LITTLE GRIM

05 THE VIPERS TONGUE

ACT EIGHT RUINATION, SALVATION

Her eyelashes, thick and luscious, appear to leave silhouettes upon her cheekbones in the diminished lightning of the princes chamber. She cannot look at him: not, for he is the one to annihilate her garden in a few - the one to first taste the miel that homes under her skin and relish in it, the first to enter caves of velvet and unprecedented. The pomegranate tainted flesh on her cheekbones sings a song of scandal and there arise welts atop her skin. Even the blind and the deaf could see - Pearl is restless.

And for a moment the angel permits her eyes to avert toward the copper and bedazzled statue that stands on a little table nearby the bed - one of a head of a vigorous man and undoubtedly more costly than everything she had ever possessed combined. She thinks for a moment of how unfathomably tantalizing it would look whilst dashing unceremoniously into Helios' skull - how easy that would be . . . But no, little Pearl then asserts and simultaneously, feels more at ease upon the thought: fore she would grant him undeserved mercy and end his life and baptize herself in his crimson, she would make him but a sliver of the man he once knew himself to be. Make him kneel down to her and rip the flesh right off not only his bones but his heart.

  "P-prince Helios," she almost whispers, curtsies politely for him and then flashes those brown eyes - pools of familiarity - toward him, who sits pretty upon the edge of his bed which is covered in the daintiest, softest of silk. Every breath of her own feels like untamable inferno in her throat and she chokes nearly on the flames.

  "Peasants do not hold the right to speak my name," the prince does not spare her a glance whilst his lips move in an almost whimsical manner, upon which little Pearl clenches her jaw. "But I will forgive you for this one time. Come here."

And Pearl of course does as she is told by the prince. It is when he sees her better than ever before: so sweet, so young, so innocent. He deems her everything she is not. Reeking of wild honey and dried lavender, of gods and goddesses of pure and all that blooms. Unlike him, unlike them - those of his sort - there homes no chaos in her eyes, sending shock through bodies (oh, isn't it unfortunate he is unaware of how chaos instead finds shelter in that pretty head of hers?).

  For then, he speaks, "off."

She understands instantly, notwithstanding the prince had only uttered a single word. The mere word that entices the hairs atop her flesh to stand straight. But, a mere word uttered so surlily it entails her to do exactly as he commands - no more, no less. The fabric that was enveloping her form slowly slips down her shoulders, further . . . Before she is aware, the dainty piece of attire accursed by her is but a mess on the floor - and the prince possesses a grin on his lips she wishes she could simply carve straight off his visage. But she cannot. Not yet.

"Listen carefully, yes? If it hurts, I will not stop. Should you ask me to, I will not. You accepted to carry my child and alas you are obliged to do every little thing I ask of you. Thus I expect no different," The prince whispers against her flesh, then draws her closer - soon, close to her; so close girl of divine can no longer decipher whose air she is breathing. Too close. So close she fears he can smell the grief lingering on her fingertips, feel the thorns that grow amidst her ribs and heart that decays slowly, echoing, louder, louder . . .

"Yes, my prince," The young girls breathing hitches within her throat. There entails suffocating silence - silence perhaps solely foes would share.

The prince, eventually, nods, "Very good."

And there is an upward curve of his lips that can impossibly be missed - she cannot in any manner, for her face is but inches separated from his - his hot breathing over her face but an ounce of ichor from sickening. She can feel his skin against hers - skin smooth like cream but warm like the feistiest depths, the most uncontrollable pits of hell. Abruptly, he captures her lips with his own pink petal ones: does so 'till both pairs are swollen and incarnadine.