Friday
Picture 2
Muse Calliope's Choice: both
Title:
One of Trinity’s favourite things about being Fae was her ability to glamour. Over eight hundred years ago, the Fae had been a hell of a lot more powerful; you must have read the fairy tales, heard the legends? Yes, well, if the Brothers Grimm had been around eight centuries sooner those little snapshots they’d taken of Fae life would have made Greek myths pale in comparison. Unfortunately, right about the time the Fae were settling in to their happily ever after, Aoife, the Winter King's exiled Consort, staged a coup and killed the King. According to magic and tradition, his only daughter, Princess Fionnuala, should have ascended to the Winter Throne and over at the Summer Court their Queen Emer should have stepped aside and allowed her son, Brennus, to become King. It was one of the Rules that bound the Fae; always a King and Queen would rule the Courts but never the same Court and never together. But when Lyr died, all the Rules were broken; Emer kept her Summer crown, Aoife stole the Winter throne, Brennus became little more than a glorified doll and Fionnuala simply vanished.
Trinity hadn’t been around then but she had been around a hundred years ago; that was when things for the Fae had really gone into a decline. Before, a sort of plateau had been reached and, while none of the Fae had grown in power, none of them had lost any either. Then, sometime in 1899, it was like the scale and tipped and suddenly the power of the Fae was lessening. A lot of what the Fae had been was lost over the years, a lot of gifts, but the glamour, while weakened, had remained and Trinity couldn’t be more grateful for that. As a shade, her natural skin tone was silvery grey, her eyes were a dark charcoal from lid to lid and thickly lined in black that trailed down her cheeks like tears, and her black hair, no matter how often it was cut, was always tipped in a swirling rainbow of colours. While modern trends gave her some leeway, glamour allowed her to mask her appearance and pass more fully as human.
Being a shade allowed Trinity to blend with the shadows as she walked through the castle’s hallways towards the throne room. It allowed her to pass as nothing more than a shadow so far as the security footage would be concerned. Glamour, however, made it so any mortal that saw her traipsing around after hours wouldn’t actually see her; her glamour would convince them she wasn’t there, not really, she was just a trick of the light.
At least, that was how it was supposed to work. In Prague...In Prague, these things tended to be more iffy.
Mostly because the people of Prague equated the Fae with hellspawn and went all out trying to keep the Fae out of their city. Wiping the Fae off the planet would have made them happiest, but the Fae were, for obvious reasons, not aboard with that plan. They had calmly informed the city that the Fae predated human civilization by several millennia and would more than likely outlast it as well; were the people of Prague to interfere with that in any way, not only would they fail, but the Fae had no problems returning the favour. And the Fae wouldn’t fail.
Unfortunately, this still left Prague armed to the nines in anti-Fae charms and technologies with an entire police force dedicated to killing any Fae (or Fae halfbreed) that wandered within their borders. Fun place, Prague.
But, again, all Trinity had to do was get herself to the throne room, summon a ghost, ask some questions and hightail it out of there. Piece of cake.
Or, at least it should have been. Finding the throne room had turned out to be easier than she expected; despite being the closed-off section of the castle there had still been clearly marked signs leading the way. It even went well when Trinity set up her circle and infused it with energy. Unlike most magic practitioners, Trinity’s circles not only kept whatever she conjured bound within its confines, it also emanated a spell to keep mortals away. Sort of like Hogwarts but downscaled and, you know, real. She even managed to summon the ghost.
Now, here it really should be pointed out that Trinity wasn’t a necromancer, neither naturally or by trade. Trinity was a Shade, sure, and that gave her some affinity for the dead, sure, but her powers laid more in the way of shadows and darkness than ghosts. In fact, once Aoife stole the Winter Throne, a huge manhunt had occurred, purging all the human bloodlines that had any trace of the gift. Any Fae that had the gift had that particular power Bound, rendering it useless. Trinity was a practiced conjurer by trade, which was why she’d be offered the job to begin with; the theory being that if she could conjure demons, she could conjure a ghost. And, what do you know, she had. A young tourist who’d been killed in the throne room a decade past, the ghost was dressed in a buttoned-up denim shirt and jeans with wild, unevenly cut brown hair and dark eyes. His rolled-up sleeves allowed the tattoos running from his elbows to the tips his fingers to be see, the most ironic of which being the words “LIVE” and “FREE” the ran across the knuckles of either hand. Add in the guitar he had slung across his back and he was just your quintessential rocker-turned-roundabout.
Nope, the problem arose just after that when the door to the throne room, which Trinity knew for a fact she’d locked behind her, opened and three people just waltzed right in, catching Trinity kneeling on the far side of the room and the ghost, who really couldn’t be mistaken for anything but what he was, hovering just in front of her.
Three hundred fucking years old - she really should have known better that to jinx herself.
A/N: To be continued next week!
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