Her decision that day came with the price of this eternity - and she would have argued this served her well in the coming decades, especially once she freed herself of any influence and came into connection with her own wishes for that first time. It was only that the dreams no longer belonged to the person she was, and her slenderness in the night with its reflection of moonlight was no longer Alexis'.

Coventina's desire had been to leave Magnolia as soon as possible. Then, and now. She clutched the smartness of her suit around her with the thin grasp of her fingers at its chest, bundling in beneath her rosied palm until her shoulderpads gave way and her edges softened. She looked smaller, shuffling through alleys and under the sway of streetlights until her memories were left deep in the recesses behind her. She wouldn't sprint, was no longer a person who would run or shout in urgency, but she hunched until she more resembled a young woman who might and her hair snapped at the air under her speed. She was shrouded in this veil of shadows and her own near-panic, the hand not holding at her bosom puncturing the top of her hat until it concaved into a bowler against her skull.

She only served to dig herself lower into the depths of this history. She had followed a path she had once flung herself through all those years ago, subconsciously or perhaps even intentionally in her flurry of emotions. She had been unable to draw sadness from the pit of her stomach when recalling the events of her failed escapes, one after another, in the knowledge that she no longer remembered the people of her time then: and she had become someone much stronger, much more wise and powerful and scary, herself, 'til no fingerprint but her own remained. Unmarred porcelain. The untouchable Countess.

But as she came to a gasping halt, slamming her hand from her head to the nearest fencetop, something splattered atop a patch of grass. It came with her breath, and she brought her hand from the bodice of her suit to her lips in confusion - remnants of a meal? Lingering wine to scorch her tongue? And she found her lips dry. She leaned on the fence, spreading her fingers to grip its piece in full, and shook it with the pressure she applied when her hand roamed upward. The shaking was her own. A trail of wetness down the perch of a cheekbone, sharp enough to deter such displays. She paused at the first brush of another bauble of dew, and it hunt atop her fingertip before spreading beneath her nail's manicure.

"What --," came in hushed tones, and with it another threat from her lid when she brought it closed. A long, harsh blink, and her vision swam when she opened it again. It spilled out, down the jarring surprise of her hand, and she instinctively wiped up with her palm to rid herself of the discomfort. Unease set in her chest from where she had tried to find sorrow, and it spread through her limbs. She had been unable to cry for any of the men and girls who had once been her life and her demise.

But there was one.

"No." Coventina Carmen never asked or questioned. She answered and demanded. She brought people's desires to their very lips and into her own in breathless wants, and then she strung them under her fingers to play as a harp. She was always in control. Not once had that not been true in the prior century. She had not always been the most powerful force in a room, had not always ruled her every situation and circumstance, but she had always been in control. She was Coventina. Coventina. The Countess of Oak. Its ghost & phantom. Its RIPPER!

"No!" She yelled, and it came pitched and withering in a shrillness her throat hadn't known. The slam of her fist toppled the section of the fence she had been relying upon, sending her lurching forward as she grasped at the air in her tantrum. Her hat rattled off her head and bounced off the sidewalk, rolling down its edge and falling flat off the side. She was shaking, her tears melting down perfect, pale cheeks, and she sent them flying in her rage. Those not displaced evaporated under the heat that was flushing her dead veins. There was no room for the sparkle of light on her statuesque features as she disturbed them, her hair shifting off her shoulders and falling in a veil around her face. A gap between her and the moonlight, and a place for red to take her jaws. "No! No! No!"

She stomped. The night was ever alive in Dahlia, but all creatures had a sense of preservation, and survival did not call to interrupt Coventina Carmen. The sudden turn she took in place thrashed her arm into a mailbox at her side, and it was sent hurtling off into the street. A glare peered out of the forest brush across the way and settled on her silhouette, but it was interrupted by the snap of her head and furious crimson before it could so much as growl.

She reeled herself back into a full stand, surrounded by the streetwise carnage of her short rampage, and she stood so far above it as if the earth no longer existed for her feet. Her every breath was harsh and wheezed through her nose, unkempt weaves of black troubling her expression like scribbled lines. She finally turned her head to face the building she had come to, whose yard she had disturbed, and she stared down at its front door.

A welcome mat sat, dirtied and tousled.

Her walk up its pathway was unnervingly silent. She touched the earth, but it did not scuff her. The light of streetlamps and their accompanying moon could not illuminate her. She was not something observable. This was a private moment. Her shadow creeped out in a billow behind her, and her every step brought to life another from its shifting shape. She was weaving them - another tapestry - and they flowed out to accompany and trumpet her path. Rolling out a carpet of despair.

The flickering sound of something inside. A picture box? Its blue caught the window to her right and drew empty light over uncut grass. It was snuffed by her presence on the porch, and only the sound remained. Something drew in a rattling breath. She could hear the weakness of her prey's lungs. She had become so accustomed to the sounds of the frail and vulnerable, and she had often sought to avoid them as victims. Their taste was dry, tired. And she was not the natural death they had earned for all their years.

She didn't announce herself with a knock. She lifted a hand and swiped it, and the door crumpled at the whisper of her mana and launched from its doorway through the scene inside and out the other side of the kitchen in a direct path. Her darkness took the rallying call of crunching metal and the surprise of the figure inside to spill forth, covering the room in pitch until only the woman in white remained for reference.

"You! You did this! You did this to me!" She screamed, and the shadows evolved in a bubble that cut the entirety of the house's landscape from the rest of the world. Only rough shapes and edges could be made out of the dusk, but Coventina's wrath could not touch the figure of this ire.

It was so small. A skeleton of a man, withered and curled into the cushion of a couch that sought to swallow him whole. He could barely fill its cushion. His hands were dry and quivering, his flesh sagged if it didn't hang taut from the wisp of limbs that remained. It was spotted, mottled, and his only remaining hair was thin curls of white - patchy across his trembling chin. Coventina was not the cause of this. The sight of him, the strew of objects on the floor, and the half-empty bowl with its spoon hanging off its edge was enough to clue in to a permanent state of weakness. He was almost nothing. Almost nothing at all.

"...Alexis...?" Came a voice from that nothingness, and it wavered on breaths that sounded as if they hung on their last. One of those hands lifted in the circle of light it was afforded, reaching out. "Is that you...?"

The shape of Coventina crumpled to the floor, wracked with a sob and a scream in twined measure.

[ 1494
no contest ]