Do not own.
"This dress is too tight."
"Looks a little tight. Those flowers look dead."
"They are dead."
"I thought so."
This was the sum of what was said between Nikko and Kaelani their entire first morning together. Kaelani had been shoved into a floor-length blue gown with a red sash and small white stripes. Her hair was still in the customary braid, but was now woven through with white ribbons.
She wasn't a big fan of white.
Nikko, for his part, was genuinely trying to make conversation, but the inner mechanisms of his mind worked a bit like this: Should I mention the weather? Would I sound stupid? If I didn't would she even care about the weather? Of course she would care; she's spent her entire life on a boat. But what if she knows more about the weather than I do? Then I'd look stupid.
As it turns out, Kaelani didn't care about the weather. Instead, she was focused on breathing deeply, bringing the scent of the open air to her nose and lungs. But breathing was awfully hard to do in her dress. So, she began to imagine the open seas, right before a storm, when the air itself is as clear as Corsican glass. It wasn't working, and she considered ducking out of the palace for a few hours, when they reached the garden.
A high-walled splendor, the royal garden was designed to look like a jungle, with thick green vines weaving out among tropical flowers and tinting the light that fell from the sky a delicious pale green.
"Amazing." Lani whispered, and wished for her sketchbook.
"Yes, it is, isn't it?" Nikko said, hands behind his back, pleased to find a subject well suited for him. "It was built a few years ago by my mother, Lady Katherine, of Damascus. She had flowers imported from all of the twelve kingdoms, and the trees," Was it Lani's imagination, or did Nikko sound excited? "The trees were almost wiped out in their homeland, and every single one here was grown by just one seed."
"Wow." Lani said, and found a stone bench to sit on among the foliage. Nikko hesitated before sitting beside her.
"Don't say it." Kaelani said quickly, her eyes still painting the fall of light through the trees to her right- right over Nikko's head.
"What?" was all that he could manage to say as Kaelani stood back up, backing away to try and get more of Nikko in her mind-sketch. The light played off of his cheekbones and jaw wonderfully, glowing against his skin and filtering through his hair... It would only take her a few minutes to run to her room… her fingers were itching for a pen or a brush to hold. She turned to run down the hall, but Nikko caught her arm.
"Kaelani- I'm sorry for how I treated you. I was a jerk," he apologized, either completely sincere or the best liar Lani had heard in ages.
Her response was something that sounded suspiciously like "understatement".
Nikko raised a pale eyebrow at this. "Okay, then. I was a complete…"
Lani's jaw dropped at how easily the obscenities dropped off his tongue. A few were new even to her pirated mind. It took him two whole minutes to finish. When he was done, he let her arm go. "Happy?" he asked simply, hands stowed behind his back to hide the way he was crossing his fingers for luck.
Lani burst out laughing.
"Although in my defense you did ruin my new shipment of plants," he said lightly. It was only by the twinkle in his eyes that showed how he was making a joke that stopped Kaelani from being overwhelmed with guilt for the small paper packages he had been carrying when they met.
"Well," she said, returning the tone, "I could go steal some more. Because, you know. Pirate." She clarified, and he tilted his head back and laughed up to the heavens.
Lani thought it was a nice sound.
The sum of their entire first afternoon together was far too large and filled with complicated acting and impolite swearing to be included here, but Carrion heard every bit of it in his empty prison.
His council of emotions was stored away in their mirrored box, and his hand held mirror was once again floating before him, eerily reflecting at him his sharply beautiful face. He tilted his chin to one side, considering, and felt the bones slide and shift beneath flesh, reimaging him into a young boy with a long blonde braid.
Only his eyes remained the same, a dark, blood red with a white pupil. Breathing gently on the surface of the glass, fog enveloped his face, and he began drawing in the space. Soon, he had envisioned a large tiger with a snake for a tail.
"Go, my creature; bring me their heads," he purred, and waited for the animal to lope off into the confines of the mirror before putting his nails into where his hairline met his envisioned face. He dug in gently, and a brand-new mask popped off, hung on the nothing wall beside the faces of countless others.
