A Mirror of Eden

Chapter One: When the Queen Questions the Cost of Her Power

Sienna Kaitlyn Leone

The world was nothing but a series of pictures. Captures, mosaics, and paintings meant to be viewed through the gazes of billions. Every one subjected to a million different interpretations guided by beliefs and logics stroked poignantly by the illusion of time. Above all other mediums, however, the world was most characteristically a continuous blurred painting of heated strangers in the most encapsulating dances. Swirls of streaking colors creating the movements of people from their heads to their skits, and fostering the depictions that would tell the whimsical stories of how the world was meant to be.

As children people are coddled to see the dancers as princes and princesses. Nobles and maidens meant to be representatives of the goodness of the worlds in which we live coming together to bring the world bliss in a fluent dance that all speak without talking.

What they don't tell is that inevitably in the blurred dress coats and flushed draped dresses are monsters. Nobels and maidens are often hunted in these stories by those manifestations of evil who filter throughout their dances waiting to make the perfect strike. Waiting to send the blur into a tailspin of oblivion so messy nothing made sense but the chaos of the smears that hold the image hostage.

What they don't tell is that sometimes the monsters are so graceful and poignant that they become the maidens. The blurred paintings aren't always of balls celebrating the goodness of the world. Sometimes, the blurred dances of whimsical innocence are plagued by beast who hide their teeth and monsters whose nails covered in stones and paints dazzled the crowd instead of petrified them. The blood that mares them becomes apart of the costume: it's cured into the blush on cheeks and disguised as the deepest Rose lipstick staining the mouth of the predator. Nothing about them is beautiful. Nothing about them is innocent. All they know is to destroy and to blend: until they don't have to. Until the cameras flash, and the lights go out, and in the dusk of the stage where the picture is set screams fill the air and blood spatters the lens until nothing can be seen but the death that the villains bring in their wake.

My mind jolted as I looked at the images along the walls of my grandparents house. Everything here was so innocent seeming. The warm lighting of the centered hallway highlighted the memories scattered beautifully along the wall. Pictures captured laughing babies covered in cake phone new and Polaroid old alike, and I couldn't help but to linger over them. It didn't matter that I'd seen them virtually everyday for as long as I lived.But as my eyes glanced to myself, my brother, my father, and all of us whose blushed smiles are subtly stained with blood I couldn't help but to tighten up as my skin clawed and itched with the prickles of the monster behind my mask laughing at my inability to keep it quiet and below me.

The soft smells of vanilla and cinnamon wafted over me to provide a sensual distraction to the racing my mind plagued me with. I couldn't help but to bask in it as I walked deeper into the house. I kicked my shoes off to the side before going towards the back wing of the small manor offside of the living room before the kitchen and family room. As I reached the last door, a heavy large brown painted wooden door filled with intricate detailing, I smirked seeing it ajar enough for me to enter into it. I slid inside, and carefully dropped to the carpeted ground before I reached the corner of the extended wall that gave way to the master suite that laid behind it. The white, grey, and green accented room smelled heavenly of a mix of cinnamon and mahogany teakwood. The faint lingering of cigars was there within the more potent mix. I was right beside the bed before I was made.