"Every savage can dance." ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice


* This chapter contains M-Rated content only suitable for mature adults. May contain explicit language and adult themes. Read at your own discretion.


Étaín had learned to wield her body in a way that no blade could replicate at a very young age. As much as she'd like to lay claim to the frivolity of her gender, she hadn't been given that privilege and had learned the hard way that there were worse things to loose in life than her dignity. It wasn't a sin in her eyes, nor was it a transaction she was forced to preform out of necessity. It was an expectation, another pair of shoes to fill, another room, another bed, and she did it because it was the quickest route to a man's heart, quite literally. Many rooms came to mind, ones with beautiful faded tapestries, reddish panels, and some ormolu furniture, but all had served a purpose bigger than her own sense of propriety. In her eyes, she was married to the Brotherhood, heart, body, mind, and soul. It was another burden to bare, one she treated with the upmost fragility.

It was hard to explain to an outsider, one who hadn't been raised under that realization, but her body had been built under the pretence of weaponry, just like the blade within her bracer or the gun holstered to her hip. Everything she did in life was a feat in itself, a struggle to stay alive, to make it out on top, and she was willing to use the tools God had gifted her with to do so, even if it required a personal sacrifice. But she'd come to realize that it wasn't easy to draw blood during such intimate moments, when the men she'd been asked to assassinate had laid their souls bare before her, unknowingly laying their lives on the line.

She thought it a cruel way to be murdered, but her profession hadn't been made by men with gracious hearts. Everything she did was unforgiving. It wasn't hard to ensnare men unabashedly, sinking her blade into the soft flesh of the neck, watching the eyes fade in death even when she had thought herself beyond such sadism. Tone had been right of course. She was a monster to some degree, but had been made into one the way a rock erodes, layer by layer, revealing its insides as time slowly crawls ahead. It made her want to laugh, but what would have been the point to such an extravagance? She hadn't had a proper laugh in a long time. In some ways, she liked to think that capability had curled up and died, but even then she was surprised to find that some things tended to linger anyway, the same things she categorized under familiar smells and embarrassing memories.

And so Marta appeared, dancing across her imaginings like a ghostly spectre. Her jig hadn't changed in fifty years. Given any opportunity she would dance for a crowd, usually in front of the chickens or her father's great horse, her belly dancing along with her in its own independent way. Her legs were no longer in rhythm and her toes weren't really pointed, but she had a tendency to dance as if she were romancing a mysterious man. In reality, she'd be wrapped around a broomstick.

"Don't you go and romance young boys now, you hear, lassie?" she'd say, pointing her broom at her the way she'd often do under such circumstances, "they'll be wanting more than a kiss from you."

And she had been been right of course. But such words served no purpose, not when she had become the very thing Marta's conventional wisdom had warned against.

Now, upon entering Paris, she noticed was that there was a palpable misery there, engrained on the buildings and windows like a sheen of black soot. It had soaked into the dirtied streets and into the graffitied walls. It was in the back alleys where the few restaurants who persisted in trading had their garbage searched several times a day, and not just by the cats. It was etched in every gaunt face, and those faces had become more numerous with each passing year. Some slept in the streets rather than shelters, some clung to their holy books hoping for something better, and some were simply gone, their faces vacant and their stares as hollow as their empty stomachs. She hadn't seen such misery before and couldn't help but wonder whether this was what her father had wanted, a world made free from the tyranny of kings, a world where freedom faced consequences larger than what it had originally conspired against.

What had begun as a pursuit of freedom became an excuse to do whatever one wanted. Men and women wandered the streets like vagrant animals, streets that had been abuzz with the haggling of vendors and pedestrians before the revolution. Now they were war zones, residual reminders of violence plain to the eye. Blood had flowed freely from one lifeless body to the next within the span of a few years, and months after breathing in the air she would smell semen, sweat, and smoke with no source of either. Always she would check her nails for dirt. They had been ripped, broken, and damaged from attacking a man she had prevented from assaulting a woman.

That man had been about thirty, but in the harsher brightness of the day he was closer to thirty five. Behind the tangle of his beard she could tell that his lips were twitching upwards, an obvious attempt to handle the onslaught that had just bloodied his shirt and she commended him for it, especially since he seemed so intent on letting her know exactly how much he didn't regret his actions. It wasn't surprising because Étaín knew that he had consumed his fair share of alcohol, trying to drown his sorrows like the rest of the men she had noticed laughing boisterously around women just as debilitated and hopeless as they were. She thought it ridiculous, but she wouldn't stand for such debauchery, not when those women had a choice as to whether they'd rather throw their lives away instead of truly living.

"Let's be reasonable," she said in French, her words warbled and mispronounced, "I wouldn't act in such a way if I were you."

The laugh that slipped through his mouth was in his eyes, his face changing into a vision of relaxed joy and unrestrained mirth. She wondered what it would be like to watch that look slowly drain away, but he hadn't done anything to deserve such treatment, although she was sorely tempted to spill his blood on the floorboards anyway. How many men had tried to do what he had done? How many men had succeeded? It had become a common reality and she wondered whether it would ever end, these battles for dominance, these dances of control and susceptibility that tarried endlessly on and on.

