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I looked down. Sure enough, a ring with diamonds encircling it hugged my left ring finger. I tried to tug it off, and couldn't. I looked up, my green eyes wide in fear. "I need to use the restroom!" The man looked surprised and nodded to another door. I rushed through it and ignored the spectacle that was the huge bathroom. Instead, I immediately grabbed some soap and used it to try and slide the ring off of my finger. "Why won't it come off? Why is it stuck?!?" I was exerting so much force that the knuckle began to hurt, as though I was about to pull off my finger. My nails scratched deep into the skin beneath the ring and still it would not slide off. My mother used to tell me stories about evil people who would do something wrong and an inanimate object would attach itself to them until they died or confessed. Tears of frustration welled up in my eyes as I silently confessed all that I knew I had done, my laziness, my greed, my unconcern for others. Still, the ring remained attached to my finger. The man, unseen, came up to me and grabbed my hands. He was stronger than he looked and he pulled them apart as though he were opening a closet. "Lady," he said as he looked in my eyes, "You need to calm yourself. It would not do you justice to meet the Master in such a state." I found myself nodding reluctantly and following him out of my room. I have only one word to describe the hallways we walked through: gothic. The creepy paintings and carvings all seemed deliberate enough, but it still bothered my clean-and-simple-poor-city-girl aesthetic. The man led me into another room- a sitting room with a fireplace and armchairs. I was sure that there would be Beast from Beauty and the Beast and all of those talking objects from the Disney movie. I swear, this could have been a set for a real-life movie starring myself as an unconventional Beauty named Ash (I'm not a knockout, but I was sure that I wasn't the Beast in this one). And who would be playing Beast? I hoped that it wasn't a real monster- that would be the icing on this really frightening, poisonous cake that I sat over like a kid on her birthday. Well, sort of. I can honestly say that I was disoriented enough to be thinking of completely random stuff like that. I gave a choked off cry when a fluid-deep voice from behind me said, "Have a seat, Ashlyn. We have much to talk about, you and I." I was seriously sick and tired of this 'appear from nowhere and scare the living daylights out of me' s**t. I snapped, "I'll sit when you do," as I turned around. He was wearing a black suit, of course. At first, I played with notions of him being the driver of a hearse and imagined his flyaway dark hair under a chauffer's hat. But his eyes were simply too strange to ignore. Silver. They were silver. Absolutely colorless with a shine that seemed to originate from within rather than from the flames. He chuckled as I took a seat on the edge of one of the armchairs. The leather was slick and I was forced to sit back, despite my wish to be ready to flee. "You seem confused, Ashlyn. Do you even know where you are?" His face was elegant, but his features were a little foreign. I tried to place the cheekbones. Maybe he was European? As he spoke, he sat down and leaned forward, waiting for my answer. "Umbraea Manor," I said, not wanting to come off completely clueless to the man I was sure was the counterpart to my engagement. He tilted his head and smiled (which wasn't entirely reassuring), "Very good. However, Cade, please step forward." The man who I'd formerly met in my room emerged from the shadows, his hands clasped behind his back. "You told Ashlyn this, did you not?" "She asked me, Sir. I merely answered an inquiry." All of this was beginning to sound like some sort of test and I felt my hackles rise. "Thank you. You did well, Cade. You may leave us for the time being. I'll call if I require anything more." "Very good, Sir." I kept my eyes trained on the man in front of me as Cade's footsteps lost volume when he left the room. Finally, I interrupted, saying, "I didn't quite catch your name-?" He laughed, the sound contrasting with the sharp crackling of the flames. The firelight sparked red shine in his hair, and gave his pale skin a glow that I'm pretty sure wasn't entirely a human one.
||I'm going to continue this later- It's getting late.||
TempestuousSeas · Mon Apr 23, 2007 @ 02:54am · 0 Comments |
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