Moonlight Held in Flesh

The Queen is dark. Dark skin, dark nails polished and pointy at the ends. Dark lashes grow long from her eyelids, creating cruel shadows over sharp cheekbones. Spider web gossamer makes up the dress that flows from shoulders to ankles. Her dark hair is broken by florescent pink highlights; the only colour.

Around her, subjects pay court. They are in many different shapes and sizes. Horns and wings are popular themes. One small creature seems clothed entirely in vines. Another has bark for hair. They like to leave bark in place of the ones they steal. Bark and bracken. They laugh about it afterwards.

Before them all, a serpentine girl awaits their pleasure. Awaits the Queen's pleasure. None of those paying court are moving. They all are there awaiting the Queen's pleasure; dreading her displeasure.

"Play." The Queen's word is formal.

The serpentine girl is blue and green. Her arms and legs are long, flowing; fingers and toes have extra joints. She is beautiful, hair flowing like water, trinkets in it like goldfish swimming through sea weeds. Her painted skin is bare, perfect globes for breasts that barely move as she twists and turns in impossible contortions that seem perfectly natural to her form.

Her audience stares in silence that is only broken occasionally by awed gasps that she seems hardly aware of. Her hair flows into her face and away again. Her gaze has attached itself to a far-away point on the wall.

"I tire of this quickly," says the Queen. Courtiers look around and a new silence, made of in-held breaths, replaces the last.

The serpentine girl seems not at all surprised. Rumours of this Queen have come a long way, so that when the serpentine girl was summoned, she knew her likely fate. Once, death had been terrible to the long-lived races. Not so with this Queen. Still she had come to make this dance.

As her fate came to fall down upon her, the serpentine girl moved not at all, fingers still and clasped before her smooth nether regions, hair long but still, as though it had never looked like water. Her lips seem big now, pronounced, out of place. Her nose is small. Her gaze is no longer fixed on some far off point. Her stare pins every faerie in place, calling them on their compliance to let this action occur.

It is almost a relief when her head is relieved from her shoulders. It rolls towards several courtiers to the right of the Queen. They all step back into the faeries behind them.

Even the blood runs blue.

The Queen is unmoved. The night is young.

"Next!"

**

I wrote this -- something like this -- a very long time ago.. and then promptly lost it. It's been playing around in my head ever since and tonight, buried nose deep in my new copies of Holly Black's the idea came to me again and I decided to rewrite it. There's a whole novel attached to this vignette, less than half of which is written.

I'm torn between writing that novel for my PhD, or the piece I've been working on and off with since I was 16. 11 years on and I can still stand the sight of the latter. But my interests and exegesis are more in line with the mostly unwritten novel that I've had in mind for only 3 or 4 years.

But hey, at least I'm talking about my PhD again!