Prelude (Underworld Lucian Fanfiction)

70 - Chapter LXX: A Flicker of Doubt

Yet time continued to pass, the fall of 1910 marking the first year in eleven that Reinette had not thought of what could have been. The first hour of every day spent working on her scent with Rena. That tell-tale whisper of desire, that which could not be felt, now buried beneath the weight of austerity and perception. All of those around her so certain now of her nature that they no longer delved beneath the grey surface of her exterior.

As though the veil had melded with her skin, the notion that she could be anything other than dispassionate leading her down a road no longer marked by self-pity. Her gift requiring a vision every fortnight, but her time otherwise unoccupied; and as a consequence, her rooms now graced with the fruits of her labour.

The walls of her private sitting room covered not in the wings of butterflies, but the bountiful flora of the earth. Oaken frames filled with flowers and herbs from the surrounding forest. Each pressing numbered and catalogued in leather-bound journals that spanned nearly a half decade. All of them lined up like soldiers before battle. Witnesses of a war she could not remember, hidden behind glass, tucked away in sketches and scratches. The cramped handwriting of one with too much time on her hands...

...every book allotted to a different subject. Refusing to let her mind be idle. Voraciously devouring every volume she could find on the war. Weaponry. Battle formations. The gathering of forces. The last battle before all would become dust in a single night of flame and retribution. Her research taking her as far back as the late fifteenth century before the volumes of the Corpus Scriptorum Historiae petered out. But her mind now filled with dozens of whispers. Their faces hidden, their tongues silenced, as they fled.

Scattering to the wind.

The great lie.

And through all of it, there was an absence. His name present for a measure of three decades before it faded into a song of martyrdom. Dead to his enemies. Dead to his people. Their debates able to sustain battles, victories, and losses, but his history proving itself a dance that neither of them knew. He avoiding her eye while she watched from afar. Dinner passing in a flurry of guests. Her place so ubiquitous at his table now that only the reckless would comment about the tsar and his veiled firebird.

Until in time, the guests would depart, the floor would creak and he would seek her out. He would find her in the monotony of her unchanging days. No longer lit by candlelight but electric currents. Like a language she could not speak, the furniture moving, the wallpaper changing, the modernity leaving her in dust as the den moved forward. But the walk always drawing out a word. A thought.

Every book one that he had studied. Every page one that he had turned. Both of them caught in the past, she in body and mind, and he forcing her to walk before she fell too far behind. The mystery of his age falling to the wayside when it occurred to her that she no longer cared. Her search for meaning now taking her through all that she might have missed or could not remember. Every conversation leading down a new passageway. History, geography, language, poetry, mathematics, art, music...

The only sound coming from the fire, the scratching of her pen, and his breath, constant and quiet, moving in time with the clock. Buried in his chair, now asleep in the minutes before dawn. The few nights when an hour of reading The Anatomy of Melancholy accomplished its purpose.

And so they lived.

o...o...o

The story familiar, but framed in a different light as the Lady Allegra stood in a cloistered window of the Oppenheim guest quarters, watching the sun go down. Listening for the tell-tale creak upon the stairs, the sound of one too indifferent to mask his footsteps. So that rather than admiring the famed views of the surrounding valley, the clock struck the hour and for the third year in three, Allegra found herself pondering if she'd made a mistake in leaving the lycan-master to his affairs for so long. The sight of him walking the grounds with a veiled lady familiar to her now, but still prompting more than one glance from a visiting dignitary or a new member of staff.