Creatormas Drabbles Set 2

[hrhrionastar]

For the peoplespalace 12 Prompts of Rahlmas--organized chronologically, these three are all Creatormas season 1.

Title: Open Your Eyes
Characters/Pairing: Cara/Dahlia, Rahl/Cara
Rating: PG-13

Word Count: 156

Prompt: He sees you when you're sleeping

 

Open Your Eyes

Your hair is loose, golden on his pillow. He lies beside you, one arm carelessly thrown over your chest. In sleep, you look happy. Calm.

Better than when you spar with me, or even your beautiful bruises, after a fight or a dance—you and me: we’ve never needed music.

I would never tell you this, but you look better this way—no braid, no leathers, no me hanging on your every word. Natural.

And him—well do I know that never can I compete with your devotion to him. It’s the same with me—a matter of duty.

For you, perhaps it’s more than that. After all, he sees you when you’re sleeping.

You stir, eyes open—green fire. Your eyes make me yearn for the Underworld. “Dahlia? What is it?”

“Come,” is all I say—all I need say. Lord Rahl sees you when you’re sleeping—but I know when you’re awake, Cara mia.

Title: Silver Bells
Characters/Pairing: Rahl/Cara/Denna
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 472
Prompt: Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings

 

Silver Bells

“You know you deserve this pain, don’t you, Denna?” Lord Rahl whispers, circling her.

Denna doesn’t try to follow him with her eyes—she feels him, like a dragon, breath like fire on her back…like a monster.

Just like her, as the Seeker would doubtless say. Denna wants to laugh, thinking of him. If he thinks he has escaped her, he will learn his mistake. She’s in his blood, now.

Denna’s eyes open, senses struggling to be alert. She is exhausted. But Lord Rahl is very, very good at this; she won’t sleep until he lets her.

Cara suddenly appears before Denna’s bleary eyes. Her face is blank, impassive—but she betrays herself in the tilt of her hips, the curve of her throat…Denna watches her watch Lord Rahl.

And then Cara lifts the whip.

Confusion flits across Denna’s mind a second before the whip flits across her torso, leaving a long red welt on her stomach. But that’s not all—Denna feels the bite of a thousand tiny knives, each a pinch of pain as sharp as a dagger—

And hears the soft jangling of a thousand tiny bells.

Denna’s eyes fly wide in shock—Cara ignores her, her lack of expression a statement in and of itself.

But Lord Rahl won’t stop talking. He’s in front of Denna again, touching his lips with one finger. Denna knows that look—his cold eyes make her think of the Keeper.

“They say, every time a bell rings, a nightwisp is born,” Lord Rahl drawls. “Imagine how pleased the Creator must be.”

Denna does imagine the Creator, then—a beautiful woman in a white dress (not the Mother Confessor) looking down on this scene—and wrinkling her nose in disgust.

Now Lord Rahl is gripping her chin. “Why, Denna?” he says, all faux-sadly. “Why do you make do this?”

Denna knows better than to answer. With detached interest, she notices that the bells on Cara’s whip are silver. Pretty.

Lord Rahl steps back, his eyes glowing with hidden promise.

Cara lets the whip curl around her feet—the bells jingle, and Denna puts together what she felt and what she heard—the bells have tiny blades at their center. Pretty on the outside, sharp on the inside.

Like us, she thinks.

Cara’s fingers are gentle. Her lips are soft, against Denna’s. Denna shuts her eyes. Someday, Cara will pay for this.

Still…deep down, Denna knows why Cara is Lord Rahl’s favorite.

“Why bells?” she asks. She shouldn’t speak, but she wants to know.

At that, Cara actually smirks, just for Denna. “’Tis the season,” Cara whispers.

That’s right, it’s Creatormas, Denna realizes—

And Lord Rahl is at her back again, breathing on her neck, hair disturbed and faintly tickling her skin.

Cara’s back to expressionless—but Denna remembers worse holidays than this one.

Title: The Bratty Ghost
Characters/Pairing: Darken Rahl, OC (the ghost)
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 592
Prompt: Cookies and milk

 

The Bratty Ghost

“Can I have a cookie?” the little girl asked plaintively.

Darken Rahl turned from his melancholy contemplation of the only edible food apparently left in his Palace kitchens, this close to Creatormas—stale whitenut cookies.

“Who are you?” he asked, sharply. Little girls did not tend to address him so familiarly—or at least, not for long. Could she be an escapee from the Palace’s Mord’Sith Headquarters? But no—no one (except his pestilential little brother, the Seeker) escaped the Mord’Sith.

Now that he looked at her, he saw there was definitely something odd about the little girl. She looked no older than six or seven (the age, he recalled with a pang, that Cara’s son would be, had Darken let him live), but her hair was exquisitely arranged and her dress was in the ornate style of hundreds of years ago.

“The Lady Lucasta,” the little girl said, curtsying. “And you?”

Darken narrowed his eyes. Lucasta—the name rang a bell. But—impossible! He had never believed that old superstition…

Once, so the story went, the Rahl bloodline had included daughters, as well as sons. But then came the death of little Lucasta Rahl. The stories varied on how she had died; some said her father had poisoned her, others that her brother had stabbed her, jealous of the attention she received everywhere, as the little princess. Still others claimed she drowned in a watery grave.

But two things all the different version of the legend agreed upon: first, that it had been one of her own blood who had murdered Lucasta, and second, that in so doing they had unleashed a terrible curse on the whole Rahl line, until such a time that another powerfully gifted daughter like Lucasta should be born to them.

But Darken Rahl didn’t believe in curses—or at least, none not of his own making. Thoughtfully, he took a bite of one of the stale cookies, and almost choked on its dryness.

“Have some milk,” Lucasta suggested helpfully. As she danced to the icebox, Darken remembered what his old nurse had told him, before Father found her comforting a teary Darken and sent her away: “They say her spirit walks, you know. Oh yes, bound to this place—to those of her own blood, the descendants of her betrayers. Her murderers.”

And now—here she was. Nurse had been right—unless this was all some fevered dream, brought on by the strain of hunting for the Seeker and the Boxes of Orden.

His eyes narrowed—the Lady Lucasta Rahl had been dead for more centuries than he cared to count. How did she imagine she was going to pick up the milk?

She was back, easily settling on the chair across from Darken. “Why won’t you give me a cookie?” she wailed. “I want a cookie!”

Darken leaned back, watching her. “No milk, huh?” he said sardonically.

She pouted. “You’re mean!” she yelled, and then she shimmered, and disappeared, with a flash of images that, had Darken not been inured to blood, death, and gore from the dreams the Keeper sent him—and, of course, even more personal experience—would, at the very least, have destroyed his appetite.

As it was, he bit into another cookie, turning the experience over in his mind, and wondering if he would have that milk, after all.

He almost choked again when he remembered the last part of the legend: that Lucasta Rahl’s spirit only appeared to those of the Rahl bloodline right before they were about to die.