, somewhere behind her eyes she must also be visualizing how much ground of yours she can claim. 

She is nimble and horrifyingly dexterous, and you are made disgustingly wanton to her touch. She knows how to run her fingers over the places you did not know you were sensitive, controls her breath so the warmth of it coasts over the shell of your ear to make you gasp. She is light with you, more so than you thought her capable of, but in a body so strong perhaps one would have to be incredibly aware of everything. At the very least, she is uncomfortably aware of you. 

“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” She purrs, lowering her voice beneath the upbeat of the new track. You will never be able to think of jazz cleanly after this. You had liked jazz. And on the contrary to her statement, you do. 

You are fucking her hand through your trousers, humping her like a Goddamned feral dog because that is the most intercourse you have ever unfortunately witnessed. And you are hot from your temples down to your collarbones, clawing your hands in her dress and (to Hell with it all) you’re whimpering. Something is happening in your lower stomach, something warm and tight, and you stop only because you think you may faint. You feel stupid, and cannot care. You are terrified that you do not give a fuck.

“What was in the wine?” you pant, forcing at least a little bit of that wolf-toothed gold-eyed bravery you know you’ve started to pick up on. “What did you put in it?”

She takes her hand away and you regret everything immediately, sinking back down against her hips and grinding there instead. It isn’t the same. 

“Nothing at all,” she replies cooly. “It was just wine. And you are just aroused.” 

This shakes you, startles you and makes you irrationally bashful, despite understanding on some level that it is likely you are. You do not know what to do with the information, however, and decide instead to rut against her thigh. It feels pleasant, because the immediate shame is being stored somewhere that it cannot interfere with your obsession with the half-sex. 

“It would feel infinitely better if you’d only remove-“

“Absolutely not.”

She lifts a brow at you, as if you were being unreasonable. As if the idea of anyone denying to strip for her was ludicrous. You do not want to know what will become of you should you bare yourself to her, and you are stupid in heat, but you are not yet ready to die with your hips snapping against the rise of her thigh simply because you want her practiced fingers on places no one has touched before. And you would die if she pressed her fingers to more sensitive skin now. She is drunk; this makes you only slightly less paranoid of her. You are tipsy; this makes you only slightly less conscious of the fact that you will hate yourself viciously tomorrow. 

But she watches you, as you pathetically try to achieve something magical between your cunt and her leg, and she kisses your neck occasionally (you will let her nowhere near your mouth again). She pulls her hand back every once in a while to listen to you moan for it returned. She gauges you and your desperation, and after you have spent yourself, trying to understand scientifically what it would take to unravel the jolts of heat that lance down your back and untighten the pressure in your abdomen, she smiles, all fangs, and presses her fingers upwards . 

Your spine bows forward and you cry, shuddering and every muscle beneath your belt clenches into attention. You writhe and something warm occurs between your legs. Your heart leaps between your teeth, and you exhale in one breathless sob. 

“Oh my,” the countess says in amused surprise when you raise your head to look up at her, dazed and with tears in the corners of your eyes. “You’re going to be rather fun, darling.” 

And you fantasize about all of the new and interesting ways you’ve thought of killing her. You press your chest to hers. 

Chapter Text

You were not fun, though, as she had expected. 

She had expertly snapped off two of the buttons holding your pants closed on your waist, doing it in such a clever way that you had not noticed until she was pulling your belt out of the buckle, and you had both peered down at the first smattering of hair atop your pubic mound and you had promptly lost your mind entirely at the full two ton realization that you were so distressingly aroused that you had leaked through your underwear. 

She had likely said something tremendously sexy—and tremendously humiliating—and you had gotten wetter still. You could not be sure, because you were staring down at the single greatest unaccounted for flaw you’d ever oversighted: that you were, honest to God, attracted to her. 

That warmth coiled so tightly in your stomach you thought you would be sick. And you were, had always been, and would always be. You were so sick, for all of the world, you were ill and contagious. You were never extended the opportunity to become anything else. You shook in her lap, afraid for something that did not have a name but had the face of the congregation and was blanketed by an ice-steel mask. And while your fear was something she made, and something she piloted, and something she controlled, it was still a fear all the same. And you were guilty—guilty to the marrow. 

You had tipped backwards off of her, landed on your back wrong, and rearranged yourself unsteadily onto your legs. She held her hands suspended where she once cradled you, staring at you with something that could not yet be labeled surprise, but was a startlingly akin cousin to it. 

You were burning alive, by this point, blood scorching underneath the skin of your cheeks and flaming at your ears as you tugged the waistband on your pants (realized you had no buttons) and redid your belt. 

“No,” you had barked, a short sharp clap of a sound. Then you laughed loudly at the absurdity of it, and for too long. You stopped when the countess’ brows pulled in close, because it was the look you received when people had dawning questions about the health of your mind. “No, no. I,” you gulped. “This is…incorrect. Do you understand?”

The countess said nothing but the silence spoke for her. You watched those eyes cloud deeper with pity-concern, the sort of concern you would show for a child convinced of monsters under the bed. Your monsters were not so kind. 

“We taint each other, you and I,” you managed, breathless. In your shame and flustered need to articulate you only poured your taught words back to her. “We are unmatched. Incompatible. There is nothing to be gained from this. There is nothing to be had here, anatomically. We can’t- I can’t- “

You had stopped, you shuddered in a full body panic. You were desperate for her to understand you, to know that even if she and her mastery had pushed and tugged and puppetted you with lies and underhand economical moves, that you knew nothing else. That you had not escaped. You were bred into an ideal of purification. You were designed to want only for certain things, to crave only certain aspects. You were governed down into the privacy of your sex, and it had not left you unaffected. For you, this was your end, as sure as her fangs to your throat or a bullet punching through your cranium. To lie with her was to blaspheme. You were hysterical, yes, but also deeply upset at her confusion. She, whether she cared or not, had made this of you. She had designed it all, and yet she had welcomed you to sin as casually as the record spun. 

And she was drunk, tired, and unaffected by stringent rules and curfews and all the horrible things they would do to any two curious girls or two lonely boys who’d grown reckless and hid themselves away in the secret dreary corners of that little village. Where you had watched brandings and castrations for anyone you would dare -

Of the system she had crafted to make you breed for her, she was just as uncaring or unaware of. 

Your sweat had been cold against the back of your neck. “It’s unclean.”

