[ The tears seem almost like a sickness that spreads from one person to another.
The prickle of it sharp in her eyes, and it is practised, practised from childhood about even when it got the better of you, to say and do nothing to acknowledge it, her jaw shut and her eyes up, to act like just because she feels, nothing comes of it at all. Even when her shoulders shook, and she wanted to rock and soothe herself.
Her mother had never been kind about displaying this.
The show is not strange in so much to see puppets. This was the show often done for children in her own lands. It was every so often that the Mummer's would come to play from them, but only in the spring weeks when the trader hailed them. Winter in the Keep would have many of these displays put on, though usually, it would have someone to speak over it and tell the story. But this would happen too.
It is a fearsome story, one that feels familiar yet distant, playing over and over again, with the odd music, and the bloodless death of the shadow shapes. It does not surprise her that she weeps, truly, tracking down her cheeks, silently. The cut of the knife still felt raw, even all these years later. The ache in her throat. Never to heal. Proof always that the world was not kind. But hidden away where no one could see it, behind her wimple and veil.
It's only after it ends the third time that the spell of it breaks across her senses and she can break to look around her - and see that others weep as she does, though the man beside her seems so overwhelmed.
She does not know him, so she does not fully embrace him, but her fingers lift as if she means to do so - hovering above his hand as it catches her. No one ever held her when she wanted to weep, anymore. It seemed so awful, to leave someone else to the same fate.
So she settles between the two, moving to lay the gentlest brush of her fingers against the outside of his hand. An offer, and no more, easily rejected. ]
There now, what strange stories they play for us. It is not a good tale at all. Would you like to hear another instead?
sound and light
The prickle of it sharp in her eyes, and it is practised, practised from childhood about even when it got the better of you, to say and do nothing to acknowledge it, her jaw shut and her eyes up, to act like just because she feels, nothing comes of it at all. Even when her shoulders shook, and she wanted to rock and soothe herself.
Her mother had never been kind about displaying this.
The show is not strange in so much to see puppets. This was the show often done for children in her own lands. It was every so often that the Mummer's would come to play from them, but only in the spring weeks when the trader hailed them. Winter in the Keep would have many of these displays put on, though usually, it would have someone to speak over it and tell the story. But this would happen too.
It is a fearsome story, one that feels familiar yet distant, playing over and over again, with the odd music, and the bloodless death of the shadow shapes. It does not surprise her that she weeps, truly, tracking down her cheeks, silently. The cut of the knife still felt raw, even all these years later. The ache in her throat. Never to heal. Proof always that the world was not kind. But hidden away where no one could see it, behind her wimple and veil.
It's only after it ends the third time that the spell of it breaks across her senses and she can break to look around her - and see that others weep as she does, though the man beside her seems so overwhelmed.
She does not know him, so she does not fully embrace him, but her fingers lift as if she means to do so - hovering above his hand as it catches her. No one ever held her when she wanted to weep, anymore. It seemed so awful, to leave someone else to the same fate.
So she settles between the two, moving to lay the gentlest brush of her fingers against the outside of his hand. An offer, and no more, easily rejected. ]
There now, what strange stories they play for us. It is not a good tale at all. Would you like to hear another instead?