He was a vessel bereft of a soul. Nevertheless, his odor lingered, wafting and infusing itself firmly into the frontal lobes of her mind like an antagonist of her conduct with the conspicuous intention of endeavoring to incessantly deliver prickly reprimands with the termagency of a livid mother fervent to extinguish her fortitude by unraveling her spirit and divulging her peccadilloes. It, on the contrary, failed to pique her.
Ptolemy pulled out a folded foolscap tucked in her boot and scratched out four lines with a quick flourish and scribbled 'Nathaniel' underneath a list of thirteen other faceless names. Returning it, she sat in reticent deference like a Turk and paid no heed to the scruples her embittered governess struggled belligerently with to create a more syrupy disposition for her in order to exonerate the hoydenish lady's eccentricity and compliance for discourses that beckoned her acid wit to unearth itself in the company of Polite Society. Ptolemy sniveled indignantly at the indefinite recollection and provided her askance perusal to the visual rendering of her self sitting stoically with her hands folded on her lap while solely consigning herself to gape ahead like a demure and vapid girl. Her callers proclaimed exuberantly when they beheld the portrait with lifted brows and pleasantly mirthful sentiment printed on their countenances that she was a rather fine creature. Ptolemy would thereby scowl with ingenuous discontentment after almost garroting on her chagrin. Antelopes, Ptolemy would suppose, were fine creatures themselves. Therefore, if she too was such an exquisitely pretty being like an Antelope, she should, inter alia, have her head jutting out of a bronzed frame too. The artist's depiction of the chit was a mere affectation on his part, she was neither tantamount to docile or reclaimed. It was pure sinful for him to fabricate such a mockery, such a wily and artful subterfuge. Ptolemy, as she often would, recalled her nonsensical assumptions on her internal organs, apprehensive that the lack of stimulation would grind them to a halt. She was much too proficient at the arraignment of the ton and their unfeasible activities. Cradling the senescent music box in her palm, she fished for its counterpart enclosed in an inherited compass. A damned ignominy, she mused. However, she adamantly refused to shirk her duty.
In a broken series of successful gestures, Ptolemy retrieved the key from the bedlam of the shattered compass having formerly served its singular purpose as its needle and wedged it within the slot at the substructure of the reticent box. She pried the lid open, nearly prostrate with the trepidation of the forthcoming disclosure, a leak in the clandestine lives of her ancestors. Ptolemy, her complexion fading a degree paler than choleric, her insides quivering like aspic, azure eyes glinting like lonesome stars in the vast ocean of evening sky, glittery with her refusal to bat an eyelid, made the sheet of hard-pressed paper that slipped through a slit with a rapidity that would have made the Pope lament with irritation her focal point. It descended to her palm with the sort of refined grace her governess would have praised. The rhapsodic tune expired like the final wisps of the passivity she had preserved for the circumstance. She, now, was not dithering on the clever acumen that she ought to cease caviling over insignificant facets. It was merely her affairs now.
After tightening her fist, she slowly peeled her fingers away. "Solomon's pentacle," she murmured pensively, observing the paper disintegrate itself. The black inscription staining itself onto her palm.
She was blessedly oblivious to the portent as she shed her obsequious awe for the convoluted details.
Ptolemy was a wild, unruly lass who had more masculinity than the man himself and kept in her possession like a historian and his relics more than a few trifling foibles. Her impiety, nevertheless, had not assisted in her inadvertent collaboration for her own mortal demise.
Ptolemy heard the soft click of the pistol and instantaneously arose but it had been discharged. The smell of gunfire swallowed the aroma of Nathaniel. She swiveled on her heels shakily, sanguinolent and irate and slightly asphyxiated. He was completely inured to her ferocious scowls, however, so he stood there, the gun cocked in her general direction. "Nathaniel," His name was wrapped in warning tones of direst approbation, her eyebrows positively levitating with ire.
"Don't make me shoot you again, Ptolemy," he drawled, amber eyes hinged with favorable inclination for his words. In an uncharacteristic lapse of her normal hauteur, Ptolemy exhaled resignedly. Nathaniel squinted at her, feeling the noose of death tighten inexorably around his neck.
"Hand over the last clue, Lemy," He jiggled the propped up firearm for emphasis "Hand it over,"
Ptolemy shivered in passionate repugnance to the nostalgia manacled to the endearment, black bile in lieu of her acrimony and displeasure climbed out of her throat. She stared at her him. "The Wilde Hunt isn't a diversion for bluebloods," Ptolemy growled, only moderately infuriated "It's a race, a mad pursuit for the even madder Hatter. Did you actually assume that I would simply offer you the conclusive inkling of our scandalous uncle's whereabouts? You must be as harebrained as he is,"
Nathaniel grunted, the hand gripping the pistol twitched. "Nathaniel," she tried again, less glorified by an intonation of melancholy "The others consider him game, a gratifying sport. They'll surely send him to the gallows or worse, to the Reaper," He remained impassive, a boy chiseled from stone, with a heart of similar substance.
