Dare Mirror, Mirror

It almost seemed to appear overnight, the strange little structure on the outskirts of town. Demira wasn't a small city by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't so massive that nobody noticed when something was amiss. Those passing through would double-take at the odd dome-shaped building, made with cinder-stones and draped in eye-catching purples and golds. Locals would narrow their eyes, swearing that the place had been dilapidated and vacant only days prior. And yet there it was, with concaved, bubble-like windows that looked into the road like eyes, an entryway made with hanging reeds instead of wood, allowing a fragrant purple smoke to occasionally seep out from within. Hung proudly on the buildings face was a name, and nothing more.

The Black Rose

To Rovias, it was home.

To be sure, it was also his place of work. The modest little abode was filled from floor to ceiling with his effects: Tomes, tools and tablets, long stretches of parchment pinned to the walls displaying the most intricate of equations and graphs from a mind dedicated to the scholarly art of the Arcane. Tables riddled with strange oddities, vials of colored liquids and powders, and a thin cloud of smoke that clung to the ceiling of the room all painted the picture one would expect of the laboratory of some high mage of the aristocracy.

There was only one part of the cluttered room that was clear enough to easily navigate, that being the section by the circular window looking out over the town below. There sat a dark-skinned young man reclining in a velvet-cushioned chair, a large book open in his lap and a pipe hanging loosely from his mouth, the source of the strangely sweet-smelling smoke in the room.

Rovias almost looked like some foreign king, lounging so carefree in his cushioned chair, with purple robes loosely hanging from his slender bronze frame and glimmering gold draping his neck and adorning his face like one would decorate an idol at a temple. This was a well-deserved break, a reprisal from the intense labor that had driven this room to the mess it was in now. The fruit of his labor? It stood proudly in the center of the room, placed upon the only clutter-free table in his home, with a seat placed on either side.

A scrying mirror, and perhaps the finest he'd ever crafted. The sun itself seemed magnitudes more brilliant as it poured through the windows and reflected off of it's flawless surface, the shining silver base beckoning the hands of the greedy, and the untold wisdom in the images it could show calling forth the eyes of the wandering and lost.

Trial and error marked both of Rovias' hands, the flesh seared and scarred by catastrophic failures, his stress only increased by the ever-creeping deadline awaiting him at some unknown horizon.

It mattered not. He had his mirror. Now, he needed only a patron. He'd sent the word out, of course. A man who claimed to be able to divine your fate? No matter where he brought his little home, they always came seeking his sight, listening to his words. And sometimes, there was even a little fun to be had in the meantime.

What new face would grace his eyes on this day? In this town? Something enough to warrant a stay? Or would he be left wanting? Hungry? Travelling from his den to seek his own adventure?

The smell of stagnant water pushed against the lavender smoke inside The Black Rose like a wrong note in a song. The slim figure did not come alone, but was accompanied by notes. Bells. Not the soft bells of a dancer, not the singing bells of a priest, but the wicked bells of a jester.

Standing in the doorway, grinning like she knows a secret about you. Her patchwork clothes were stained from the road, spattered with mud and old food and gods-knew-what else. Her fingers folded around a fat green toad. His little black eyes watched the room like a tiny, damp priest.

She is perhaps nineteen, or twenty at most... though it’s hard to tell beneath the grime. Her skin is pale, from too many nights spent in things that weren’t beds. Her black hair hangs in loose, uneven strands, half-tamed beneath a patchwork hood stitched from scraps of velvet, wool, and what might once have been a brothel curtain...

Her eyes fixed on Rovias, not the mirror, not the arcane diagrams, not the gold gleaming at his throat. He sat, draped in smoke and self-possession. He looked every inch the exiled king. She stopped just shy of his chair. No more than two feet away. Too close. One hand held the toad. The other was empty, but curled like it wanted to hold something worse.

And then, her voice, high and sugar-sour, spilled out:

“Everyone looks in that clever glass.
It glows and hums and shows their ass!”

The jester giggles like a girl. She did bow, smiling at the king in smoke. The frog in her hand blinked as if uncertain whose dream it was inside.

Something enough to warrant a stay, indeed.