And you had backed away from her into the dark hallway, breathing wet huffs from your lips. You had fled underneath the piano, rubbing furiously at your mouth and neck to wipe away her lipstick prints. You had rubbed until you were red and purple. The alcohol had burned out of you like gasoline, leaving you to the fumes of embarrassment. 

You slept there, wanting for rocks and knives and a way to rectify what had occurred, what you had allowed. Humans were not instruments nor machines and could not be fixed in the same way, they had to break in order to mend, so that the poor foundation did not hold the new growth. Penance.

But you did not need to drop massive rocks onto your bones, or cauterize your palms, or knife your way through the flesh of your thigh, because you were already punished.

***

Cassandra falls into place like a puzzle with three pieces, entirely predictable for this singular situation. 

She finds you underneath the piano at dawn, drags you out of a dream involving the countess and many sets of eyes before you can even wind up the key of your brain, and holds you up against the wall by the wrinkled collar of your undershirt. 

“You let Daniela have you,” she says, calmly in spite of the lion grip she has on your shirt. Her lip curls as she sniffs at you, unimpressed. She shakes you, once, and your head knocks against the wall. Your brain would fall out of your ears if she did it a few more times, you think. “You let her have you.” 

She really is too tall. For your feet hang limp off the floor and she has you held up an arm‘s length above her. It is odd to be above any of them—above anyone—and staring at her now you could imagine, in the blurriness of half-sleep, that she might be actually flushed with her anger. 

You blink the fuzz out of your eyes and smile pleasantly at her. “Pardon?”

She digs her nails into your clavicles until you snarl—open mouthed and horribly reminiscent of their strange feral communication—at her. 

“She didn’t leave much behind, but I smell her on you. I smell Mother on you. I smell everyone , you foul little thing! You’ve whored yourself to everyone else, haven't you?” 

You flinch at this, as a result of some pre-conditioned neuron that was not yet so traumatized that it wouldn’t flinch at being referred to as a whore after the events of last night. 

“I’ve done no such thing.”

“Don’t lie! The maids say they saw the both of you together.” 

“And what, pray tell,” you say, raising your voice up a pitch to mock her. “Would you deduce from that other than your sister and I were in company for some period of time? I’ve no control over her nor where she decides to follow me. And even if I did,” (You pause, for just a beat, to roll the word around in your mouth like something bitter. You’d said it before, but it was weighted now,) “whore myself to her, it has nothing at all to do with you.” 

And this goes over with Cassandra so poorly that she instantly slams you into the floor. 

You lose all of your breath and one-quarter of your snark in one gigantic wheeze. You push yourself upright and cough, until Cassandra kicks you back down. Her heel presses into a cut on your cheek.

“She’s got no right to you,” she hisses. “Neither of them do. I’m the one keeping them from ripping you up. I’m the one who makes sure they don’t split your stomach and drain you like a pig. I’m the one keeping them from slitting your throat open while you sleep. I’m the one who keeps you alive.” 

She’s angry enough, mad enough, wild enough to kill you here and now, and you see your own death in that stupid entitled aristocratic need to own . If she cannot possess you, no one else will. And you would have been terrified if not for the fact that she has too much restraint. She’s too strong, just like the countess, and so she has to be aware of herself. 

“Your mother is the only manner of authority they obey,” you spit. “I can’t imagine you’ve got any sway one way or another. She’s the one who keeps them from attacking me when they’re not destabil-“

“ Mother? ” She cries, shrill and girlish in a way that is not meant for her, and is truthfully not her voice at all, but Daniela’s. How she manages that is a question for when she is not crushing you underfoot. “Mother may have given the order but I enforce it. She couldn’t possibly know to save you unless you were laid out in front of her, she can’t smell the way we can. My senses are far keener.”

You grin bloodily into the carpet. 

“So I’m meant to do what, exactly? If it bothered you that Daniela drank from me you ought to have stopped it earlier.”

“I was preoccupied,” she grinds her heel down to emphasize her syllables and your teeth meet fiber. “They know better than to fuck with you. They do it anyway because they’ll find a way to blame it on me, and they’ll skip away without being punched through the Goddamned stomach. They do it to piss me off.” 

“ Sărăcuțul de tine. ”

She kicks you in the shoulder. But any amount of her fury is worth the things she will give you without even realizing: She cannot keep track of you constantly, it is a conscious effort on her part to keep up with you and her sisters, and most importantly; the countess does not share their ridiculous sense of smell, at least not from a long range. She is not even remotely omnipotent, which is the greatest and most powerful relief you have felt in a month. You had already known that she and her sisters were a united front out of convenience and necessity, but a fragile one, Cassandra most of all. The vagueness of what they can and cannot do to you, per the countess’ instructions, and what she —as their de facto ringleader—does not want them to do has taken some sort of toil on her. All the better for you that they should be at odds. 

“And then you go off to feed her! I get a mouthful of coal for so much as sniffing at you and then they get to drink their fill of you, and you let them!”

“A crime of opportunity,” you groan, rolling over onto your side. You curl protectively around your stomach and your sad little vital organs. “She was there and you were not. And for the record I’ve never willingly let Bela do anything to me.”

“You went looking for her!”

“You refused further inspection. I found someone who wouldn’t.”

She grabs you by the back of your neck, her nails clawing around your throat, and lifts your head so you look her in the derangement of her eyes. They are not actually gold, this close to her, they simply reflect the ambient light off of the prismatic exoskeleton of her flies, and that light happens often to be from fires. 

“You’re running out of time,” she says, all of her says, in the countess’ voice. This makes you bare your teeth. “You’re too sick to keep going on, too broken, and too small. You live because Mother wants you to live. You breathe because someone else wants you to.”

“And yet, I breathe all the same.”

She rolls you onto your back, puts her heel on your throat and you choke. 

“Let’s be friendly, let’s be kind to each other. We’re both in the same shitty boat, anyways.” And she holds you there, no more pressure than absolutely necessary to make you squirm. You dig your nails into her ankles, trying in the same pathetic way dying birds try to pick themselves off the ground to orient yourself. 

“Dani’s sweet, really, underneath all of those teeth she’s great. My little baby sister is my pride and joy, but that’s the problem. She got all the good bits from me and none of the refinery, she can’t help herself. Bela, on the other hand, is not sweet, refined, nor good in any capacity. She’d serve Mother your entrails on a plate and get a little gold star for it. The one thing they’ve both got in common is that they don’t really give a fuck about anything because rarely does anything happen to them .

