nighteyes
used book shop goblin 🌿☕
Esther Asturias
SHERWOOD
health bar
WHERE: City Park
WITH: A Phantom
DOING: Conversing
CREDIT: W.J. Neatby
WITH: A Phantom
DOING: Conversing
CREDIT: W.J. Neatby
Her hands returned to her lap, and her gaze soon followed suit. Eyeing her gloves, she turned over one wrist and ran her fingers thoughtfully down a twice-mended seam. Then she puffed out a sigh of resignation. These gloves fit like a second skin and she was fond of them, but they were too worse for wear. She wasn't looking forward to breaking in new pairs, but there was nothing for it. Her streetclothes weren't faring any better, either. Truth be known, Esther did not want to go to the trouble of turning out her wardrobe, but she could not put it off any longer. She knew what the going rate was for a bolt of Zhejiang silk but the latest fashions were a mystery. Daunting as it felt, she was fortunate enough to be acquainted with individuals who were handy with a needle and thread.
The songs of birds and insects all around began to cease. She, in turn, grew very still.
One bit of wisdom she had taken away from her wandering years, and arguably the most important, was to pay heed to the shifts in her environment. Her eyes were downcast but stared at nothing at all, into the middle distance; her attention was thoroughly focused on her surroundings as she attempted to discern what, exactly, had brought about this change. Animal, or man? Straining her ears into that quiet, she tuned out the distant stirrings of the city that seemed a world away in the thick of the park. There - was that movement in the undergrowth, or merely the wind?
The press of eyes was upon her. Esther waited. For what, she could not say. Then the quiet was broken by a voice from the brush. Her head turned toward it by the slightest fraction. If her senses were not as keen as they were, she might not have noticed him at all until he'd spoken. To encounter one with a step that was perhaps even lighter than hers was not only uncommon, she would go so far as to say it was a rare occurrence. She was accustomed to being an observer. To become the observed was a little bracing. She would not dismiss a reminder to never rest on her laurels, even when it came in the form of a stranger with unknown designs.
Esther lifted her gaze with deliberation. When the quality of the light was just right, her eyes carried a very faint, luminous sheen not unlike that of creatures suited for seeing in the night hours. She reckoned that would be the case now when she fixed her stare upon this newcomer, with the mingling fey light of moon and star peering through the branches to dapple her figure in the gloom. If nothing else marked her true nature, she trusted that would.
There was a figure a little ways off the footpath, enrobed in shadow. Even to her eyes his features were well obscured, and she discerned very little of him beyond an outline and the gilded incisors he now bared in a grin. Not animal, nor man, but something else altogether.
Esther looked upon this newcomer with unveiled curiosity, for the most part, and a little wariness, but there was no hidden fear in her face, for she had none.
She was a woman who walked alone at night. There were fears she carried with her wherever she went, but had endured too much to still tremble at the dark or things that hide within it; least of all in the shade of the trees, which may as well have been the shadow of her mother's skirts.
This man was kin to her, yet his voice was not a familiar one. That came as no surprise. She could not claim to be acquainted with many of her own kind, and she did not spend much time in their company.
"Bold words from a stranger," she remarked. "I take my freedom where I can find it. Twilight is fleeting and I cannot hope to see this place in the light of day. If I shied from the night, then where would I be?" Her tone was polite; she could have been making conversation about the weather. When she spoke, there was not even a faint gleam of metal in her mouth; her teeth remained as her maker had designed them.
"And you, sir? What brings you? Loneliness, affliction, or both?" Esther ventured. Like recognized like, as the saying went. The metaphorical ball had been struck back into his court. He struck her as more invested in the asking than the receiving of answers, his words not so much a question as they were an observation, and she had opted to give him near to nothing in the way of a response. But she had not put forth any argument, either, and he was free to draw his own conclusions from that.
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