A jester? No, the girl only pretended to be so simple. She was a shambling corpse draped in dying colors of celebration, cloth once expensive and coveted, stiched into something that barely clung to being. The contrast was so delightfully morbid that Rovias could not help but feel his grin widen as she neared closer and closer, until she stood nary a foot away from his chair, the smoke that filled his room wrapping around and embracing the the tragedy wrapped in the rags of a fool.

"It's the nature of fortune, isn't it?" He pulled the pipe from his mouth, sprinkles of glittering dust falling from the reservoir and melting against the bronzed skin of his thigh as he shifted in his chair, swinging his legs down to grace his new friend with a proper posture. "Those desperate enough to seek a desirable future, often ruin their chances with their own actions. I get the impression that you, of all people, can appreciate the humor in that, my friend."

Friends. He corrected himself silently, noting the silent frog resting between her fingers like some sort of mediator. Perhaps, he thought, that amphibian was the sanest of the three of them? A little laugh escaped Rovias as his ringed hands brush the long, taupe locks from his eyes.

"A portrait of despair and misery wrapped in a shrouded cloak of faded joy and jolly..." The man muttered as he stood, some lovely cocktail of amusement and amazement in his words. Amber eyes seemed to find no end of unknowns, of questions to be answered. Gods, he hoped she didn't answer a single one of them. Then, he bowed back, the clinking sound of jewelry seeming to bounce off the stone walls far louder than it should. "Any living thing so willing to make themselves a riddle has my respect, and my welcome. Though, I've little to offer but hospitality, tea, and vague premonition."

@Ariel Harmless

Her head tilted, one way, then the other, like a marionette remembering how to move. She didn’t simply stand still, she balanced. She rocked from her toes back to her heels. Ariel watched the grey ember glitter fall from his pipe. Without a word, she reached out. The pale middle finger on her right hand, with a scar like a crescent moon cut across the second knuckle drifted down and wiped the ash from his thigh. A gentle motion, light as breath. She flicked the bit of dust into the smoke between them. Then she looked up at him, eyes glassy.

“Fate is funny... she limps and sways,
and trips on all her own old plays.
She paints the end before the start,
and gives the wrong ones... all the heart.”

With surprising care, she tucked the frog into a sagging side pocket of her patchwork jacket. The creature didn’t protest. It vanished into the fabric like it knew this routine.

“So yes,” she added lightly, stepping back half a pace, “I do enjoy the joke.”
“Especially when it starts to choke.”

She touched the patch where the frog bulged in her jacket and gave it a fond pat. And she smiled at his: a portrait of despair and misery wrapped in a shrouded cloak of faded joy and jolly... She did not smile shyly, but like someone being correctly described by a blind man. Then she spread her arms wide, sleeves falling open to reveal bare wrists crisscrossed with old ribbon cuts and ink-stains.

“Even tragedies can make us laugh,
... if we break them cleanly... half by half.” she said lightly, voice pitched like she was reciting a playful children's rhyme. Ariel spun, once, in a slow, elegant circle. Her patchwork coat flared like torn flags in the wind. Her face split with a grin.

“They hung a jester once in spring,
his teeth all laughed but couldn’t sing.”
He saw too much and spoke too clear,
and now he lives behind my ear.”

“But while I’m here... your tea, your floor...” She dropped down lightly, soft as breath, landing in a crouch near his feet.
“I’ll be as sweet as rot. Or more...” The Jester sat cross-legged like a child before a tale at his feet. Fingers crept across the rugs and the cracks in the floor like little spiders, tugging at the corner of a napkin here, brushing away an old fig stem there. She plucked a stale heel of bread from beneath a low table and examined it like a rare jewel. Then, without ceremony, she bit off a piece.

"The toad has told me tales and lies,
of golden throats and silver eyes.
But frogs don't care for names, you see...
so what shall people call thee?"

She tapped her chin with the moldy piece of bread, smirking slightly.

"A title, curse or lover's claim?
Come now, dear king... whats your name?"

When he looked down at this icon of the tragic, what did he see? As she spun 'round and 'round, as she rhymed and smiled and entertained, Rovias knew only the image of the Jester she portrayed herself as. She was more, though. So much more. Not a scrying mirror nor a divine philosopher could concoct the sort of madness that created a being such as this.

When she touched his thigh, an act that took some measure of boldness as her small hand slid beneath the fabric of his robe, he did not move an inch even as her fingertip gallivanted across smooth skin most coveted. This Jester was not a being of lust or temptation. She plucked the dust from his skin, the still-warm embers of whatever aromatic vice had filled his pipe crumbling against her digits.