"Or what? You'll bend over backwards for me?"

"Tame your tongue," she hissed, relishing the fear that clouded over those dark eyes, eyes that were the grey of the last ashes on a fire, "or you'll have no tongue at all."

"You have too much of a mouth on you," he said, wiping the edge of his mouth with his sleeve.

"Aye, but you're in no position to speak wholeheartedly now are you?"

"Says who?"

She kicked him in the groin and he cursed wildly, cradling his parts in an attempt to salvage his dignity. He was a poor excuse of a man in her eyes, corrupt and poisoned like the rest of Paris, but he was the only chance she had in finding Arno. After asking around for nearly a week, a man called the Marquis had appeared in a tiny café huddled despondent among the huge city buildings. Washed out under the overcast sky, it hunched in itself, fighting against the drizzle. Unlike the outside the interior was warm and cheery, with bright lights and colourful walls, but this man, as strange as he was, didn't appear as if he belonged in such a place. He hadn't been particularly forthright with her, but managed to admit after a series of elusive responses that Arno Dorian had last been seen in a place called Les Papillions.

And so she had made her way there only to discover that its occupants were too drunk to function and too miserable to even answer her questions.

"For fuck's sake!" the man cried, obscenities flowing from his mouth in a poorly timed mantra, "I came here to drink a healthy pint of beer and to fuck a good whore! You're not the kind of entertainment I asked for, and if you were, I'd have you on all fours, grovelling at my feet and begging for mercy, you piece of shit!"

"Good. At least we've established some common ground," she grumbled under her breath, grabbing him by the scruff of his shirt and flinging him against the nearest wall, "I'm looking for a man by the name of Arno Dorian. Have you heard of him?"

"He's a thief. I won that watch of his fair and square, but he's the sorest kind of looser and one cocky son of a bitch."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You heard what I said," he spat out, intentionally spewing phlegm onto her face, "that man has what's coming to him."

"Does he now?"

"Around these parts, sure," he said, struggling beneath her arm, his fingers digging into her flesh, "but he's not what you'd call a people's man."

Étaín opened her mouth to speak but his laugh distracted her in a way she found quite unappealing. People think of laughing as a noise that comes from the mouth, but when this man laughed it was nothing like that. This laugh had been etched into his very character, in the way he rolled his eyes and bit his lip. Yet it wasn't in his face. His laugh had come from within, as if the humour bubbling inside his body had become fuel for his synapses.

"Ain't that right, Arno?" the man called out, his voice ringing throughout the tavern like the peal of a church bell, and Étaín's stomach clenched in anticipation for the first time that afternoon.

It wasn't hard to discern from the sudden onslaught of silence that a figure had appeared in the tavern as if he had been privy to every nook and cranny beforehand, every weathered floorboard and every burnished window sill. As she turned to face him, she discovered that he was a tall fellow, lean as a greyhound and in colour neither dark nor fair. His eyes were deep-set and looked out from a face that was slightly red from the February air. His nose was straight and large, cheeks well hollowed; the face would have been stern but for the humor that lurked about the mouth. He had the swagger of someone she wouldn't have wanted to lock eyes with, let alone cross, but his trajectory was set for her, eyes locked onto her hands, her face, and the hood that obscured it, but she decided to busy herself by imagining how it would feel to crush his nose in with the heel of her boot instead.

"Arno, is it?" she asked, gripping the man's shirt tighter in her grasp, "I've been expecting you."

He didn't speak, which would have perturbed her if she were any other person, for his presence had clearly affected the mood of the tavern. Hushed whispers tumbled around her like little pebbles onto sand. They dropped too fast for her to catch and landed softly at Arno's feet where his left hand had clasped the back of a chair, dragging it across the floor. He was the subject of rumour she realized, an apparition that was no more than a distortion of the light, a human cut out of colours that weren't right. Where he moved the things behind it appeared bowed, as if looked at through a mild fish-eye lens.

After a moment of silent contemplation, she released the man she had been attempting to interrogate, and he scurried off, spitting on her boots as he fled. Then, as quickly as she had entered the tavern, she crossed the room without leaving so much as a foot impression in the dust.

It was in that moment of absolute stillness that God tipped the balance to Arno. The wind outside died, the leaves of nearby trees ceased to rustle, even the rumble of Les Papillions' timbers shuttered one last time as if in its death throes. In those seconds Étaín could hear the floorboards creaking under Arno's boots, just enough to give her an idea of what he was about to do, but she couldn't have been more wrong. She took one step forward, twisting her hand in a slow circle, revealing the blade nestled in her bracer, and just like that, her fate had been sealed.


A/N: I loved writing this chapter. It was challenging for some stupid reason, but I loved it nonetheless. I apologize if it was too descriptive, so I might change We Are But Dust and Shadows' rating if need be. Tis' not for the weak of heart!

I'd like to thank everyone who has given my story a chance. You guys keep me going and inspire me to continue. I really appreciate it. Until next week, my friends!

Valēte,

TeaAndWarmSocks