“I’m on your side, baby, and it’s better if we don’t play coy with each other. Haven’t I been the one looking out for you? You want to cut me open? Fine, I’ll pretend I don’t enjoy it so much. But in return you don’t let them drink from you. Let’s both act like we understand what the word monogamy means and make it exclusive.” 

She smiles at you and you think to spit the bloody contents of your mouth at her. 

“We need each other. You’re smart, so you know…” she shifts her heel back and her weight with it, leaving only the toe of her shoe against your neck. She uses her other to nudge your knees apart, finding-

You snap your thighs closed and fight for your life underneath her, thrashing yourself free, kicking helplessly at her legs until she releases you and you scamper backwards.

“Were you getting off to that?”

“No,” you bite. “Put whatever stupid fantasies your simple brute mind conjured up out of your head.”

“Oh my God, you were.”

You push off of the ground and straighten out your collar. “You’re delusional, psychotic, and absolutely insane. A perverted mind with a distorted body and no shame whatsoever because your social ineptitude is actually so piss poor you don’t hold the basest concept of etiquette. You’re disgusting and brainless, all brawn with no thought between your ears because you traded common sense for muscles you only use when trying to keep your vile sisters from tearing your throat out.” 

“And you’re horny .” She clicks her tongue and winces in mock sympathy. “That’s so much more embarrassing for you.” 

“Go away,” you bark, hating her, and: “I want you in my room no later than eight tonight. You will keep your clothes on and your mouth closed. If either of your sisters comes for me, you’ll defend me or the whole arrangement is null and void.”

To your disgust, she snatches your hand and kisses it.

***

Cassandra drinks like you imagine the countess would drink, exaggerated and in a way that brings you the most pain. 

You have been bitten on several hundred occasions prior to this, but not yet by Cassandra and so you could not have fathomed how powerful her jaw could be when her teeth stab into your side. She works her muscle against you, flexing her cheek to drive her fangs in deeper and despite your best efforts you do let go of one shaking breath, because it is bloody and makes your head white-hot with hurt. 

But it isn’t intentional.

She is fully devoted into the preservation of  you, the usual blaze of her force being tempered by a remarkable show of control that had likely taken years to accrue. You know this because you feel the strength in her grip, how easily she could close down her mouth, find your ribs, and pull . She is not her mother, and she trembles minutely in her restraint, she is imperfect and it requires more effort for her to keep from killing you. There is none of her signature self-satisfaction nor any smugness; she is deathly serious. 

Her hand is tight on your hip, each fingertip viced around your bone to keep you locked in place. She made it clear before you began: if you moved, she would end you. She snapped your shirt high around your chest, wanting to feed from a place where the countess would not see her mark. How she can distinguish destabilized wounds from controlled ones is beyond you, and you do not care because the countess has receded into the stonework of the castle, nowhere you nor any of the maids can perceive her. Apparently, her hangovers are violent and stretch through several days. 

You hold tightly to your tongue when Cassandra pulls away from you, licking at her lips and sighing through her nose. The pain of removal is just as awful as insertion, a stinging acidic pain that is a result of her sending her flies into a wound to collect your blood. She falls against you on the bed, chittering and pleased with herself. 

You lie there for moments that you will never get back, the sheets white where they are not red, and both of your legs twisted into the linen. Your head spins with dehydration and the new blood loss added to your general anemia. You reach out a hand to touch her hair, feel the thin-plated bodies shift underneath your fingertips. To the touch, she rarely ever feels solid, unless she is aggressive. She feels like what she is: many little things being clumped loosely together to form one large thing, and the large-thing-made-of-many-little-things smiles fondly at you.

“You’re wonderful,” she purrs. “I can’t believe I haven’t killed you yet. I should have. You’re far too dangerous, too addictive. I’d fight wars if it meant I could keep you bottled up forever.”

“I do not see the appeal.” You extract yourself from underneath her and recover your modesty. You will not consent to both her version of flattery and being under her at the same time. 

“What does it taste like to you then?” 

“Metal,” you answer immediately. “Like copper or iron. It is unpalatable.”

She shrugs and turns away from you, resting her chin in the cup of her palm. Her back is tight with tension, you notice. “I think I can imagine that.” And then, spurred on by something you may have wrongly mistaken for wistfulness: “I didn’t want to drink when I first turned. Mother snapped my jaw off, poured wine into my stomach so I’d live.” 

“Why didn’t you leave?” You tuck half of your shirt underneath your belt. “You could have escaped elsewhere. You could have thrown yourself into the fire if you did not want to become such a creature.”

“Ha, no,” and her body closes in on itself, the flies banding together in what she does not understand is emotional defense. At least you hypothesize it is. “I could never. The same way you refuse to die, I do as well. I have no control over something as base as instinct, I was made to live and live well.”

“I refuse because I have some purpose in living. It is a choice I made,” you say. You lie. “There is something, now, that opposes me and I want to destroy it. What purpose is there in your existence? How could you be content to live, knowing that you live only to be—subservient? A fantasy for a broken woman who wants to pretend to be a mother, who is also subservient.” 

She stills for a moment and then creeps to loom over you, one hand against the headboard. She wants you to flinch but you know she will not kill you here. “You won’t escape this castle by driving me into an existential crisis.”

“But I will if I fornicate with you?” 

“ Fornicate with me? ” she pitches back to you. To anyone else, anyone with a calmer mind, she may have been joking. You, however, understand innately that she is making a proposition that she knows you will reject. “It’s a good theory, do you want to try? I promise I’ll cuddle with you afterwards.”

“No. You’re the one who insists on the innumerable innuendoes and baring your chest to me,” you say. “And once again, I do not see the appeal.”

“Ow. You’re cold.” She then decides to roll herself into your lap, blinking her leopard eyes up at you. “But you see the appeal of Mother, yes?” 

“No.”

“You don’t have to lie , we could smell you last night and it lasted all the way until this morning. Can you imagine having to explain why our pet human was crying to precious, sheltered Bela who has, in horrible spite of the world, never quite understood the concept of when two people love each other very much– ”

“Enough,” you snap, and feel yourself grow warm with shame. “I made a miscalculation, I won’t have you berate me for it.”

