Thank you all who reviewed this chapter and the previous one :D
To Moonbeam: you didn't leave your contact email behind, so I couldn't reply you, sorry about that. I hope you see this haha. Thanks for reviewing, and also, I'm glad this managed to help inspire you to write an Earl-based fic. Have fun writing it! (:
Disclaimer: I own nothing, nothing, nothing at all (:
You, dearest?
But you betrayed me…
The piano plays out in stormy silence, and the Earl doesn't quite deign to shutter the windows. He sits stony-faced, his two laps wobbling and his bright eyes whirling. The fire sputters, the raindrops creep, the moon dips her head under the starry seas and in the dark room, the Earl mutters. And a long-lost language it is too; a tongue which speaks of lore and hidden memories long buried in black dust.
It is the darkest hour of night, when darkness melts into shadow and shadows walk under the starless slit of sky. In the room, the Earl broods alone, tempering grief with sorrow twice over.
It is strange, he thinks, how the greatest stories are tragedies, and how tragedies are mostly borne by the wings of sweet, bitter love.
When the darkness envelops the world, he remembers her, and he wants to rip apart the past and find the seed that sowed discord.
...
We could have been happy, he thinks.
He can see them now, a vision draped in tomorrow's fancies, he dancing, she smiling on his arm, twirling the night away. He might have looked like Tyki-pon, he thinks, for he can change his shape if he so chooses. And she – she would have been resplendent in the gauzy robes of today, her moon-like face lit up with a devastating radiance.
But alas, he is no Prince Charming and she is no cloth-clad-crowned princess, and such dalliances do not hold true.
The rain stops, and the thunder dies down. In his room, ancient pity walks with bent legs and feathery whispers.
...
They were lovers first and foremost, and they walked under the young canopies in the beginning of being.
She plucked golden apples (molten sunshine painted over with joy) for him and he gathered violet flowers stained the colour of a rainbow for her and both exchanged gifts with gleeful precision. There were no children (they had no children) to break the routine of their marital bliss, and she weaved her soul into his clothes and he chased mammoths to fill her stomach.
Then came the sin-mongery.
...
But now he awaits her memory with tea laid out in willow-patterned cups and the echo of her face in his eyes. The wind screeches with broken teeth, his bones creak in the long hours before dawn, and he withers deep inside where the darkness cannot reach.
With trembling hands he deals the tea and cuts the little scones and butters them with tears and sorrow, and butter gone mouldy.
She sits and watches him, in the chair that stands just at the periphery of the light. The long years are sewn into her eyes, and the pain is etched into her skin, but her smile is still the same. Beautiful.
Done. He smiles and reaches out for her hand – pale, plump – and it shimmers in the first light of dawn.
"No!"
But the sun swallows her, and the moon removes her webbed lace from around the hapless shade, and the Earl is left alone once again, alone, alone, alone,
with just the slightest shadow of her going upon his cracked plate.
The dewdrop
on a bamboo leaf
stays longer
than you, who vanish
at dawn.
(Izumi Shikibu, as translated from the Japanese by Jane Hirshfield, The Ink Dark Moon)
A/N: The Earl is fascinating, very much so mmm. He is the obvious bad guy, but who knows what he has suffered before he turned into the wicked sorcerer he is now!
I hope you enjoyed it. Reviews would be appreciated (: