Those Five: Short Story Compilation

The Rampage of the Marionettes

[The Festival of Faces is an annual event that happens on October, celebrated by the entire city with much merrymaking. And once every ten years, a mysterious Circus comes into town to join in the festivities. Those wise enough seek more from this arrival and its curious entertainment a reward that promises Magick to anyone worthy of it.]

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They were built by some Magick to be different, like statues but were more slender, more agile, more graceful...figures towering some six and half or so, taller than humans, taller even than the brothers that were given steward of them. They were the Sword and the Shield, a Marionette couple that were never meant to be anything else but together. Thus, they had been given to twin Masters…

EE’TuSIR’raK was the name of the female mummer. A glittery pink rose made up of lace and ribbons, inverted so the petals of the flower became her skirt, falling to shape like a small bell’s, ruffles like that of a porcelain doll’s.

She was covered top to toe in satin. No skin exposed, just that endless texture to her very ends and tips, her hair a mass of flowers and more spiraling ribbons and much tulle like some expensive fan. No face. Just a mask. Small eyes, small lips…decorated with swirls of pink and red and white and gold and silver much like everything else that she was, sometimes a sunflower in the mornings while she sits on the balcony, waiting for dawn, a quiet bloom, soft and fluid in her movements as if she were the water in the pool or the light of a candle, dancing in her excess of silk, the train spilling down her waist.

De’NU’MonDo’Eh was the male, hard and dark as his gender suggested. A steely figure with folds and folds of cape and cover dragging behind him on the floor. He was TuSIR’s complete opposite, and black was his color. As was silver and gray and shades of it like Monsieur Death down the hallway. 

But he moved in his own graceful way, not as agile but powerful, carrying a stature about him that sometimes suggested he would have been her prince if he were human. The obvious gloves. The stripes of black and gray that was his skin, his arms, his legs, his clothing like the night sky with diamonds for stars powdered all over in a pattern which defined the Magick that had made him, but whose meanings have been lost long ago. 

Perhaps only the Carnival can interpret them…if only the Carnival told their secrets that is, but they do not. No matter. 

De’NU’MonDo’Eh likewise did not have a face. A similar mask but plainer. No lips. Just the path of a tear down a cheek and slits for eyes…

The Marionettes, since given to their current owners, had existed in the darkness of the house. But how they had lurked. Either of the twins have had such moments when completely forgetting at times how unusual their lives had been the past years, still get startled by either TuSIR or MonDo pausing in a shadowy corner, keeping very still, looking but not really looking at them. 

They had such strange habits, these two, like how from time to time they stare at the moon or pop out of a seeming nowhere to cock a head to one side, though the twins had eventually become accustomed to them, the couple’s presence becoming a constant in the otherwise peaceful residence…until that one morning when the said presences…disappeared…

“Oh damnit!!”

Marken aimed and shot his spell directly at his fleeing Marionette but she drifted out of its path like a feather. A wasted pentagram, not to mention the Magick it took to weave it, but he tried again. 

The twins chased the two mummers as they ran a course through the city, leaping from one building to another, scaling the sides like lizards with the finesse of the jungle’s great cats, propelling themselves with a simple flick of the wrist, the very epitome of defying gravity.