drusilla → i have lived with shades, a shade; i am hung with graveyard flowers

[visitedupon]

The thought of waking Mayaseralle only to put her back to sleep at Riva seems entirely too much for Veda, and unfair to a child whose rest has been troubled lately; the idea of managing to keep her asleep for the return trip strikes her as laughable. Her luck hasn't been quite that good lately and being not nearly desperate enough to actually

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[a_pretty_fire]

The city was silver and still. Like a magpie, Drusilla made her way through the shadows in search of glittering objects that happened to catch her eye. She had a good eye. Two good eyes. She passed over flowers and people and buildings until, at last, she spotted the fountain.

The tumbling water drew her in. It was singing to her. Soft and sweet. Like the silver bells that somebody had forgotten to plant in the garden.

Drusilla sat down, allowing her fingers to break the rippled surface of the water and her dress to pool around her legs.

Footsteps. Someone who wanted to shatter the pieces and the quiet. The light cut through her shadows like a knife. The girl cut through the shadows like a knife.

"Pretty girls shouldn't wander on their own."

[visitedupon]

Knives were something Veda was comfortably familiar with; she carried one more often than she didn't, and the glint of it hid behind the faintly displeased expression she wore as she examined Drusilla in her garden, by her fountain. The sewing was abandoned but she kept a hold of her lamp as she took a step forward (bare feet, pale gown, a green rope tied under her breasts and no adornments at the late hour) to get a better look.

"Pretty witches do whatever they like," she said, succinctly. "What do you mean to be doing on my property?"

[a_pretty_fire]

That was a surprise.

She wasn't just pretty, she was beautiful, but she was wearing a face that didn't belong to her. She looked like Morgana but she didn't smell like her, and she had a power that was all her own.

At first, Drusilla didn't know if she should be angry, amused or intrigued.

In the end, curiosity - killed the cat, it did - won out.

"That isn't your face."

[visitedupon]

The differences were mostly subtle; Veda was taller by a few inches, and her near-black eyes were nothing like Morgana's pale blue, looking out of that familiar face with a chilly refusal to back down in the slightest.

"You know one of the others, then," she said, scrutinizing Drusilla as if she were trying to decide which of her doppelgangers it'd make more sense for her to know. (She'd guess Mary, to be perfectly honest.) "I'm afraid that makes it no less my own. What do you want?"