Another bottle of something heady and burgundy hung from the plush of her lips, spilling liquor down her chin in a steady drip atop her bosom. It was joined with shy rivulets of an uncanny crimson substance, peeking at the corners of her mouth and likewise pooling in lines to messy her jaw. Cherry-stained lips curled and popped off the drink like a stopper, ash on her tongue rolled atop it and over the roof of her mouth before she'd discard it with a sleeve. She brushed it at the tip of her mouth, dainty, to rid herself of the less pleasurable taste.

It wasn't hers, of course. That'd be dirty and improper. She dropped the corpse's arm to let it roll off her velveteen couch, joining its fellows on the floor with a resounding thud. She hissed at the sound, waving an immaculate - if bloodied - hand to ward it off, as if dismissing the source. Even the dim light of the room's lantern wearied her eyes, squinting their deep gold and lifting her other hand to shade her gaze for its focus on the mess she'd made. Four. That was all she had made a show of this evening, but it meant a necessity in leaving quiet and leaving soon.

She rolled her eyes at the memory of their gruff words pealing off into helpless pleas. A beast of hers had made quick work of their breath and left the rest to her, and she had made quite the feast from their veins and the alcohol the men had stocked about their accommodations. Traders, she presumed, having slipped through the inn's window where they were staying. They weren't supposed to be here - but it'd never be said she didn't make lemonade with lemons. A coarser drink, at the least.

The mortal indulgence stung in her mouth and made her hack after her next breath, messied bangs startled down her forehead. She'd have to pluck their disarray back into place. She hated the taste of anything but blood. Some Vampires could stomach it - meat, at least, or particularly strong drinks - but she had never been fond of the way they felt in her throat, as if she was forcing air down pipes that rusted long ago. She only drank now to drown out the buzz beneath her skin. They weren't supposed to be here. This was where she once was, with him. This was their room. Perhaps they had left it behind months before ... but Coventina was awful at letting go of her things.

She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to think about him or anyone but herself. Her hand pressed into her head and helped guard & prop it, lazily flicking away what remained of the bottle between her other grip and letting it clatter to the floor. It meant nothing, she decided. Her mood had already been foul and her needs unsated. The dull crimson that remained in her irides was proof enough of her full appetite, and a blanket dragged from beneath the feet of a dead man a fair hankerchief for her mess. A bloodstain remained down the top of her pale bodice, only smeared by her brief efforts to tidy up, and she examined it in the mirror with a wistful finger. A trace up ... a circle, spiraling ... and she led her nail tip off, watching the spattered black catch the light.

She then flipped off the image and turned to leave.

This had been the trajectory of her life following the previous few weeks since abandoning everything that had been built up around her, and it would continue for the following. It took that taste to dull the bitterness left on her tongue. The memory of her last look over a sleeping figure and the last trail of her hand across its doorway, then that final step she took to leave her would-be castle and its inhabitants. Maybe he looked for her.  Maybe she would have made it easy, returning to her roost of Oak and the room they once shared ... old habits to die hard, and hapless annoyances to die harder.

They didn't cross paths again, though. So it didn't matter. No one else seemed to call after her. Ryuko might have, considering Coventina's abandonment of her egg beneath the dark posters of her bed there -- but she digresses, eyes half-lidded in a lazy disinterest in her thoughts. She didn't make herself easy to pin down even with knowledge of her location, and various wards were placed in every domicile she entered and remained in until her departure; to dissuade any of those troublesome portals from cropping up, of course. She felt the tug of her magic and the creature it had sprung to life, circling in the shadows of the alley she now wandered down. Always here again, she found. Some things never change ... no. She doesn't change. She is Coventina Carmen, the Countess of Oak: and now its ghost.

A movement alerted the dog that bled darkness along its chosen wall, as if challenging the night in deep obscuration and Coventina's brooding alike. A rustle from behind and a man stumbles in his stupor from a bar's awning to his unfortunate choice of path - as they always did, and she had seen and taken advantage of many times before - but she had left behind hunger in her previous red room. Tilting her head back, strands of hair spilling out of her raven's veil and forming a curtain over one long, pale, ear, she lost herself in thought. Searching, her hand pressing to herself and trailing just the tips of her fingers up her navel and beneath her chest. The man called after her. His fate had already been decided the moment he crossed her threshold and alerted the beast - a hound, but not hers, not in the same way - but her attention wasn't with him. It was with the lack. A void. An emptiness.

The sound of a scream was the backdrop to the little flutter of her eyelids, lips parting just the same, and an 'oh' she breathes into the world. Her hand turns against and off of her stomach, reaching out with arm outstretched and palm turned toward the light of the moon. It glints off porcelain skin, a starker white to the shadows that coalesce around her and the silhouette of red from the splattered blood at her back, and the ray that pools in her hand glitters. It looks to drip down her wrist, a searing light she hums for. The orchestra swells. Tones play off the steady spray of ichor from a mangled corpse and the wordless growls that accompany it, only to be joined by a choir of shocked gasps and a yell for help as a gaggle of people pass in the night.

She calls an end to the symphony with the lilt of her palm, discarding the moonlight dispassionately and bring her arm in an arc with the turn of her heel. The darkness follows it, bringing a shade over the pallor of her visage and calling the fold of the night over the startled onlookers. There must have been a handful of them: but Coventina held nothing. Off with their heads, so said the Empress of the Night, and so heads rolled.

They collapsed all at once - an inconsequential rhythm of thuds - and the resulting geyser, and subsequent rain, of the dullahan corpses left behind weathered away the wolf with its jaws still tight about the first man. It disappeared beneath the heavy patter, Coventina taking a short step back to avoid the worst of the downpour and -- well, admiring her work wasn't the right word. Nothing new had entered her eyes as they fell upon the resulting scene, and even the primary concern of her vanity seemed to be undeterred by the rivulets of blood that were now staining her heels.

She simply stared, and watched, and thought, and thought nothing. And felt nothing. And this bothered her, just that feeling of feeling nothing at all, and her arms crossed over each other and across her bodice. It took time for the various leftovers to stop spurting. Blood hung like dew at her jaw, just below her cheek where it first landed, and she lifted her thumb to wipe it away after a dazed minute connecting to the sensation of its trails. It collected on her finger, thick and viscous, and she tossed it aside without an interest. It made a round of noises against a discarded nameplate, and she turned the opposite direction to make her way out of the alley without giving it any consideration. The turn on her foot was sharp, with not even the bloodied caking managing to muffle the sound of that resounding heel click.

There was nothing left for her here.

[ 1520

traveling to east ]