❝ 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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IT IS CRUEL DEPRAVITY, AND NOT A CALLING OF FATE that guides Anitchka into the trappings of the demon's lair.
When he clasps her fingers lightly, pulling her from the deep voids and high ridges of the snow, she assesses the formerly modest coach that gleams a sleek obsidian now. Its sharp edges cut across the fine gates of the Tsar's palace as though a taunt that it has entrapped the dead girl instead of him.
As she steps inside, her eyes stare at the Collector's for a minute, praying that there is a window for turning time on its heels. "What if the debt is not repaid? If I run?"
"If the land of living break their pact with the dead, then the two will be at war until one triumphs over the other," he breathes, mist escaping his parted lips, and Anitchka thinks it to be so beautiful and yet so cruel.
Behind him, the lights of the palace and its vivid, elaborate domes beckon her once more, urging her the promise of escaping from him. But as her brows rise in anticipation, she catches sight of Dmitri, and recalls his words. He had spoken fondly of his master, and cruelly of the Tsar. It is obligation that had prompted him, yet she wonders if it is true that the ruler of living and the commander of the dead held the hamlet in the palm of their hands. If they cracked it open until it yielded to their will.
The demon's collected gaze never leaves hers as he shuts the door of the carriage, intense with the touch of winter. And there is a pause when he occupies the seating at the front before getting up and moving into the lush velvet of her coach. She feels the space beside her, heavy with his presence. He clicks his fingers then, and the coach jolts from its slumber, beginning its journey into the dark of the night.
Anitchka has never witnessed a scene more strange. Or a man more mysterious.
All she feels are gaps and spaces and a memory inevitably lost, and in this snowy lull, she clings to its fragments. "It feels like I've known you before," she says, focus trained on the darkened windows, the surroundings both familiar and unfamiliar. "I have met you, haven't I?"
The Count's lips twitch, pulling lightly. "Of course."
"When?"
"I've worn many faces in my years, Anitchka," he says, gaze intent on observing the swathes of white outside. "You have seen them all around you."
His eyes shift to her slowly, lightening and darkening like the gentle flicker of shadows. "Even in your dreams."
"Nightmares," she corrects. "Nightmares."
Snow falls hard against the windows of their black coach, drumming the glass as the creatures in her head and her home had once. His silhouette reminds her of dark things and dark places, of midnights and winters. It contrasts him well, the snow.
Anitchka sucks in her breath. The villagers would be up the next morning, whispering of a lonely girl at the edge of the hamlet, her bones so tired and dead that perhaps winter had fed its belly on her sunken eyes and frail limbs. Then she would be forgotten as was the sun this far north. Another casualty to the endless cold.