Ptolemy sighed, swallowing against the painful knot congealing in her throat. Acquiring the smooth veneer of bored sophistication, she called out to his lost conscious
"Then you have left me no choice for my better judgment, good-bye Niel" In a thick cloud of smoldering temperature and heavy density, he had lost his little sister.
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When Cristofer crept into the dimly-lit room, he had no specific ploy in mind but however he did entertain an indefinite notion constituted of causing distraught and ruffling the feathers of the dignified tenants of the Manor. Something, after all, was going to stir them up and abandon them with the sentiment of unease. He wanted to be the instigator of the inevitable. Cristofer coolly sauntered across the room with the air of a giant cat approaching prey; nonetheless, his rheumy-blue eyes maintained a glint of mischievous conduct that disturbed his otherwise tranquil nature and wit. This is what made him irresistible, charming and fairly tolerable. Justine, a fellow dweller, had exasperatedly claimed that he was far too good-looking and that being anything but disagreeable with him was trivial effort. So she sought to be an absolute wench.
The dark-haired boy with the bright eyes ran a finger on the writing-desk and raised it to his mouth "Dark amber," he tasted "From an old, ancient tree situated at the infernal heart of The Copse, carved by Austin Milford. A great duke who died of depression when his unrequited love who was absolutely mad, Yves, threw herself off a bridge,"
"I did not die of depression, one needs a heart for such a tremendous feeling," Austin commented "I was simply enchanted by Silas," He glanced briefly at the tall, fair fellow with the enigmatic expression clinking test tubes with concoctions together. Silas selected a pen decisively from the collection stabbed in his mollified but otherwise fascinatingly colorless hair; the young man, oblivious and absorbed in his inane habit of pursuing the unknown, licked his puce lips and wrote in deep concentration and in furrowed eyebrows on foolscap. With an amused expression, Milford returned to spying through the bronze telescope.
Cristofer sipped the decanter and immediately dropped it back on the tray with a wince for its palate. It was only here that the girl made herself known.
"The Lord will not favor you for such a heinous act,"
The boy gazed nonchalantly at the top shelf of an impressive book case stacked haphazardly with the literature of the tongueless and located the girl with his eyes. She was merely a chiaroscuro sketch in the dark but he could smell the scent of dead flowers wafting through the air and something distinctly sweeter.
"For quenching my thirst?" he made his way around the desk and smoothed a crumpled page of a book. It shook.
"With his drink," she retorted and suddenly leaped off the ledge and hung precariously upside down from the chandelier, fixing him with dark eyes. "What business does the demon lord have in such a modest home?"
He grinned, disembodied from his situation, weighing the journal in his hands and barely refrained from snorting at her words. Demon Lord? He was distantly amused, however true, but 'Modest' did not humble the impressive girth of the building. It was immensely large which was what had drawn him to it, for large homes had larger secrets wedged in-between. And he was merely a plumber of sorts believing in his quiet destiny that he would unclog the sewers of its messy tales and fix the broken pipe dreams. It was all very funny, indeed.
He ignored her "The Master has been dead for a hefty year," Cristofer noted the fading smell of the man who expired unfairly young. The once renowned portrait of Bartolomeo that used to cling over the mantle piece leaned in desolation on the wall. Cristofer observed the even color of its paint.
The girl fluidly dropped onto her feet and skipped towards the empty frame of the clock, humming to herself a nursery tune. "Yeah," she sung casually over her shoulder, her fingers absently picked the petal of a flower as she sat near the feet of the clock. Cristofer lit a cigar and pondered quietly "Madame Flume is upon us," the girl commented before sinking into the clock, her statement was confirmed when Cristofer heard the soft click of a pistol above his head, the pounding feet and the odor of another unwanted presence intruding his domain. "Good evening, Madame Flume," Cristofer murmured, a gentle lilt to his head.
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He had woken up from a sleepless dream, floating in a sea of books. Charging his pipe, he picked a paperback from the gathering of novels underneath him and exhaled through his nose a puff of blue smoke that took the form of a young lady that dissipated after attempting to maintain his short-lived attention. The words trembled within their confines. A 'J' fainted.
He inhaled, he exhaled. A raven knocked on the outside.
"Hereinkommen,"
She opened the door, crossing the Rubicon. She smelt of nothing. Carrying in bottles of absent concoctions, she swam through. "Calcifur," She replied to an unworded question. Nodding his head in acknowledgement, he offered an empty palm and she offered an empty bottle. However, it wasn't as empty as one would have expected. The book dived in as soon as it was released from his grasp. Uncorking it with a bottle opener, he grabbed a white wisp that attempted to fly out the small window above their heads. After tightening his fist, he slowly peeled away his fingers. She covered her mouth. On his palm, he revealed an inky black mouth that after consuming the tendril, released a burp and disappeared. In its place, a faint mark drew itself.