“A ‘miscalculation’? Is that what you’re calling it? I’ll be honest, I can’t say I expected anything different.” 

You shove her off of you and she does not go far. 

“Don’t be rude. You still need me, after all. Speaking of, what did you want from me this time if not for me to demonstrate all the ways I can flex my abdomen?”

There is a mason jar on your nightstand. Unassuming and irrelevant. 

You grab where her hand meets yours, clenching it desperately. You hold her like that for a moment and watch whatever light reflects from eyes flicker in disbelief. If you open your mind and listen hard enough, you can hear how loud she is thinking.

“Something decidedly more interesting,” you reply.

You lean forward and kiss her, take her sliver of a tongue into your mouth and feel it wriggle disgustingly around yours. You bite down, crush two flies and feel their wings dissolve on your lips. Some rattle behind your teeth. 

Cassandra makes an undignified sort of ‘umph’ sound when you kiss her and it devolves immediately into something exaggeratedly sexual. Her hand comes up to the small of your back and trembles. She shakes against you so quietly it could not be intentional, and you can taste how obsessed she is with you. It makes her easy and you can understand, if nothing else in the entirety of the universe, how stupid a thing can get when it is infatuated. You are a victim of infatuation yourself, and hate it. 

In a different life you may have pitied her, but in this one it is uncontestedly and absolutely her most grievous mistake to become smitten with you. But fucking with the people you mean to kill is an inherited trait as well as a learned one. 

You push her down against the bed and cup her face in your hands. Her jaw is strong, always. She keeps it formed even when it is inconvenient. All of them do. 

You gasp into her mouth and trail your fingers down her throat. The flies give way, there is nothing especially important there. 

You bite your own lip until it bleeds and every last one of her flies grow agitated, you feel them as you slip your palms against her chest. Solid. Likely protecting something vital, to say a heart would be ambitious and too ironic to be possible. 

She bucks against you and her hands grip your waist far too harshly. You know immediately that you have overdone it, and pull away from her before she can trap you here. 

There are no words for the way she looks at you then, with her lips stained with your willing blood, her pupils shiny and black and hugely staring up into yours. She looks like she wants something that you are in no position to give, nor will you ever be. Still, you feign a bit of maidenly humiliation and look away from her. You may have said something to her then, smug likely, but also there is a chance you may have wanted to warn her, in the way she has always warned you: that she is being hunted.  

But you want nothing less in the world than for her to speak and so you disengage, take your jar and retreat into the hallway where she would not risk following you. 

You spit into the jar and four living, if not saliva covered, flies clink against the glass.

Chapter Text

There is no one who is more fit to play God in Castle Dimitrescu than Mother, which is how it ought to be, considering everything. 

And she does, she plays wonderfully, falling into the role like she had been born for it—which she had. She sparkles on the stage of marble, glows under the candlelight of their braziers, shines in the rose of their maiden blood. She is set in the perfect backdrop, colored in the most pristine whites, contrasted and looming over the darkest reds. Beneath her heels lie the three of them, her crazed sick shadows tamed by her grace and education. She rules over this small world, this little globe of dread that houses her manufactured terrors. 

But when you pull back curtains and wash out the spotlight, there is no God here, only a mutated woman with greying skin, porphyria, and a collection of centuries old white dresses that they don’t make anymore. Cracked through the veins with every human flaw imaginable, vanity, pride, avarice, envy, insecurity—a dove set aside to pace a cage because it would never furl its feathered wings and become a swan. 

And she wandered around with her heart openly in pieces, which made the entire situation wildly embarrassing to Bela. 

It would be unfair to call it anything other than a matter of unfortunate circumstances, they did the best with what they had, cut their maids merrily and drank until their stomachs were filled and cultivated a business out of the wreckage that was, ultimately, a failure for each of them. 

Mother failed literal God. Cassandra failed Mother, even if she thinks she hasn’t. And Daniela failed everyone else. It could be argued that Bela failed Cassandra, but only Cassandra thinks that way and, really, it didn’t count for much and wasn’t worth tarnishing her record over.

She was better, and it isn’t an egocentric claim, but rather a statement that remained true due to the fact that she was, quite literally, made to be superior. 

Mother took her time with Bela, crafted her with the tenderness and unwavering affection that is exclusive to the physical manifestation of someone’s dreams for something finer than what they had themselves: a firstborn. 

She does not, can not, remember the procedure but it had been explained to her while she was still learning to arrange her vocal cords and was gurgling her first syllables. Mother had spent several long months searching for the perfect host, she loved the idea of Bela being different to her, hair so bright and blonde it would proclaim her surely mild temper and good spirit. She would be tall, slender, with symmetrical features and round eyes with a dimple to each cheek. At rest she would have a soft expression, and the corners of her lips should always remain tipped up. She would be calm. She would be refined. She would be controlled. There would be no scarring, no imperfection feasible. No dark mark from a mole. No splash of freckles. Not a hair out of place. Pure. Golden. Porcelain and good paint.

And they both believed, in joined blind harmony, that she could do no wrong.

No matter how messily she killed. 

No matter how violent she became.

No matter how much she wanted for everything and everyone to burn for no reason at all other than she believed the fires would be spectacular. 

Girls want for dolls with candy colored eyes and pretty pink ribbons, women want for corpses with red teeth and strawberry skin to make into bookmarks. This, Bela knew in the same way she knew the weight of a sickle or that the sky was grey.

It was never any fault of hers, not when there were so many other things to blame first. She was emphatic about Cassandra, truly, but it was far too easy to trip her up, she always could be made to move to the wrong place at the worst possible time and her body was not so carefully made. She was too unsteady and too graceless and that made her the most perfect antithesis to Bela. The perfect scapegoat when things, as they always inevitably did, went to complete and utter shit. 

No one in the castle seems to know this, but Daniela is a good bit wiser than she wants everyone to believe. Bela is aware because she’s more slippery, more difficult to pin with a needle—their toothy little butterfly. She’d much rather split the responsibility between both of them, have Cassandra be caught stained in red one day and Daniela the next, but she knows how to circumvent the worst of the trouble. It’s caused something of a strain between her and the middle child, but Cassandra beckons trouble so well , courts it beautifully, and Bela adores the things she’s capable of when she’s angry. 

Mother knows. 

