❝ Anitchka, Anitchka, will you not invite me in? ❞
In which a girl is indebted to a wintry demon for saving her life, and the gold from her fingertips is a magic whose price she must repay tenfold. Unless she guesses his name first.
| loosely based...
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IN A KINGDOM PERCHED AT THE EDGE OF THE THIN, THIN LINE between the living and the dead is a mansion that thinks itself to be a Tsar's palace. It is cold and cruel and reminiscent of death lingering at its corner. It is all parts beautiful too, Anitchka notices from the high window, the trees white and bare, and the water frozen.
Girls standing by windows are curious little things, and she is no different. Anitchka gazes at the vast swathes of lifelessness that she is to call her own. When she whirls towards the goblins, their hollow bone masks startle her again. These creatures are starkly different than the ones she has seen before, almost human, but not quite yet. Dmitri had been an oddity to her at first, but the goblins with their frames close to men and their skin unlike them, are surprising. "Can you take me to the Count?"
The taller goblin speaks, the voice resembling a woman's. "He is to remain undisturbed for now."
"But what am I to do?" Anitchka points, looking around her. "I am here as promised, and I don't understand the debt I owe."
"Olga," the second goblin says, and she realises that their pale clothing are supposed to be dresses, "I am Olga, and this is my sister Helga."
Anitchka nods curtly, eyes traveling to the dark interiors of the mansion. Splendid arched windows line up next to each other, displaying the winter dotted grounds outside. Snow has settled along the windowsills, a blanket of its magnificence coating the obsidian framing. The deeply coloured walls are patterned with what she assumes are curling vines of silver, and the fireplace emanates the sole source of light in the room. "When can I see him?"
It takes a moment for her response, and Anitchka wonders if the demon can talk to them without being physically present. It chills her, and she takes a frantic sweep of the vicinity as though he is hiding in the shadows, watching her. "Once the night falls," Helga mutters, the knotted mane of her hair swaying around her face of bone, "Would the mistress like to see her chambers?"
"Am I not to be thrown into a dungeon, and have my soul ripped from me?"
This time, both of them laugh, and the sound is strange but not unwelcome. She has never heard the laughter of companions, and it breathes a fresh wave of warmth in her. It shouldn't. "No, there are no dungeons and bars here, mistress. Death is eternal and its kingdom is prison enough."
Voice dry, she asks for food, a loaf of bread, some rich slabs of butter, and perhaps the cool wash of wine down her throat.
Olga readies a platter wrought with silver, its edges thick like ropes, and its contents brimming with the pleasure of a hearty meal. Anitchka smiles, for the first time, a prayer lining her full stomach.
"Mistress," Helga mutters in a light daze of wonder, "You're magic."
And so, a sunken girl stolen from the snow and two goblin girls housed in the land of death, find themselves peering at the tray. One that has been born anew from a pale silver to a beaming gold, and in that moment, their demon overlord asks of their presence.