Those amber orbs that watched her were not the eyes of a companion, but a spectator. Was she not the performer? Pretending to be held aloft by invisible strings that guided her? It was her words that spoke to a darker truth, one not so evident in her playful and painless demeanor: This puppet had been free of her strings for far too long, and now that aimlessness had led her to his doorstep.

Maybe he thought himself too clever, but she was a riddle he was so enjoying.

"People don't like it when words meant to be gibberish begin to make sense..." The man purred, reaching for the teapot placed upon the small table to his left and pouring them both a reasonably hot cup. Freshly made from leaves of his own selection, the tea filled the room with a floral scent, deep and aromatic. It was rare that Rovias shared these small sips of heaven with another, but if this was not an occasion, than whatever was?

"They wish to know, until the knowledge is too much to bear. They leave that burden to the ones who truly see." With a low, playful chuckle, he found himself rhyming much like her as he handed her the drink he'd poured. "Those with eyes like you and me."

It was more fun than any scrying, to sit across from the strange girl with the garish clothes and the silent frog. He'd stepped from a monotony into a fairy-tale, and not the droll preachy kind, either. Rovias raised his cup in her direction, bringing the rim of the porcelain to his lips and allowing the searing yet soothing drink to lightly scald his throat as it passed through to his core. A light shiver ran up his spine, and the smile dancing on his lips grew emboldened enough to split into a grin.

"To some I'm called The Black Rose. To others I'm quite nameless, a face they've seen once at evening's fall and morning's rise. To you? I am Rovias."

@Ariel Harmless

“Sense is a gate, and gates have guards.
But nonsense?
That slips past like fog in graveyards.”

Ariel laughed. Not loud, no. Quiet. Like someone giggling during a sermon. Her frog shifting in its patchwork den.

“I dream in screams and comet tails,
and wake up weeping blood and snails.
They think I babble. They hope I do.
Because it’s easier than the true true true.”

Ariel took the cup in both hands like it was something sacred. The porcelain was startlingly white against her dirt-blackened fingers. Her nails were bitten low, stained with things best left unnamed. She indulgently sniffed it, long and slow, eyes half-closed. She looked up at Rovias, her mouth curling. Icy blue eyes not blinking. Her face was young, but worn, but not from years, but from places and people.

“A name is weight, a name is thread,
one knot for joy, two more for dread.
Rovias… yes. It suits your eyes,
half full of stars, half full of lies.”

She raised her cup to him, elbow crooked at an odd angle, as if she were toasting some invisible court. Ariel lowered the cup close, not yet drinking. The steam curled around her face like a bride's veil, casting her smile in shifting shapes. Her fingers tapped gently on the porcelain.

“I’m Ariel. A name that lingers,
on gallows ropes and dead men’s fingers.”

It was a rare and tangible shift, the kind of reversal that hummed beneath their words like a hidden chord.

Too often, far too often, it was Rovias who sat draped across his velvet throne, the fragile weight of another's heart resting in his palm like a robin's egg: delicate, trembling, perilously easy to crush.

He’d murmur what they most longed to hear, each syllable a balm, each smile a promise, and they would leave wrapped in the comforting blanket of an illusory peace, like silk pulled gently over a blade. And yet it could not be denied that such a power dynamic came with temptation. That soft, silent control. The knowledge that with the wrong word, or no word at all, he could turn longing into ruin. That comfort… was a kind of seduction in itself.

Now, the game had shifted. No longer was it a solitary performance, but a duet danced in shadows.

Rovias swayed slightly in his seat as he reveled in the jester’s rhymes, her cadence light and lilting, laced with a mirth too bright to be sincere, like silver bells chiming at a funeral. Her verses tumbled playfully from her lips, each one cloaked in whimsy, yet steeped in a darkness so deep, it curdled the laughter before it ever reached the tongue.

"I'm neither hanged nor expired," Rovias spoke with a certain fondness for her, as if he'd known her for far longer than he had. "But the name will be with me when I am.

There was beauty in her performance, yes. But it was the kind that hid a blade beneath its ribbons. A song masquerading as joy, while every note carried the weight of a truth too sharp to be ignored.