"Solomon's pentacle," he murmured, appreciating the detail from a nearer perspective "and an impressive one at that" "This isn't right," She chided in acrolect. Offering his hand to Ptolemy, an albino monkey wrapped around his neck, he responded. "It'll be alright," Ptolemy, who was aroused from his reverie, plucked the pipe from between his teeth; placing it between his own, and hauled the rabbit resting on the boy's head into the swarm of agitated paperbacks. Climbing on to his thick unruly mane of hair, a shade less or more the color of night, Ptolemy examined the palm.
"It will be alright, but you won't"
Entertaining an itch that resided on his shoulder blades, he shrugged and allowed himself to become bored.
He inhaled deeply. "Clemency, I demand clemency," The words stumbled out of the man's throat like bile.
A brow was raised and a small smile took comfort where comfort should not be taken "Oh, be a little more amusing" the boy retorted "Here, hold." Handing his cigarette to the other man, he pulled out a suitcase. The content of the box with a leathered handle was a question that was provided an answer when a top hat with drunken stature materialized from the depths of the question. "A hat," the other man noticed, sounding a little disappointed. "Very observant," he nodded, straightening its posture "It is a hat, irrefutably." Grinning with saccharinity, he continued in a sepulchral tone. "Here's a riddle, my good man, what does a hat do for its hatter?"
¯
the brougham was hauled passed the municipality’s postern by a brace of mechanical mules manifested of gears and iron; fixed at the sides as permanent substitutes for disc-shaped spheres. The machinist, a lean starveling of a man, remained stubbornly reticent and wordless like the night that evening during the entire course of their excursion, unobtrusively rotating the winch-wheel; and with the itinerant’s futile attempts of stimulating a polite colloquy disregarded with such impressive resolution like a pestering pet and its obstinate master, the desire to sleep had magnificently overcome him when the acumen that his internal organs would grind to a halt for a lack of stimulation unraveled itself. Nevertheless, the paperback, supported on his lap by slender fingers attached to a self-regulating hand, persisted to turn the pages. […] The vehicle paused and so did its contents.
A bitter squall of wind carrying a heinous omen was conveyed from the far north through the gaping window, interposing the hand's exertion by precipitously flipping the pages over in contrary.
Increasing in altitude, it secured the mortise lock and averted the wind from intervening. Bartolomeo, aroused from his kip, blindly plucked a tendril from the air between an index and thumb and held it there. The specimen slithered and writhed, it thinned and widened then thinned again.
After raising Bartolomeo’s hat away from his eye, and tightening his coat, the hand nodded in approbation to Bartolomeo’s quiet acknowledgement and receded into the cane after he tapped it twice against the base of the carriage. The door before him had fallen open and cascaded into a short flight of steps [before] Bartolomeo could ingest the slithering wisp. He sighed as his snack disintegrated into lesser, edible fragments.
Outside, the evening seemed ill and even darker and cheerless. Pulling a luggage that was longer than it was wide from beneath him; he then charged his pipe and carelessly leaned through the opening in the brougham with a hand gripping the doorpost for support. A boat sat under congealed frost that lay ten inches in a hard, asphaltic pavement. Its mechanist was in a most miserable plight; bitten by the acrimony of the cold without clemency and the color of death hung above him like a rainless cloud. The boy inhaled deeply, looked with a brooding stare then exhaled blue fumes that wrapped around his neck like coiling pythons.
"He looks a little pale," Bartolomeo commented amiably, as if the choleric complexion of the man was a subject of levity.
"I ken, 'e's very much a dead lad," the machinist retorted. Bartolomeo struggled not to be surprised or unimpressed. The machinist who went by the Russian name Kert Vomkav had the intonation of a frequent habitant of the London gallows. His silence had been rather considering than recalcitrant, Bartolomeo supposed briefly then inhaled again.
¯
Merriment was apparent. It impelled a quiver in the core of her substance. She thought belligerently about the despicable little children and their ingenuous diversions. I will wolf his soul; she insisted feverishly, his ageless succulent soul. Her abdomen groaned in lust and void.
‘Such infamy,’ the little rabbit droned provokingly, scraping his ear with his foot ‘You let him slip through your fingers,’
‘Be quiet, you daft hare’ returned Cyrus, contemptuous towards the stubbly fair fuzz that dominated her home. She shifted in the direction of a nude wall, summoning a window.
Creasing his shell pink nose objectionably as he capered in refined advancement from his haven in the shadows of the uppermost ledge bearing jars that contained nauseating constituents to the desk situated at the heart of the chamber she condemned herself to. The spherical fur accosted her from behind ‘I’ve been lenient with your futility, Cyrus, and I know that you know that I know that you’re very well aware that I am a rabbit, presently,’ Drawing back his snot with a savage sniff in negligence to her repulsion, ‘Very boorish on your part,’ he sobbed in amplification. During the course of his pretentious blubbering for courtesy, she observed the pair prancing in a barrel of riots, generating significant amount of commotion, near the forest of walking carcasses. Digging her emaciated pincers into her palms, his soul is mine, she declared tersely; the concept had been ingrained into her mind before she could dissect it for ramifications. In alacrity, she crafted a fool-proof scheme. ‘Rabbit, fetch those demons,’ Cyrus ordered above her shoulder ‘They wander into the copse.’
