DazedJahkari

She passed through the halls of the palace silently, her dark robes trailing behind her, as though she were a messenger of Death come to bring the beings that still clung to the falling empire with her to the afterlife. How sumptuous the place had once been, how elegant and how bustling with energy, she thought as the sounds of her footsteps echoed through the now-deserted halls. Now, there was nothing. They had become too proud, too blind. They could not see the warning signs for the glint of the sun in their eyes, and thus they had been stricken down for their hubris. She had known, had always known, that this would come, but even she cou

Just because she knew it was coming—had known, for years, a nagging foreboding in the back of subconscious—did not make watching the reality of it come true any easier. Even the Black Witch could not watch the demise of so much that she loved in secret without her protective layer of frost thawing. Her first indication that this was coming had been when she was a child, too young to properly understand yet old enough to have the memory haunt her nightmares. Burning, everything had burned—blind emotion had let it burn, without any regard for the history that would be lost to it. Feelings she could not understand at that age, wh

Andrea regarded what he called his masterpiece with eyes that shown with mixed emotions. It was beautiful, in its jarring, symmetrical, human-yet-inhuman way, and she could see reflections of her own appearance in it. Her hands had become its hands, her neck its neck. Subtle hints of her own person immortalized. Immortalized. Her eyes gazed at the masterpiece without truly seeing it anymore. She had stared at it for so long she no longer could see the material thing, but only what it meant. What it meant for her. Much of it was not her. The build was too idealized, too elongated, and there was that terrible symmetry. Perfectly matched eyes

Wren watched the twins from her perch in the lonely sycamore, hidden from the casual observer by the dappled shadows its leaves cast upon her. While she hid, they were mischievously rearranging the traditional totems that marked each member of the tribe’s tent: Wren saw them switch Dragonfly’s with Cicada’s and Heron’s with Owl’s, then watched as they switched around their own Coyote and Jackal and finally as they moved her own Wren totem with the leader’s Hawk. She raised an eyebrow at this move, seeing the trick for what it was. If she hadn’t been enjoying her invisibility, Wren would have laughed at both