Bela has picked her apart across the years, for she was crafted to love and adore Mother which translated rather easily into an obsession with dissecting her. They understand each other without need of words, Bela sees how she clocks each and every detail and always always there’s something that Bela misses. She’ll pull her sickle through her favored chambermaid and forget to eat the fingernails or there will be a smattering of blood she didn’t lap up. Something, always something. Mother knows, and she’ll gaze at Bela for just a second longer than typical and that is all the time needed to convey that she needs to do better . 

She was crafted to be pleasing to the eye and to the heart, but where was Mother’s charisma? Where was Cassandra’s efficiency? Where was Daniela’s tact? She was good, not perfect. Perfection wasn’t a goal, it was a standard. Yet somehow she was lacking in the things that her family seemed to excel in. They had their niches, but Bela wasn’t niche, she was excellent. 

She’s good enough, though, to sniff Cassandra out quicker than anyone else did. She can smell the roiling churning betrayal that wafts off of her in droves and droves of pheromones. Her nose is talented, more than the rest of her family—perfect nose in function and appearance! Mother could at least claim she had achieved that much—and so she can smell exactly what it is she’s planning and what she wants. Bela watches her every day, sends a scouting fly floating into the hive of her sister’s and makes it mingle and get acclimated to her swarm. She’s simple and can’t tell the difference anyway. But it floats along and just watches; a compound set of eyes that track her everywhere she goes. 

She’s so infatuated with you it makes her look stupid.

It’s not love, not in the way she thinks you would understand it, it’s the few little faulty human neurotransmitters that her flies ate in the beginning driving her into little spats of lust. Her body doesn’t procreate that way anymore but her mind still thinks it does. It gets messy. Too messy for your little broken rat’s bones, she would kill you if she tried and—

New train of thought, please.

She wants to eat you. There isn’t anything nearly so romantic to Cassandra as the act of digestion, to put one thing inside of another and make them into one. And—despite any protests to the contrary—she, like all of them, is family centric. She wants to sow her larvae in between your ribs and watch them crawl around the sockets of your eyes. She wants to peel you back and turn you into the meat shelter for her eggs, she wants you to want this. She wants to not want this—because Cassandra enjoys pretending to be a human sometimes—but she wants it all the same.

If there were some normal, human friendly, comparison then it would be that you’d have your stomach full of her children and live happily ever after in a house with brightly colored walls and a freshly clipped lawn with a picket fence. You’d be knitting sweaters for her spawn at a warm fireplace, and she’d kiss you up and down your neck for hours until you took her to bed and made a few dozen more. Domesticity in its most banal form. But there’s a conflict of interest, so she'll kill you first and then flip your decomposition into a home and make a mother out of you and the bones you leave behind. She knows that you would hate this, but the dead don’t get to air their grievances, and she knows this also.

This is the logic that you will inherently not understand, amongst the throes and throes of reasoning that innately defies human comprehension. Bela knows that fly-brains are small, but there’s so many of them all thinking at once that they simply overpower your singular plump pink one. 

Yours…and Mother’s.

Who, for the life of her, cannot understand that you are not her lover. You’re not even her acquaintance. 

God and her little heretical not-apostle. The thing that hunts and the thing to be hunted, dancing round and round in spirals that sweep the dust from the filmy cabinets that line the halls. You both look ridiculous. 

Mother’s anatomy will allow her to procreate with you, or at least to achieve some mimicry of it. And her neurotransmitters aren’t a product of bad experimentation, but something she is designed to have, like yours. You “like-like” each other, Cassandra has said. Bela does not understand it in a way that isn’t mechanical. 

She doesn’t know why Mother plays with you, or why you play with her. She knows there is no conceivable way your dancing doesn’t end with someone dead on the ballroom floor. That is where this was always meant to go, in the end. You will never leave Castle Dimitrescu with Mother still alive. Either you will escape, or you will become a part of it. 

It’ll be the latter, inevitably. You’re not strong enough, not fast enough, not smart enough to handle Mother when she’s destabilized. She only gets stronger when she’s vulnerable. You do too, Bela realizes, you’re more powerful than you’ve ever been when you have nothing left to lose and everything more to gain. Human conviction is relentless and humiliating, she knows that she was like that before she turned. But you’re at your best and burning your Goddamned brightest right now, and Mother isn’t even trying. 

She watches you too. Everywhere you go.

She sees you more clearly now than she ever did when Mother ordered her to swipe the rounds from your gun, or even when she breathed down your neck as you tuned the sweet trilling piano. She thought it wonderous that it was being seen to after all this time, that Mother was finally letting someone touch it again. Bela thought she might’ve been healing. 

She’s not, though, you’re ruining it. You’ve set her back nearly a century in the span of only a few short months. Congratulations, little girl, you’re upending them and you don’t even know it.

Bela knows though, and she can see the chess pieces sliding around. You’re going manic, putting your trigger finger on all of them, everywhere, all at once. 

In the nights when you’re fighting to stay alive, she can hear Mother scratching a quill on paper. She found the concept sketches she’ll send to the craftsman, and it’s of the most beautiful cello she’s ever seen. 

You’ll be perfect, when this is all through, maybe even more so than her.

Chapter Text

You and your flies sit together in solidarity on the floor long after Cassandra has dissolved out of your room. You hold the jar with both hands, the heat from your palms smudging the glass, and you thumb against the area where they all tap against the jar, trying to get through and to you. You have half a mind to tear the lid off and set them back out to their owner, for you fear with chilly awareness that you have invited her eyes unto you. You were insane to take these—her—and bottle them away as if any part of a Dimitrescu could be contained. 

They are loathsome this close up, wriggly stout things that aren’t like any insect you’ve ever seen before. They are fly shaped but these are not something you would see in nature, not with those exoskeletons glittering and shifting the way they are. They look at you, eight red hexagonal eyes peering up while they throw themselves against the glass where you’ve brought your face closer to inspect them. They chitter, quieter without the rest of their swarm to echo their song. For a moment, one that washes over you and makes you nearly drop the jar entirely, you think you might be able to understand them. 

May God strike you down where you stand if somehow you’ve absorbed their language.

You shake the jar, gently at first, and harder again. This you do because it is a small power you’ve snatched away, these flies likely have bitten you before, or have come about as a result of your blood filling their stomachs and sacs. You shake them because it is the smallest step in the direction of control. You consider briefly, insanely, that you might want to eat them the way you have been eaten. You want to swallow them whole and show them your own stomach acid. 