‘You ridicule me, as your conscience I have the-’
Spinning to fix the fluffy ball‘s countenance with a disdainful scowl and rheumy-blue eyes that beheld under dark brows the termagency of an irritable mother, she dismissively dispersed the window into tiny motes of particles ‘As my conscience, you obey without query’ Leaning towards the rabbit, with her claws pattering on the work surface ‘Unless, you doubt my authority?’ A thick taciturnity was established between both girl and beast. The impoverished mantel pieces fixed on all four walls began to quaver; he intently scrutinized her in response. Apprehending his tranquility as compliance to her law, she disrupted the silence that heavily blanketed the room with a sob ‘I’m peckish, detain those urchins, and I won't propose your Relegation’
The rabbit lowered his conceit and his fleecy head. ‘I do not question your conviction, but I do hesitate on your lack of perception,’
Igniting a cigarette, she added ‘Oh and do feel free to alter your manifestation into something more life-threatening, those deceased psyches will coo rather than cry at your expense’
‘Gee, how I appreciate your humbling concern,’ this sarcastic rejoinder culminated their tête-à-tête. The outline of an acerbic cottontail perceived from the soil was what she saw depart as she exhaled a cloud of burning fumes, but a grave man with armaments for limbs, adorned in an entire white costume left the grounds and proceeded towards the copse. Hovering in the breeze behind him was his hair as ashen as snow.
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Sanguine beasts of filth. Consumed in darkness, bathed in sin. Grinding the bone, and tearing the skin of brothers with honed tusks like emaciated animals. Troubling our essence to enrage and terrify the souls that live amongst us, in unmindful existence.
Demon.
Evil spirit.
And even, the occasional misconception, monster.
A disparagement for most. A quirk for the less humorous.
An entirely false actuality. In fact, amidst a reunion in which we, in feign civility, attempt not to slay and consume each other’s essences for understandable domestic causes with kitchen cleavers; We position ourselves at a stretched dining table and share lovely conversations over a steaming dish of ‘normal’ food.
So when the flaxen-haired wench uncurled from her shell that seeped of thorough resentment, her tongue too uncurled and he reveled in the sheer force of her disposition. "Savage," she spat
He heard that word embedded in every dialogue he had committed to that he rendered it a not to clever rejoinder. But when it rolled off her tongue, he was insulted. However briefly. But it was well-deserved, being caked in her {most likely her} brother's blood and all. Albeit, it wouldn't rob her of her paragon of saintliness if she coupled the noun with a comely adjective. Beautiful being of his liking. He was, after all, a beautiful savage if he was to be a savage.
"Let's prod and poke at my peccadilloes some other time, darling," He didn't mean for the endearment to further her sentiment. Her face embraced the acrimony inside the clumsy drumming of her heart. He charitably conjectured gastric pains and would have openly suggested divine aid from the gods if the tears plummeting like suicides had not nearly made him swallow his own tongue.
"Oh God, don't tell me your crying" He squinted through the curtain of hair that draped over her visage so impeccably well he wondered if she could adorn a scruffy beard "deliberately,"
She grunted and rubbed gruffly at her cheeks before incinerating his insides with her eyes. It appeared to be a quintessentially female motion, if not her own.
"Come here," He coaxed with open arms. She stood her ground and her potpourri of acidic emotions made way for bewilderment. "Are you ma-" Muffled by this ridiculous man's chest, she felt the intimidating mass of his head on hers. "If it makes you feel any better," Resting his chin on her head, he cooed "I don't think this man's your brother," She decidedly froze.
Mathius held her at arm's length with one hand gripping her shoulder and in the other, she dreaded, was her grandfather's dagger plucked easily from behind her. He then had the gall to wink at her and turn on his heel with such atrocious male solidarity while pocketing her confidences and her only means of self-defense besides the tongue she bore, that the desire to malign him justly gave her an itch. She, however, was mute.
"The offer for my companionship still stands," Mathius gathered the lithe body with ease "And I mean that euphemistically," He laughed briefly
Her narrow, stubborn chin jutted out at an obstinate angle "You are perfectly Byronic, my heart sighs,"
Mathius grinned boyishly at the insincerity or perhaps it was a habit of intonation. "An interesting ambush of a compliment, love"
She inhaled sharply "My parent's gave me a name and damn you, if you don't use it,"
"Charmed," He mocked contritely "And what is this name by which I may call you, my fair maiden?"
"Madeline Anne," fell out of her mouth dismissively as though she were accustomed to saying the name, and then watch with bored eyes as everyone dislocate their spines in low bows of obeisance. He made no such move.