Rovias never minded a blade at his skin, so long as it sang in the name of a good time. The goosebumps blooming along his arms, the fine hairs along the exposed valley of his chest rising like an audience before the curtain, reminded him of that exquisite tension: the delicious uncertainty of walking a tightrope strung between two hearts, two minds.

With a slow tilt of his wrist, the rim of his cup met hers in a silent toast; To what, or to whom, only the echoes of her eerie lullaby could say.

"Tell me, friend. You know my name, drink from my cup, and gaze upon the stars of my deceit." His voice was low, a velvet rasp threading through the smoke between them. "I hear your song. Your words sink into my skin and stay long after you're gone. You've already given me so much.”

He leaned in, just slightly. Just enough.

"Tell me, Ariel... Do you come to share your truth? Or is there something you want, which such a talented liar as I can provide?"
@Ariel Harmless

Ariel sat like a child beside him, but it was no child’s gaze she gave him. The jester shifted, a slow, sinuous motion, rising from her child’s sprawl to her knees, spine as straight as a blade as she was kneeling at his feet. One pale hand reached across her chest, fingers splayed. She looked up at Rovias from beneath the dark tangle of her hair, and her words lilted softly.

“Every king needs coin and show.
A blade, a tongue, a trick, a glow.
I’ve got the tongue. The tricks. The song.
And folk who’ll follow, right or wrong."

She tilted her head, her grin turning wry. Her grin was crooked, something between a dare and a warning.

“I know the alleys. The tollmen’s wives.
The whores. The mourners. The ones with knives.
I’ll bring them all to your door,
the wretched, the lost, the rich, the poor.”

Her hands hovered near his chin as he leaned in slightly, trembling with an eagerness that felt both urgent and unsteady. Her voice softened, like a hook sliding in.

“I bring the lost ones to your gate.
Let them peer, and pay, and sate.
They’ll pay to see your clever glass.
They’ll weep. They’ll beg. Their secrets pass."

Ariel rose, finally, graceful, agile, taller than she seemed. A slender shadow of tattered color. Ariel circled him once, then twice, toes barely making a sound against the floor.

"You tell their fates. I take the fee.
Half for you. Half for me!”

She twirled once, fast and light. Then she stopped dead. Slowly, deliberately, she slid down into a perfect split at his feet. The jester leaned forward in the split, stretching her back like a cat. But unlike Rovias’ lazy sensual grace, hers was off. Half-dancer, half broken doll. She looked up at him. Her frog wriggled free of her jacket at last, plopping onto the floor beside her with a wet smack. She didn’t stop it.

“Say yes, my Black Rose. Let me serve.
I’ll feed your glass what it deserves.
Let me belong. Give me a place.
A bone to chew, a mask, a face.”

Then, calmly, Ariel reached out one long finger and stroked her frog’s back.

Rovias had peered into a thousand lives through silver mirrors and smoke-choked rooms. He had whispered riddles to widows, peeled secrets from sinners like the rind of a fruit, and stood as a false prophet for nobles who paid in gold and shame. But never had one asked to belong.

Ariel's voice lingered in the air, heavy despite its lilting rhymes. The tea between them steamed like the last breath of a dying god. She knelt in a perfect split, eyes like frozen sky fixed on him, and for a moment the weight of her request pressed harder than any hook or blade.

To serve.
To feed his glass.
To belong.

The word cut deepest.

He regarded her, his face unreadable. Amber eyes flicked from the frog to her hands, to her strange lips that wove omens and poetry with the same ease.

“You ask for purpose,” he said softly slid, leaning closer until her frog's dark eyes reflected his own. “A cage in the shape of a crown. Or perhaps a crown in the shape of a collar.” He crouched slowly, his purple robes pooling like wine around his feet. “You wish to serve, but I see no servant before me. I see a storm in a painted mask.”

He reached out, not to touch her, but to lift a frayed lock of hair that had fallen into her face. He tucked it behind her ear with reverent care, a priest tending the altar of some feral saint.

“And storms are not meant to kneel.”

But then, his grin returned. Sharp. Beautiful. Dangerous.

“...Yet I would be a fool to send one away when it knocks so sweetly at my door.”

Rovias stood once more, robes catching light from the mirror behind him. He held out a hand, adorned with rings carved with old words and older warnings.