But they may very well eat you back, again. So you leave them in the jar to crawl over one another in their interrupted path to you, for now. In truth, you had collected them nearly on a whim, there was little information you were apt to gain from just these flies alone and not from the entirety of the swarm that Cassandra was composed of. But these were the start to something vital in the operation of escape: research. More thorough than just plucking through an ancient library or laying Cassandra bare on your bed where she controlled herself far too well; you would need to find what made them shiver. 

If she came to collect them come morning, you would learn she was able to perceive you through them or that your kiss had simply not distracted her enough. If she did not, you would learn that she was well and truly fucking with you or—the possibility that excited you the most feverently—that she cannot be aware of each individual fly. A small vulnerability is a vulnerability nonetheless, though what applies to Cassandra may not extend to her kin. There were potentially factors on the board that may skew the play, and nothing was without risk. You could assume nothing, but you were free to theorize. 

If Cassandra’s outburst held any truth, the countess is able to utilize them as a catastrophic surveillance system. Without them and their many, she will likely struggle that much harder to pin you down. It would benefit you greatly if you were able to be rid of them entirely, though doing so would likely be a challenge as complex and dangerous as murdering the countess herself. You may have been getting more ambitious than you could handle. 

You tap your nail against the glass and the flysong stops momentarily. ‘Likely’ wasn’t a guarantee. And ‘likely’ may see you swinging upside down in the countess’ cellar with your throat peeled and clamped open to be drained if you become too dangerous to her. The only advantage you hold over anyone in this castle at all is that they look upon you and see a pending expiration date, lose that and there will be nothing left of you. 

You are hurting for information and resources and a cohesive plan. More than either of those things, though, you require subtlety. You need to remove the watchers from your wall, and you need to keep them out. 

You consider the flies in the jar, and then you press your index finger to where you bit your lip earlier. A wet red bead forms on your fingertip where you broke skin and they grow restless in their prison. You draw this down the opposite side of the glass and watch, distantly amused, as they turn from you and clamber towards the streak, buzzing themselves against where you’ve pressed it. 

You draw your finger round and round and round, whorling blood along the glass and they follow you like moths to flame. Birds to seeds. Cows to grass. Snakes to mice. No matter which part of the world it may be, no matter how far you venture out of this icy crypt, you know you’ll inevitably find that everything eats something else. 

There’s only the briefest moments, when the air electrifies and, on an impulse you’ve cultivated unwillingly, you suck in a breath and you hear the faintest sound of footfalls on carpet; like preparing for a wave to wash and close over your head. You quickly slide the jar of flies underneath your bed, letting the polished wood carry it beneath the headboard.

You’ve gotten acquainted with how each of the women in the castle carry themselves, and what each sounds like in their approach. You can tell from pace alone the intentions of each one and how they relate to you. 

With these sets of footsteps, with the muted way you can hear heels on carpet, you know something has come to eat you, too. 

The countess, for all her height, moves next to silently if she wishes. If your life did not depend so heavily on whether or not you were paying attention you may have never heard her coming at all. But it does, and you do. 

When she stoops into the doorway she moves as if she knows everything about you before she enters the room. There is never enough air, with her in the room, and being sat on the floor, blood on your finger, on your lips, under your shirt, and on your collar you feel as if you’ve been caught in mischief. 

“Good afternoon,” she says, and with the tone that sounds like the prelude to an unpleasant one. She has reattached her composure entirely, everything is groomed back into place so perfectly that it is hard to imagine that you had ever crawled to her and that she had ever asked you to. She looks unphased, neither by the alcohol nor by you. The powder has been reapplied to her face and her lipstick unsmudged. She is pale, gold, and black, her pearls clipped on and her wedding ring tucked back beneath all of them. It makes sense that she would not allow herself to be affected by you—too impure even to be made into wine—in any capacity for long. You had caught her in a small precious moment of weakness, a lapse in judgment on both of your ends, and perhaps that would not go unpunished. You certainly felt more than deserving of it, though not by her hand. You should’ve taken the opportunity to gain something, not to lose your dignity.

But she has sucked you mercilessly into her orbit, just the same as everything else behind these aged walls. You are a belt of broken rock, spinning and spinning around her sun. 

“What the fuck,” the belt says, “do you want, my lady?”

“To attempt diplomacy,” the sun replies.

You don’t want diplomacy, and you don’t want to bring attention to any part of what transpired between the two of you. It is a slithy, amorphous, eldritch thing that haunts you to think about. You should not have touched each other, not in the way you’ve been drawn to touch women recently. But you had not died when the world told you to—and it had told you many times, even before the castle—and as of late it was growing harder to remember which part of scripture it was that demanded that you not lap the desire from between a woman’s legs the way your nature bid you. 

You are as a dog, you must do as a dog does. The dog does not question why it wants to howl at night; why should you question why you had once wanted to let her deflower you on her chaise lounge?

Perhaps that’s why your life has been so difficult, now that you consider it.

She sits cross-legged on your bed, and you make no move to join her; only twisting your body to face her behind you because you would never make a mistake so rudimentary as to show her your back willingly. You pray the flies are too occupied chasing your bloodstains to drone. If they attract her attention, she may very well claw you or worse, confiscate them and in doing so alert her children. But if she hears them now, she makes no comment, only clasps her gloved hands in her lap and stares at you. 

And in her silence she will make you go and drag that terrible, reeking, porous thing out of the closet and set it on the table for discussion. You know she will not leave without having dissected it. 

“I’m not fucking any of you,” you state, briefly running your tongue along the abrasion on your lip where she cut you that was just beginning to heal. “You can have my corpse if it so pleases you but not while my mind inhabits it. I do not understand anyone’s obsession with my body.”

For once it seems as if you have managed to surprise her, for her brows lift to the apex of her forehead and she balks just slightly, as if she had not known you were capable of language so offensive despite all evidence to the contrary. She hadn’t expected you to confront it with the amount of scorn you had, you realize. Somehow this served only to make you more bitter. 

“I am neither your friend, nor your lover, nor your comfort. You see me for the purpose I serve to you and occasionally as an object for your entertainment. But in spite of that, in spite of you, I am still well aware that no matter what you may consider me, I am still a person. Even if only by technical definition,” You hold her gaze, even though it burns. “As a person I am telling you that there is no diplomacy. Whatever satisfaction you seek from me, you won’t find. We stand on the same ground as we always have.”