"Madeline," He tried it out and weighed it in his mind "Maddy,"
"You will not subject me to your outlandish sweet nothings," Madeline fretted in abhorrence to the nostalgia associated with the name "Yes, Mother," came his reply. She entertained the gory nautical punishments that rooted itself into her mind. She was, after all, equally savage.
- Micah/10G2/November 2013
Ptolemy pulled out a folded foolscap tucked in her boot and scratched out four lines with a quick flourish and scribbled 'Nathaniel' underneath a list of thirteen other faceless names. Returning it, she sat in reticent deference like a Turk and paid no heed to the scruples her embittered governess struggled belligerently with to create a more syrupy disposition for her in order to exonerate the hoydenish lady's eccentricity and compliance for discourses that beckoned her acid wit to unearth itself in the company of Polite Society. Ptolemy sniveled indignantly at the indefinite recollection and provided her askance perusal to the visual rendering of her self sitting stoically with her hands folded on her lap while solely consigning herself to gape ahead like a demure and vapid girl. Her callers proclaimed exuberantly when they beheld the portrait with lifted brows and pleasantly mirthful sentiment printed on their countenances that she was a rather fine creature. Ptolemy would thereby scowl with ingenuous discontentment after almost garroting on her chagrin. Antelopes, Ptolemy would suppose, were fine creatures themselves. Therefore, if she too was such an exquisitely pretty being like an Antelope, she should, inter alia, have her head jutting out of a bronzed frame too. The artist's depiction of the chit was a mere affectation on his part, she was neither tantamount to docile or reclaimed. It was pure sinful for him to fabricate such a mockery, such a wily and artful subterfuge. Ptolemy, as she often would, recalled her nonsensical assumptions on her internal organs, apprehensive that the lack of stimulation would grind them to a halt. She was much too proficient at the arraignment of the ton and their unfeasible activities. Cradling the senescent music box in her palm, she fished for its counterpart enclosed in an inherited compass. A damned ignominy, she mused. However, she adamantly refused to shirk her duty.
In a broken series of successful gestures, Ptolemy retrieved the key from the bedlam of the shattered compass having formerly served its singular purpose as its needle and wedged it within the slot at the substructure of the reticent box. She pried the lid open, nearly prostrate with the trepidation of the forthcoming disclosure, a leak in the clandestine lives of her ancestors. Ptolemy, her complexion fading a degree paler than choleric, her insides quivering like aspic, azure eyes glinting like lonesome stars in the vast ocean of evening sky, glittery with her refusal to bat an eyelid, made the sheet of hard-pressed paper that slipped through a slit with a rapidity that would have made the Pope lament with irritation her focal point. It descended to her palm with the sort of refined grace her governess would have praised. The rhapsodic tune expired like the final wisps of the passivity she had preserved for the circumstance. She, now, was not dithering on the clever acumen that she ought to cease caviling over insignificant facets. It was merely her affairs now.
After tightening her fist, she slowly peeled her fingers away. "Solomon's pentacle," she murmured pensively, observing the paper disintegrate itself. The black inscription staining itself onto her palm.
She was blessedly oblivious to the portent as she shed her obsequious awe for the convoluted details.
Ptolemy was a wild, unruly lass who had more masculinity than the man himself and kept in her possession like a historian and his relics more than a few trifling foibles. Her impiety, nevertheless, had not assisted in her inadvertent collaboration for her own mortal demise.
Ptolemy heard the soft click of the pistol and instantaneously arose but it had been discharged. The smell of gunfire swallowed the aroma of Nathaniel. She swiveled on her heels shakily, sanguinolent and irate and slightly asphyxiated. He was completely inured to her ferocious scowls, however, so he stood there, the gun cocked in her general direction. "Nathaniel," His name was wrapped in warning tones of direst approbation, her eyebrows positively levitating with ire.
"Don't make me shoot you again, Ptolemy," he drawled, amber eyes hinged with favorable inclination for his words. In an uncharacteristic lapse of her normal hauteur, Ptolemy exhaled resignedly. Nathaniel squinted at her, feeling the noose of death tighten inexorably around his neck.
"Hand over the last clue, Lemy," He jiggled the propped up firearm for emphasis "Hand it over,"
Ptolemy shivered in passionate repugnance to the nostalgia manacled to the endearment, black bile in lieu of her acrimony and displeasure climbed out of her throat. She stared at her him. "The Wilde Hunt isn't a diversion for bluebloods," Ptolemy growled, only moderately infuriated "It's a race, a mad pursuit for the even madder Hatter. Did you actually assume that I would simply offer you the conclusive inkling of our scandalous uncle's whereabouts? You must be as harebrained as he is,"
Nathaniel grunted, the hand gripping the pistol twitched. "Nathaniel," she tried again, less glorified by an intonation of melancholy "The others consider him game, a gratifying sport. They'll surely send him to the gallows or worse, to the Reaper," He remained impassive, a boy chiseled from stone, with a heart of similar substance.
Ptolemy sighed, swallowing against the painful knot congealing in her throat. Acquiring the smooth veneer of bored sophistication, she called out to his lost conscious
"Then you have left me no choice for my better judgment, good-bye Niel" In a thick cloud of smoldering temperature and heavy density, he had lost his little sister.