“Very well, Ariel. You may stay. You may guide the desperate to my gate, you may speak your riddles, stir their fears, charm their coin from trembling hands.” His voice dropped, velvet and vicious. “But know this—The Black Rose blooms in no garden. This place will not tame you.”

He leaned down, fingers still outstretched.

“But it may feed you.”

@Ariel Harmless

The frog leapt. With a sudden, wet thump, it sprung from it's place on the floor and landed right between them, just shy of Rovias’ pooled robes. Its throat pulsed, its small black eyes catching candlelight, and it let out a low croak. And then it began to nose beneath Rovias’ velvet robe, with the single-minded purpose of a creature that feared neither gods nor men.

“Oh dear,” the jester cooed.
“He likes the warmth. The spice. The silk.”
“He’s old, you know. Don’t like the chill.”

Ariel watched Rovias with eyes like glass covered in frost, bright, brittle, and faintly warped. She did not move when he approached. Not when he crouched. The jester was so still for a moment, she could have been a doll left behind in some girl’s nursery, long forgotten after the summer of childhood.

"A collar, a crown...both kiss the neck.
One leaves bruises, one leaves wreck.”

Her pale skin prickled beneath the grime as his fingers grazed the slick, tangled strands: stiff with old salt, wild with oil, ribboned with threads that may have once been lace. She leaned her head into the touch, just slightly. And he was gentle. Reverent. Like he thought her sacred.

Or breakable.
That was funny.

When he called her storm, Ariel only tilted her head in a slow, unnatural arc, as if the name confused her. As if it didn’t fit. The frog’s fat, slick body pressed against Rovias’ shin as it tried to burrow its way into the folds of purple. Ariel reached one hand forward, not to stop it, but to smooth the fabric over it like tucking in a child.

“Storm?” she hummed.
“I’ve worn worse names… and wore them a while.
But I don’t crack skies or drown men’s cries...
You are the storm. I just ride flies.”

She giggled, but the sound was wrong. It fluttered like a cough full of feathers. Only then did she take Rovias’ hand, her fingers colder than they should’ve been, her grip feather-light, more suggestion than clasp. In a single, fluid motion, she unfurled from the split, rising with an acrobat's grace. Her patchwork coat billowed with her, its colors dulled by road-wear and ash, hanging on her slender body like a forgotten carnival flag.

“Not tamed, not chained, not taught to heel,
I walk on knives, I dance on steel.
You’ll find I serve with tooth and tease,
all in collar made of wasps and grease.”

Then she kissed his hand, mockingly formal, like a jester greeting her king. Her lips were cool and faintly damp, like something that had just crawled up from a crypt and remembered manners. And when she pulled away, her lips left a smear. A dark dusty grey, like old soot mixed with the oil of skin that hadn’t been washed in weeks.

She smiled with all her teeth. The frog under his robe croaked again, quietly, but it sounded approving.

Rovias’ laughter came soft and unhurried, like velvet dragged across a blade. The smear her kiss left upon his hand he regarded not as filth, but as sigil; a mark of something ancient, feral, and newly bound.

“You’ve a tongue made for trouble,” he murmured, his voice steeped in warmth and warning alike. “And trouble, my dear, has always been the truest coin of my realm.”

He turned his palm upward, the soot-dark print of her lips stark against the gold of his rings. With his thumb he traced it, slow, deliberate, until the motion became almost devotional. “Let this be our seal, then. Mot written in ink, nor blood, but in soot and breath. You will bring the desperate, the dying, the dreaming. I will show them what they already fear.”

“Fear, in my experience, pays well.” Rovias continued, and something behind his eyes glinted, not quite mirth, not quite malice. “And it keeps the gods fed.”

The mirror behind him thrummed softly, its surface no longer still but rippling like the skin of disturbed water. Within it, faint shapes flickered — faces of those who had come before, whispering prayers they had mistaken for bargains. The air grew colder, sweet with the metallic tang of candle smoke and distant storms.

Rovias rewarded it with only a glance, the smile that found him one of sweet sadness. Consignment to a duty he'd long been shackled to. "They're hungry, the people. They always are." Rovias stepped closer, and the space between them seemed to hum, alive with a strange gravity. “We will feed them. Not with mercy. Not with truth. With story. That’s the meat they crave. But mind what you eat, little storm-rider. The mirror does not care who watches from which side.”

@Ariel Harmless