They all watched him with empty eyes, and he stared back.
Proteus and Sinbad were walking along the open, upper-level hallways of the palace when Sinbad suddenly stopped, looking down at the gardens below, where his daughter and Nikko were sitting on a bench together.
"Well, well, well…" he chuckled and turned to his best friend. "Looks like we might just be in-laws."
Proteus rolled his eyes, knowing painfully well that a childhood crush never turned into much. Unless you were Sinbad, who was now leaning forward even more, a smile on his lips as Kaelani stood up, quickly followed by Nikko.
"Sinbad…" Proteus caught his friend's arm, pulling him around to face him. "Why are you here?"
The pirate looked away. "We… found something," he said delicately, rubbing one hand across the back of his neck.
Proteus gave him a look.
"Granted, we may have been finding hordes of gold belonging to other people at the time…"
"Sinbad."
He sighed, before looking at his best friend straight-on. "A box," he said. "A closed, mirrored box, unlike anything I've ever seen. It can't be any bigger than—" he held up his hands roughly ten inches across and only five inches tall, "But it weighs like there's… something inside of it. We measured it when we made a stop on the Ivory Coasts, and Proteus, it's heavier than lead. Heavier than anything that could possibly be inside of it. I think…" he trailed off doubtfully.
"You think Eris is involved," Proteus finished for him.
Sinbad shrugged. "If anything, it's her."
The Goddess of Chaos had not been heard from since Sinbad had outsmarted her, nearly seventeen years prior. The people still gave her offerings at her temple, more out of fear than anything, but no one had ever reported her mischief within the Seven Kingdoms. It was as if she had simply disappeared into the darkness that surrounded her.
"You want my people to take a look at it?" Proteus guessed again, lightly, hands diplomatically behind his back.
"No!" Sinbad shouted before pausing to check that Lani and Nikko, below, hadn't heard. The two teens had vanished, back into the palace.
Lowering his voice, he continued, "This is something beyond your 'people,' Proteus. I want you to lock it away, far away. Can you do that for me?"
Proteus smiled, offering his hand. Sinbad took it, relief on his face. "Anything for you, old friend."
Elsewhere, a creature began to stir.
Garrett, a rather unfortunate guard, was making his rounds with his head bowed low, not meeting his fellow guards' eyes. It wasn't known to anyone beyond the turnkey that he had been locked up, but he had the feeling in his gut that if he did look to someone for more than a moment they would be able to read his mind and somehow pull forth the painful memories of the day before. All because of that stupid pirate girl.
Garrett rounded one corner, sword balanced against his shoulder, to feel the pricking of the hairs on the back of his neck. He paused, breathing in and out quietly, ears straining for a sound that he knew he didn't want to hear.
Growling. In the shadows.
Looking around, Garrett saw another guard just turning the corner ahead of him, heading down another hallway. He was alone.
Swallowing loudly, he gathered his courage and stepped forward, sword at the read.
"Who's there?" he asked the darkness.
Echoing back, a voice said, "Who's there?"
Garrett's hands began to shake, and he gripped his sword tighter to hide it. "I'm not joking. Tell me who you are." He approached the shadowed area slowly.
"Tell me who you are," the voice replied, flat and almost feminine.
"Enough joking! Show yourself!"
"Show yourself…" a stirring in the shadows as whatever hid there obeyed his orders.
The guard who had just turned the corner turned and ran back at the sound of Garrett screaming. When he got there all he saw was the fast blur of fur and teeth as the beast ran on, leaving Garrett behind, an unconscious heap. As the one guard approached his fallen form, he awoke, and began to mumble.
"I saw them… I saw them…"
Terrified to the core of his being, the guard shouted for reinforcements.
The beast made its way through shadows, silently, whispering fragments of sentences through huge fanged teeth. Its tail, a hissing snake, flicked back and forth, stirring the languid afternoon air and gathering shadows around it to conceal it from the humans that rushed by and by and by…
It master told it to hunt. And so it hunted.
Review, please.