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When Cristofer crept into the dimly-lit room, he had no specific ploy in mind but however he did entertain an indefinite notion constituted of causing distraught and ruffling the feathers of the dignified tenants of the Manor. Something, after all, was going to stir them up and abandon them with the sentiment of unease. He wanted to be the instigator of the inevitable. Cristofer coolly sauntered across the room with the air of a giant cat approaching prey; nonetheless, his rheumy-blue eyes maintained a glint of mischievous conduct that disturbed his otherwise tranquil nature and wit. This is what made him irresistible, charming and fairly tolerable. Justine, a fellow dweller, had exasperatedly claimed that he was far too good-looking and that being anything but disagreeable with him was trivial effort. So she sought to be an absolute wench.
The dark-haired boy with the bright eyes ran a finger on the writing-desk and raised it to his mouth "Dark amber," he tasted "From an old, ancient tree situated at the infernal heart of The Copse, carved by Austin Milford. A great duke who died of depression when his unrequited love who was absolutely mad, Yves, threw herself off a bridge,"
"I did not die of depression, one needs a heart for such a tremendous feeling," Austin commented "I was simply enchanted by Silas," He glanced briefly at the tall, fair fellow with the enigmatic expression clinking test tubes with concoctions together. Silas selected a pen decisively from the collection stabbed in his mollified but otherwise fascinatingly colorless hair; the young man, oblivious and absorbed in his inane habit of pursuing the unknown, licked his puce lips and wrote in deep concentration and in furrowed eyebrows on foolscap. With an amused expression, Milford returned to spying through the bronze telescope.
Cristofer sipped the decanter and immediately dropped it back on the tray with a wince for its palate. It was only here that the girl made herself known.
"The Lord will not favor you for such a heinous act,"
The boy gazed nonchalantly at the top shelf of an impressive book case stacked haphazardly with the literature of the tongueless and located the girl with his eyes. She was merely a chiaroscuro sketch in the dark but he could smell the scent of dead flowers wafting through the air and something distinctly sweeter.
"For quenching my thirst?" he made his way around the desk and smoothed a crumpled page of a book. It shook.
"With his drink," she retorted and suddenly leaped off the ledge and hung precariously upside down from the chandelier, fixing him with dark eyes. "What business does the demon lord have in such a modest home?"
He grinned, disembodied from his situation, weighing the journal in his hands and barely refrained from snorting at her words. Demon Lord? He was distantly amused, however true, but 'Modest' did not humble the impressive girth of the building. It was immensely large which was what had drawn him to it, for large homes had larger secrets wedged in-between. And he was merely a plumber of sorts believing in his quiet destiny that he would unclog the sewers of its messy tales and fix the broken pipe dreams. It was all very funny, indeed.
He ignored her "The Master has been dead for a hefty year," Cristofer noted the fading smell of the man who expired unfairly young. The once renowned portrait of Bartolomeo that used to cling over the mantle piece leaned in desolation on the wall. Cristofer observed the even color of its paint.
The girl fluidly dropped onto her feet and skipped towards the empty frame of the clock, humming to herself a nursery tune. "Yeah," she sung casually over her shoulder, her fingers absently picked the petal of a flower as she sat near the feet of the clock. Cristofer lit a cigar and pondered quietly "Madame Flume is upon us," the girl commented before sinking into the clock, her statement was confirmed when Cristofer heard the soft click of a pistol above his head, the pounding feet and the odor of another unwanted presence intruding his domain. "Good evening, Madame Flume," Cristofer murmured, a gentle lilt to his head.
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He had woken up from a sleepless dream, floating in a sea of books. Charging his pipe, he picked a paperback from the gathering of novels underneath him and exhaled through his nose a puff of blue smoke that took the form of a young lady that dissipated after attempting to maintain his short-lived attention. The words trembled within their confines. A 'J' fainted.
He inhaled, he exhaled. A raven knocked on the outside.
"Hereinkommen,"
She opened the door, crossing the Rubicon. She smelt of nothing. Carrying in bottles of absent concoctions, she swam through. "Calcifur," She replied to an unworded question. Nodding his head in acknowledgement, he offered an empty palm and she offered an empty bottle. However, it wasn't as empty as one would have expected. The book dived in as soon as it was released from his grasp. Uncorking it with a bottle opener, he grabbed a white wisp that attempted to fly out the small window above their heads. After tightening his fist, he slowly peeled away his fingers. She covered her mouth. On his palm, he revealed an inky black mouth that after consuming the tendril, released a burp and disappeared. In its place, a faint mark drew itself.
"Solomon's pentacle," he murmured, appreciating the detail from a nearer perspective "and an impressive one at that" "This isn't right," She chided in acrolect. Offering his hand to Ptolemy, an albino monkey wrapped around his neck, he responded. "It'll be alright," Ptolemy, who was aroused from his reverie, plucked the pipe from between his teeth; placing it between his own, and hauled the rabbit resting on the boy's head into the swarm of agitated paperbacks. Climbing on to his thick unruly mane of hair, a shade less or more the color of night, Ptolemy examined the palm.