She tips her head only slightly to the left, her eyes shift only briefly from your face to the rest of your body and back. The absence that yawns afterwards makes you look away.  

“I can say with full confidence that you are the only person alive to have ever rejected me, dear,” she says, though she is dry, neither pleased nor offended. “Especially when I wasn’t making a proposition.” 

“You came all this way for leisure then?”

“Your room is a few paces from mine, though I suppose it may feel strenuous to an asthmatic invalid. (“I don’t have asthma,” you interject lowly.) But, no, I came ‘all this way’ to perform an assessment of your wounds,” she replies. There is the barest hint of amusement that dares to lilt her words. “I appreciate that you’ve educated me as to where your mind lies, though.”

She has brought along a brown leather bag that holds fresh gauze and bandages, scissors, more of that foul smelling salve, with a needle and thread. You had disregarded the idea that they were for you, primarily because it is laughable that she would show you any metric of concern, and partially because you had been primarily, with a handful of exceptions, tending your own injuries insofar and had no need for being nursed. You shudder away from her instinctively, curling your lip in violent distaste. 

“If you dare— “

“Ease yourself,” she snaps, that amusement leaving as quickly as it had arrived. She is commanding you, now. “This is purely impersonal.”

“Because I’m so naturally inclined to believe that,” you snap back. “I’ve never been courted in all my life, my lady, no one has ever deemed it safe. But even I can recognize a cheap attempt at—“

She reaches down and grabs your jaw, vicing her fingers around it and silencing you so swiftly you nearly forgot what words you were about to hiss next. “You are going to listen to me when I speak and you are going to comprehend. You are going to kindly shut up and do exactly what it is that I say. There isn’t room for rebuttal, pet. You aren’t in a position to disobey. Do not mistake last night for anything other than exactly what it was, you have no license to back-talk. You are a lure for my daughters to protect the integrity of my staff’s numbers, I am here to ensure you are working properly.”

She’s come to repair her trap, to reset the pins in her machine. It is an old, wild place that howls and breathes and swallows, but everything in the castle must have a function. She is ensuring you can still perform yours. This is what you repeat to yourself, internally, as she forces you to the bed and untangles the jacket from your shoulders. You must look frantic—your breath has gotten clogged in your throat and comes out choked—you clutch your hands atop hers, small and powerless as they are and stare up at her with an expression you have never made before. You would have rather she just killed you.

“Please,” she sneers, lifting the corner of her painted lips in disgust. “You must think grandly of yourself if you think I’d resort to forcing myself on you of all people. I’m neither that desperate nor that interested.”

She guides you to sit before her, and you release her slowly. You would not show her your back willingly, but she has left you little alternative. Though her arrogance will keep her in check, not her morality. It was a fear you’d harbored that sang to you like a bell, that you might yet have something left for her to steal—something that you had not known that you had the capacity to worry over being stolen, if only because the thought was so ludicrous to your mind that it had grown phobic of it. You were no good as wine, after all. It would have been of little consequence to her if she decided to humiliate you in a more terrible way. 

But she is a gentlewoman (you snort, quietly to yourself to think of this and she looks at you quizzically), and does not move with lecherous intent as she lifts your shirt to examine the bite marks beneath. 

You have a brief moment to consider whether or not you hate Cassandra violently enough to warrant what may fall upon her if her mother discovers she’s taken of you while not destabilized. You think that, with the countess, a hole driven through her stomach may have constituted a warning.

“I can handle my fore,” you say, breathing some of your tension out from your nose. You guide her hands from the front of your shirt, having them skirt the hem in a way that very nearly reveals the calculated wounds beneath.“If you absolutely must inspect me, tend to my back, the areas where I cannot reach, then you can at least acclaim to have done some good.”

“I always do good,” she replies, in a whisper that ignites some little pathetic horrendous flame in your stomach. You wish it was bile. You know it is not. But she slides behind you, her weight displacing you slightly on the mattress. There will never exist a moment where you are not constantly reminded of how small you are in comparison. “Arms up.”

You shudder inside of your skin and all of you stands on end and alert. You could not negotiate nor plead your way out of this. She had issued her command and made her intentions clear, you were to be pliant while she fixed you. Several nights ago it had been fun and leisurely, playful even. It did not change your situation now, terrified as you were still to be vulnerable for her. 

You bring your arms above your head, your trembling cold limbs that had been raked over with scars from blades and from teeth. You hold them there as she lifts your shirt—which had perhaps been a grey or beige at some point, you cannot remember, for it is a muddied brown from your blood now—over your shoulders and tugs it over your unkempt hair. You had neglected so much, you think, and there were many things that you would never recover even if you managed to escape. 

Where does normalcy lie for you now? Does it have a place in your life, after this? Your mind may one day shove your memories of this place into a cabinet or cupboard where it can grow an undisturbed layer of dust and mildew, but your bones will never forget. Your form was a testament to human conviction or at least your own personal resilience—you looked wartorn. You will always carry the castle in your body, and it will remain there even after you are buried.

The countess places a hand upon your back and the feel of leather makes you shiver. You are sensitive to all touch now, hers especially, violently. 

“What a number we’ve done on you, hm?” She walks her fingers along the knobby path of your spine, ticking the clasps that hold your chest bindings away. “I suspect most of the damage does not lie in your body at all. But that’s all I’m quite able to fix at present, unfortunately.”

“I didn’t take you as someone versed in medicine,” you reply, electing to ignore her implication, (she was right, of course, but she had overextended) clutching your arms over your chest to preserve what little modesty there yet remained. Somehow you had fallen back into this position, precarious as it was. Only this time you were well and truly bare, save for your pants. 

“You’ll find that everyone must be somewhat learned in medicine here. I’m no doctor nor am I a nurse; but if you should get into the habit of cutting livestock open you start to learn what goes where, how it should look like, and what it does. I’ve lived long enough to be tolerable with a scalpel, and I’ve lived even longer still to acknowledge the body. I’m a budding surgeon, perhaps. My children were my master thesis, proof of the concept that I could bind Cadou to a cadaver to raise the dead and interrupt decomposition in a way that did not tamper with the mind. They are the culmination of my research, of my practice—they prove I’ve more still to learn.”

