Dreaming City

L--

Are we not already writing a story both rich and interesting? I wonder which of us is the hero and which is the pining bride, which confronts monsters and maelstroms and which endures slander and seduction.

Perhaps I would not feel so idle, so restless if I had some foul beast beyond my own ennui to fight...

Autumn is upon us already. Soon, the garden with be alight with fall's fiery hues once more. May that bright burning rekindle these ashes and stir up this dust, inspiring inferno in all comers again.

--O

Another one today. Young. Blonde. Mary. Marigold. Maribel. Maribeth. Meredith. Merry death. Ha! Once a reveller, now a revelation. Little sliver of insight twisting its way in, slipping around under my skin. I can't stop itching. It's her blood. My blood. That bastard inside me puffing up with pride at what his pupil can do on her own. Oh yes, on her own. He thinks himself my master, but see what I can do without his guidance? See what I have done?

The beast tamer always becomes like the beast. What can the beast learn from me but how to bend?

(Scribbled, illegible mess.)

I will not bend. I will not bend. I will not bend.

I only bend so that I don't break. I feel so... composed. Component. Pieces all in place, but pieces all the same. He's trying to push out. To creep out from inside me and push me down, chain me up, take my hurt away from me. No.

No.

My pain is my own. My body is my own. My mind is my own.

My kill, tonight, was my own.


I am involved with moral folk. I have a box in my possession. A bomb. When it explodes, it opens someone's life to me in ways my blade cannot. I am eager to give it back. I am itching to crack it open.

I can't stop itching.

Autumn is well on its way. The changing of the leaves will mark one year since I reopened the cabaret, and it saddens me greatly to see what little use I've made of it, dust and silence infesting its halls again as they had just last year. I did not realize how deeply Salih had affected me until just recently, until I finally took measure of how much time has passed. I think back to our first flirations, those conversations about how love can break someone, how just growing so near to a person can change who he or she is, irrevokably. Was it worth the risk, I wonder now. Was it worth this lost time, what silence and distance I have put between myself and my family, myself and my household?

Of course I can answer only yes. What was broken or lost will mend or fall away. What little taste I had of love will linger until my memory fails me. I would not trade it for anything, save, perhaps, to have our shared happiness restored. While I've pursued impossibility before, here, I will pass.

Now, it is time to survey my household, to see who still stirs in this haunted place despite how ghostly I've grown. Now, I tend my garden, pruning and weeding, watering and feeding. Salih is not all I have lost, I know. Vitaly has disappeared, leaving his own household behind some time ago; I wonder whatever happened to that girl... What was her name? Carina? No matter. I fear Austan, who had an odd hold on some small part of my heart, may be missing as well, though I very much hope he found that heavy handed man he so desired to keep him content.

While I shall keep my door open for those old friends and what others may have strayed in my absence, so too must I bring new life to this house. Must one wait for spring before the flowers bloom..?

I hate him. I must take time to remind myself of this. A few kind words and a show of tenderness does not a good man make. Must I enumerate all the times he has tortured and tormented me, hardly so that I may learn so much as to simply revel in my pain and submission?

Still... I feel some flutter of affection for that arrogant illythiiri that I just cannot shake. I keep playing over the other day in my head, how it seemed, regardless of the roughness, that he wanted me, specifically, and not simply some pliant hole to fill. He said that he would ask my Mistress for permission to breed me if not for how it might interfere with my studies. A full-blooded drow who has looked down upon me simply because of my mixed blood wishes me to have his child? I have tried to dismiss it as nonsense spewed in a rush of lust, but it is proving more difficult than I'd anticipated.

If every day he could express this balance of cruelty and kindness, I would be content to keep his company, but I know we will shortly resume our studies and he will show no mercy, no affection. In truth, I want none. At least not while we're training...

I find myself thinking of Kerrick far more often than I would like. He is gone, and I must accept that. He was given his freedom and made use of it. Swiftly. With neither goodbye nor remorse. What a fool I was to think myself any more than an idle occupation while he was trapped beneath my Mistress' thumb. Still, my heart stops when I see rustling in the bushes beyond the courtyard wall, anticipating that it might be his smart-assed cat announcing his return. Stupid. Stupid!

This desire for Ssz'afein is naught more than my hunger for the affection, attention, and approval I lost when that elf left. Nothing more.