"It will be alright, but you won't"
Entertaining an itch that resided on his shoulder blades, he shrugged and allowed himself to become bored.
He inhaled deeply. "Clemency, I demand clemency," The words stumbled out of the man's throat like bile.
A brow was raised and a small smile took comfort where comfort should not be taken "Oh, be a little more amusing" the boy retorted "Here, hold." Handing his cigarette to the other man, he pulled out a suitcase. The content of the box with a leathered handle was a question that was provided an answer when a top hat with drunken stature materialized from the depths of the question. "A hat," the other man noticed, sounding a little disappointed. "Very observant," he nodded, straightening its posture "It is a hat, irrefutably." Grinning with saccharinity, he continued in a sepulchral tone. "Here's a riddle, my good man, what does a hat do for its hatter?"
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the brougham was hauled passed the municipality’s postern by a brace of mechanical mules manifested of gears and iron; fixed at the sides as permanent substitutes for disc-shaped spheres. The machinist, a lean starveling of a man, remained stubbornly reticent and wordless like the night that evening during the entire course of their excursion, unobtrusively rotating the winch-wheel; and with the itinerant’s futile attempts of stimulating a polite colloquy disregarded with such impressive resolution like a pestering pet and its obstinate master, the desire to sleep had magnificently overcome him when the acumen that his internal organs would grind to a halt for a lack of stimulation unraveled itself. Nevertheless, the paperback, supported on his lap by slender fingers attached to a self-regulating hand, persisted to turn the pages. […] The vehicle paused and so did its contents.
A bitter squall of wind carrying a heinous omen was conveyed from the far north through the gaping window, interposing the hand's exertion by precipitously flipping the pages over in contrary.
Increasing in altitude, it secured the mortise lock and averted the wind from intervening. Bartolomeo, aroused from his kip, blindly plucked a tendril from the air between an index and thumb and held it there. The specimen slithered and writhed, it thinned and widened then thinned again.
After raising Bartolomeo’s hat away from his eye, and tightening his coat, the hand nodded in approbation to Bartolomeo’s quiet acknowledgement and receded into the cane after he tapped it twice against the base of the carriage. The door before him had fallen open and cascaded into a short flight of steps [before] Bartolomeo could ingest the slithering wisp. He sighed as his snack disintegrated into lesser, edible fragments.
Outside, the evening seemed ill and even darker and cheerless. Pulling a luggage that was longer than it was wide from beneath him; he then charged his pipe and carelessly leaned through the opening in the brougham with a hand gripping the doorpost for support. A boat sat under congealed frost that lay ten inches in a hard, asphaltic pavement. Its mechanist was in a most miserable plight; bitten by the acrimony of the cold without clemency and the color of death hung above him like a rainless cloud. The boy inhaled deeply, looked with a brooding stare then exhaled blue fumes that wrapped around his neck like coiling pythons.
"He looks a little pale," Bartolomeo commented amiably, as if the choleric complexion of the man was a subject of levity.
"I ken, 'e's very much a dead lad," the machinist retorted. Bartolomeo struggled not to be surprised or unimpressed. The machinist who went by the Russian name Kert Vomkav had the intonation of a frequent habitant of the London gallows. His silence had been rather considering than recalcitrant, Bartolomeo supposed briefly then inhaled again.
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Merriment was apparent. It impelled a quiver in the core of her substance. She thought belligerently about the despicable little children and their ingenuous diversions. I will wolf his soul; she insisted feverishly, his ageless succulent soul. Her abdomen groaned in lust and void.
‘Such infamy,’ the little rabbit droned provokingly, scraping his ear with his foot ‘You let him slip through your fingers,’
‘Be quiet, you daft hare’ returned Cyrus, contemptuous towards the stubbly fair fuzz that dominated her home. She shifted in the direction of a nude wall, summoning a window.
Creasing his shell pink nose objectionably as he capered in refined advancement from his haven in the shadows of the uppermost ledge bearing jars that contained nauseating constituents to the desk situated at the heart of the chamber she condemned herself to. The spherical fur accosted her from behind ‘I’ve been lenient with your futility, Cyrus, and I know that you know that I know that you’re very well aware that I am a rabbit, presently,’ Drawing back his snot with a savage sniff in negligence to her repulsion, ‘Very boorish on your part,’ he sobbed in amplification. During the course of his pretentious blubbering for courtesy, she observed the pair prancing in a barrel of riots, generating significant amount of commotion, near the forest of walking carcasses. Digging her emaciated pincers into her palms, his soul is mine, she declared tersely; the concept had been ingrained into her mind before she could dissect it for ramifications. In alacrity, she crafted a fool-proof scheme. ‘Rabbit, fetch those demons,’ Cyrus ordered above her shoulder ‘They wander into the copse.’
