LITTLE GRIM

13 THE RED WEDDING

ACT TWENTY FOUR         NAÏVETÉ; BEGUILING THE GODS

If the glassy-eyed and mere mortals of the kingdom are to define the word deceiver, it will not be their own muted eyes that will look back at them, but Pearl's sanguine smile - that inches almost redolent poison, with lies fizzing at the sharp corners of his bruised lips.

   "Are you nervous?"

Pearl sweetly simpers to the bride, using her fingers to comb the woman's hair behind her ear as the final touches to her appearance are made and the hands of Time spin the last moments before the sacred union. The bride looks beauteous. As per usual. The gown is a whimsical and otherworldly piece of craftsmanship, silvery grey; lighter than stone; darker than milk, and her headpiece, a string of jewels ending in the purest emeralds, form a net of brilliant crystals over her head. Beauteous as the earth itself indeed... but never like the one in light blue silk.

She - the goddess of love and lust and poison in its purest reincarnation - is a woman of many dulcet masks and more bitter layers.

The tales have blessed her with a beauty mere mortals can only dream of - chatoyant and capricious as the rise of her violin under a sky coated in bitter burgundy, it should go without saying that Pearl is a woman of many things and fervors. The fables entail more than just divinations - vague and ever-burning, like where the sun and the moon meet in flaring embrace, she is an outstanding beauty, a grandiose musician, and a meticulous manipulator. Ah, that sweet maiden with the copper skin and the virtuous gown and a blissful ignorance she dons like a crown has begun to bumble after her like clusters of frenzied honeybees do.

Pearl is many things all at once. Try as you might, when she paints those around her with her rosy hues and coddles them as though they are her blood-own children, stirring a warmth inside of them they never will erase from their memories, she waltzes on the fine line between forgettable humanity and a mortal forevermore. She is both mortal and not.

Yes, Pearl is Juliet, if under the boundless love for the teenage Romeo lurked intent of devious malice in place of gentle caresses and soft words - if Juliet had been a sweetly coated creature with blood-stained gloves on fine, dainty hands and velveteen gowns over graceful shoulders in place of a beauteous angel out of every young prince's sanguine dreams. She is Juliet if that foolish wench had had endless glossy facades in the pockets of her coat; if Juliet had been the white dove beneath your sheets and the supple fingers brushing your skin as if it are crafted out of glass - as if she does not long to destroy them. And Pearl too is every bit Adonis, a beautifully sculpted youth with innocuously soft lips, pink and gentle as the pale roses waywardly planted across the sheets of her bed - if Adonis had been so cunning the devil despaired; if he had been the one to stain his hands with the boar's blood instead of having his life taken so early.

And that juxtaposing aspect is perhaps what makes Pearl so curiously bewitching and dangerously ambiguous. She is a peculiar creature from the baby blue dress  she dons to the pretty face that relishes in the way the Prince expects nothing of her but her love. That kindred force that pulls and pushes, that lurks in the ever-present darkness whirling in her eyes, slivers so whimsical yet so desirable, is perhaps what brings her here now, eyes wide as her fingers softly brush against the woman's skin.

   "Of course. Who would not be to wed a man as Teivel is?" Pearl counts the lines of her face such as they are valleys and turquoise rivers as they spread across her face out of sheer fright.

   "A man such as Teivel? What do you mean?" Pearl says in a prettily tilted voice, as if she knows nothing. Of course, she does. (Try as she might, as she will until the end of days deny it, but with a smile of a manipulative villain, the features of an angel, and vibes of a fiend more charming than you have ever encountered before, Teivel is magnetic and compellingly deceitful.) But to her, nothing quite satisfies as much as deceiving others through flourishing appearances - at the art of a curious thing that goes beyond having a mere way with words or a sanguinely unorthodox manner of making another bend the way she wills, she is nothing, if not a true virtuoso.