AN: This is a response to a challenge on the LJ Aurikku community: must include a rose, matches and a mirror, as well as one of a choice of songs. The title means "the most beautiful woman".
Praelata Puellis
There's the moon asking to stay
Long enough for the clouds to fly me away
Well it's my time coming, I'm not afraid to die
My fading voice sings of love,
But she cries to the clicking of time
Of time
The mirror tells no lies.
Rikku had aged with grace, but eventually - inevitably - she'd lost her young beauty. It had fallen in the sands behind her, shed like a snake's skin.
She'd always thought snakes were elegant. Fine creatures, they were, and the metaphor amused her. Webs of laughter lines shifted, a smile grew. Then, her bright eyes met her mirror-self's image, shadowed as it was by candles in the Sanubia dusk, and her face settled again. Composed, she watched herself.
Her lashes were long still, her eyes animated. Her fore-head was relatively free of the wrinkles that encroached on her mouth and eyes. Her eyes… they'd kept their beauty, maybe: intense and vibrant emerald still, swirled with the Al Bhed signature marks that danced in the irises when she laughed.
And laugh she did, but not as much as she used to.
Not as much as she once had, travelling on what was now called the Final Pilgrimage.
It hadn't been a happy journey, by any means, but looking back on her life… it had been when she had lived, her eyes sparkling (with tears; with love; with joy), her heart racing and her mind alert and thinking more than it had ever been before.
Her mind was still there, in a way. Eternally paused at that time. Part of her, the part that complemented him, had stayed: waiting; watching and never done with the memories.
She'd been so young. Coming back, she'd become so old. The pilgrimage had aged her, had worn her out and worn her in to the difficult, dangerous life that was a Spira robbed of authority and tradition. It had forced to confront the old and face the new simultaneously, made her resilient.
She didn't regret it. She'd felt alive then. She'd hoped. She'd wanted and needed and suffered and loved. More than she would when she returned to her home, far more than she would whenever else she travelled to look for what she felt or knew - in the depths of her heart - she'd lost.
Her eyes had kept their beauty, but now they twisted into a painful smile.
The mirror shows the truth, hard and clean and as it really is. The mantelpiece it hung above was oak and steady, and she rested her hands on it and leant slowly forward, forehead against the glass
You're not beautiful, but someone still loves you.
And she picked up the rose that rested beside her feathers and hairbrush and jewellery. She'd picked it visiting Bevelle. She'd not been able to leave it there. Now, she picked it up and held it to her face, curving the rich red petals across her lips and cheek, up to one eye, sensuously across the closed eyelid. Where she'd shut her eye the skin was aged - flaccid and sagging. The other - still open - eye saw it and was mercilessly angry, just for a second, at how old she'd gotten.
It was the right eye she'd shut. She couldn't help but notice that.
She'd loved a man who'd lost that eye. She'd loved him, a teenage crush accentuated against a backdrop of danger and love and loss.
And had he loved her? Clues hinted at affection, but the haunting memories were never clear: a look across a room, across a battlefield or open plain.
Intense looks and curt words, a strong hand holding her up.
His grudging decision to stop and rest in a thunder-filled land when she was incoherent with fear and rage, rain-soaked, bloodstained by fiends, numb.
What had there been, to fuel that attraction she felt? Nothing affectionate had ever cracked through his shell.
A memory, half-lost, of him? Ripped almost in half with magic, his intense look that she could see so plainly – even now, when he'd long since faded – and he smiled at a child, she so innocent in his world of loss and madness… She remembered, a clear-cut image that stood out in a dreary windswept childhood.
She opened her bright eyes. And somehow their perfection amongst a body gone to seed made sense. After all, they were still looking. The rose against the tanned skin. The white hair and the few blonde braids tied in to it. The candlelight that made the rose blood-coloured.
She was still looking for him, an enigmatic figure that dominated her childhood-teenaged memories. Her fascinated gaze could never break away, despite the young of her tribe who'd always vying so sincerely for her attention, back when she'd been the triumphant wanderer newly returned in glamour.
She had loved him.
Angry, suddenly. Why did I love him?
She couldn't move on even now, nothing would let her.
The figure in the mirror looked frozen for a second, green eyes looking ahead through pale lashes, face unsmiling, creased and worn but calm. That was a lie. She wasn't calm: she had no double chin and was not yet gaunt features, but there was a burning-up behind her surface that'd been there for years. A rose balanced in her hand almost effortlessly, her clever fingers resting along the stem amongst the thorns.
The head of the flower rested on her temple, and petals white for peace and beauty rested, brushed by long hair whitened by age.
Inside, her stomach twisted. The loneliness which had helped the obsession that had hovered over so much of her life was wrong. The moral confusion and the world's twisted mythology and all of the pieces of the past that had powered her girlish love, they were all wrong. She hated them. Once more, anger at it all rose, and she twisted with the violent emotion.
And the flower slashed down, still-clever hands turning it.
Hate laid the foundations, thorns carved a path.
A red line across her, and the path described matched him.
She turned from the mirror, the sudden burst subsiding, tides of sorrow rising up to crush back down the rage.
The rose fell to the floor, and she turned sinking to follow it. Her hand brushed down the wall from the mantelpiece, paused flat against the surface of it for balance.
On her knees, she breathed in deeply and at once felt calmer. She touched the blood that had run along the stem and she raised it to her lips, suddenly overcome by an almost pagan understanding of the love and pain these flowers symbolized.
An sense of ritual moved her. and her hand strayed up to that mantelpiece again, reaching confidently through the clutter to – there.
She blew out the candle, eyes closing to welcome the darkness.
She struck a match, and raised it, eyes opening again to the fire, mouth curving and body shifting.
Her other hand found the rose, a guided by a sense of old magic, old rites, and a petal came off, hand her lifted, eyes lit by flame, watching.
The petal, translucent in front of the light. Fire. She held the petal above the match, lit the petal and watched it curl up and turn black. She rose from her knees, lifted her arms.
Dropped the petal, and the orange edge of it flickered, curled, crisped, fell.
Touched the sand. The light went out.
The match burnt down, and she dropped that too.
Her foot flat down on the thin wood. Her bare feet, but they were callused and toughened, and it splintered against the floor without hurting her. It was weak and fragile.
And she breathed deep, and felt calm. She lit another light, another match.
The magic had gone now.
She looked in the mirror, face lit from below by the little flame-light. Sane.
The cut wasn't deep enough to scar.