‘You ridicule me, as your conscience I have the-’
Spinning to fix the fluffy ball‘s countenance with a disdainful scowl and rheumy-blue eyes that beheld under dark brows the termagency of an irritable mother, she dismissively dispersed the window into tiny motes of particles ‘As my conscience, you obey without query’ Leaning towards the rabbit, with her claws pattering on the work surface ‘Unless, you doubt my authority?’ A thick taciturnity was established between both girl and beast. The impoverished mantel pieces fixed on all four walls began to quaver; he intently scrutinized her in response. Apprehending his tranquility as compliance to her law, she disrupted the silence that heavily blanketed the room with a sob ‘I’m peckish, detain those urchins, and I won't propose your Relegation’
The rabbit lowered his conceit and his fleecy head. ‘I do not question your conviction, but I do hesitate on your lack of perception,’
Igniting a cigarette, she added ‘Oh and do feel free to alter your manifestation into something more life-threatening, those deceased psyches will coo rather than cry at your expense’
‘Gee, how I appreciate your humbling concern,’ this sarcastic rejoinder culminated their tête-à-tête. The outline of an acerbic cottontail perceived from the soil was what she saw depart as she exhaled a cloud of burning fumes, but a grave man with armaments for limbs, adorned in an entire white costume left the grounds and proceeded towards the copse. Hovering in the breeze behind him was his hair as ashen as snow.
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Sanguine beasts of filth. Consumed in darkness, bathed in sin. Grinding the bone, and tearing the skin of brothers with honed tusks like emaciated animals. Troubling our essence to enrage and terrify the souls that live amongst us, in unmindful existence.
Demon.
Evil spirit.
And even, the occasional misconception, monster.
A disparagement for most. A quirk for the less humorous.
An entirely false actuality. In fact, amidst a reunion in which we, in feign civility, attempt not to slay and consume each other’s essences for understandable domestic causes with kitchen cleavers; We position ourselves at a stretched dining table and share lovely conversations over a steaming dish of ‘normal’ food.
So when the flaxen-haired wench uncurled from her shell that seeped of thorough resentment, her tongue too uncurled and he reveled in the sheer force of her disposition. "Savage," she spat
He heard that word embedded in every dialogue he had committed to that he rendered it a not to clever rejoinder. But when it rolled off her tongue, he was insulted. However briefly. But it was well-deserved, being caked in her {most likely her} brother's blood and all. Albeit, it wouldn't rob her of her paragon of saintliness if she coupled the noun with a comely adjective. Beautiful being of his liking. He was, after all, a beautiful savage if he was to be a savage.
"Let's prod and poke at my peccadilloes some other time, darling," He didn't mean for the endearment to further her sentiment. Her face embraced the acrimony inside the clumsy drumming of her heart. He charitably conjectured gastric pains and would have openly suggested divine aid from the gods if the tears plummeting like suicides had not nearly made him swallow his own tongue.
"Oh God, don't tell me your crying" He squinted through the curtain of hair that draped over her visage so impeccably well he wondered if she could adorn a scruffy beard "deliberately,"
She grunted and rubbed gruffly at her cheeks before incinerating his insides with her eyes. It appeared to be a quintessentially female motion, if not her own.
"Come here," He coaxed with open arms. She stood her ground and her potpourri of acidic emotions made way for bewilderment. "Are you ma-" Muffled by this ridiculous man's chest, she felt the intimidating mass of his head on hers. "If it makes you feel any better," Resting his chin on her head, he cooed "I don't think this man's your brother," She decidedly froze.
Mathius held her at arm's length with one hand gripping her shoulder and in the other, she dreaded, was her grandfather's dagger plucked easily from behind her. He then had the gall to wink at her and turn on his heel with such atrocious male solidarity while pocketing her confidences and her only means of self-defense besides the tongue she bore, that the desire to malign him justly gave her an itch. She, however, was mute.
"The offer for my companionship still stands," Mathius gathered the lithe body with ease "And I mean that euphemistically," He laughed briefly
Her narrow, stubborn chin jutted out at an obstinate angle "You are perfectly Byronic, my heart sighs,"
Mathius grinned boyishly at the insincerity or perhaps it was a habit of intonation. "An interesting ambush of a compliment, love"
She inhaled sharply "My parent's gave me a name and damn you, if you don't use it,"
"Charmed," He mocked contritely "And what is this name by which I may call you, my fair maiden?"
"Madeline Anne," fell out of her mouth dismissively as though she were accustomed to saying the name, and then watch with bored eyes as everyone dislocate their spines in low bows of obeisance. He made no such move.
"Madeline," He tried it out and weighed it in his mind "Maddy,"
"You will not subject me to your outlandish sweet nothings," Madeline fretted in abhorrence to the nostalgia associated with the name "Yes, Mother," came his reply. She entertained the gory nautical punishments that rooted itself into her mind. She was, after all, equally savage.
- Micah/10G2/November 2013