You nearly laugh at this, for her voice dips and grows exasperated in a way that reminds you that she is a mother, and that the filthy core of it all she can adore her daughters enough to tease and maybe conceive some warped idea of maternal love. Maybe she cherishes them the way you would have cherished your own offspring, should you have born any. You conceive, in a thought that skitters bashfully across your mind, that if someone were to purge this place of the blood and sin that a family, mundane and pretty, may have lived here. A mother and her three daughters she taught to paint and sing and sew—they would eat fine meals and wear colorful silks and dance in the ballroom with hems and skirts that swept the polished floors. 

Their scarecrows would be made of straw and twine. Inside and out.

But that shy thought crawls away, and the countess places a rag doused in alcohol against a sickle wound on your back that had been lazily wrapped with gauze some days prior. You wince and grind your teeth down against each other, but it was a preferred pain to the infection that may have taken you. It has happened before, several times, when you could not clean yourself or your injuries adequately. You were then put underneath the care of one of the daughters—most often Bela—who would whisper to you in a strange language and push medicine past your teeth or force you to hold wads of some bitter salty plant underneath your tongue until you lost your fever, chewing at it like cud until your eyes watered. 

The countess’ hands wander to your sides, pinching and prodding you roughly in experiment. “You know, I don’t need any medical devices or blood tests to know that you’re on limited time. You have some sort of respiratory infection, I can tell from your breathing. It’s advanced, concerningly so. Your body is going to fail you.”

“As a mortal body is apt to, yes.”

“That isn’t what I meant, pet.” She brings a hand up to your chest, tactfully avoiding your naked breast and instead splaying her long fingers across the entirety of the underside of your clavicle, where your heart thump-thump-thump s against her touch. “You were balancing your hours long before you came here. No need to pretend otherwise.”

“I’ve quite a few hours,” you reply, shifting uncomfortably where she makes contact with you. Her hand could nearly occupy all of your upper torso should she have wanted it to. “I wasn’t going to make it to forty. It does not mean that I felt robbed of time.” 

You smile with no humor, though she likely does not see it. She pulls her hands back to tend to you, talented and artful as if she were fixing a clock. She cleans the disease away, settles the irritated flesh, even bothers to rub some concoction that numbs your skin while she stitches those wounds that will not close independently. “How fortunate that you and yours have reliable access to all the treatments you would ever need and all that you do not; the village drowns in plague and rot. I cannot imagine living so many years that I may grow useless—that is a luxury exclusive to the high-born. No, my lady, I am not ashamed to say that my conditions and their varying severities will be my demise. They are things that not even you can fix, and so I take a measure of comfort in knowing that I was doomed from conception and not from a lack of wherewithal.” 

“How macabre,” she replies, disinterested, as she snips at another roll of gauze. “We pay careful attention to your population, too many mouths to feed and you will all go hungry, too little and we will. You may rest easy knowing that the village’s numbers are exactly as they should be. You are stable.”

You do not feel stable, listening to her. You feel like turning and spitting in her face.

“Although, your death does not need to be your end, my dear,” she says, re-wrapping the place where Daniela had carved through your back one evening as you were sheltering underneath an overturned dresser. She pats you softly on the back, over the new stitches she has placed. It was done with just enough pressure to make you lurch forward. “Not anymore.”

A sweat breaks out along the back of your neck, and you turn yourself partially to look at her. To ensure whatever it is that she says next you comprehend in full. You swallow. “What do you mean?”

“Look about you,” she says, gesturing lazily with her scissors to the four dark walls that hold you both. “I am a verifiable savant in creating life. The moroaice , the samce , my children; all of my work. I can raise the dead, turn them into something new and remarkable.”

The countess takes you by the throat, ringing her fingers around the whole of your neck, gently in contrast to the way she’s handled you prior. Now she moves with care, with consideration, as she pulls you against her your heart sprints, galloping along while hers beats once for every fifteen of yours but thunders through your whole body each time it does. 

“I could remake you,” she says, looking down upon you with the full weight of her golden stare. She looks at you with an unbridled and blatant affection, the kind of affection you yourself have—for weaponry. No one can ever be sane about the particular science they love.

Her index finger traces the side of your neck, up to your mastoid. She circles here, lightly. “And you would live a death that far exceeds the quality of your life. You would know what it means to be satisfied , pet. Isn’t that what you want, after all? Isn’t it what you think you’ll gain by killing me? You will not succeed that way, you’ll drag yourself after me until you’ve fallen apart and at the end of it all, when you die the way all little humans must do, I’ll still be here. I’ll be fine and well and I’ll put you in a bottle and give you away as a birthday present to one of the girls. They’ll fight over your corpse and the winner will drag you away to be used for their brood.”

She slides her hand upwards, cradling your jaw in her palm. “What a wretched end, and certainly not one you’d want for yourself. Not even one that I would want for you, truth be told in plain. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can still attain peace, you can still learn satisfaction. I can satisfy you. Let me satisfy you.”

Your chest rises and falls against the part of her arm that rests between your breasts. You feel airless as you look up at her. You feel heat, all over. “You would turn me into your creature.” It is not a question.

“It largely depends on how well the operation goes. But ultimately, yes, you would heed my orders in exchange for being fed and,” here she tips your head back further, pressing your mouth open with her finger. Your body will betray you several more times before it breaks down entirely, which is why you feel that hot desperate virgin’s ache return between your thighs as you are brought to lean even more heavily against her. “ Well taken care of.”

It would be a life you live in the countess’ petri dish. You would be made into a thrall, each word she spoke would become the meaning of your existence. There is a chance, a decent one, that your body would persist—not repaired, but you would not live in inadequacy and pain. 

She has curled her form around you, coiled her limbs to encircle you without making contact aside from the hand that cradles you, that comforts your temples and your lymph nodes. It is the embrace of a cage and a snake. Your lamb heart threatens collapse. How easy it would be, to surrender to the feel of her gloves on your neck. 

“I think,” you say, wetting your lips with a darting tongue. “That you ought to go fuck yourself.” 

And she constricts about you, tight at first, and then tighter still, until you feel every bit of the careful work she’s done bleed out onto the bedsheets and into her pretty white dress. 

You stare breathlessly towards the ceiling, where cobwebs dangle lonesomely in the corners.