What Lies Beneath (Vale)

So this one's about Vale, as have been other stories before, but I wanted a different style and flavour than usual. It's experimental and it's supposed to be borderline surreal; please tell me what you think.

This is the first part of, I think, two parts. Possibly three.

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'What Lies Beneath'

Early spring is a cruel, delicate creature. She caresses the first brave crocuses with a chill finger, on some nights giving up the world to the ravages of frost and on others, soothing and covering the earth with gentle zephyrs and whispering of warmer days to come. Whereas her sisters Winter and Summer are beloved for their constancy, Spring both nurtures and murders, her intentions and intrigues laid bare to none but herself.

On one particular evening in March, Spring crept through the city, wrapping each house and street in a soft embrace. And in one of these houses, Valerias Caan was at her dressing table.

Her gown was of lapis lazuli, dark in the soft glow of candle or lamplight, yet unmistakably blue. The colour sloped away from her neck, following the curve of her breasts, drawing the eye from cloth to marble skin. It was an ageless colour, highlighting ageless skin, echoing the eternal story of the beautiful and the dangerous and the damned.

The woman tilted her chin sideways, facing a small silver mirror fixed upon the wall. Kohl outlined the dark pools of her eyes; intense eyes, she thought, as they stared back at her from the burnished mirror from beneath heavily painted lids. My eyes could reveal secrets that my lips would never disclose. How fortunate that I am an actress!

Some weeks ago her cousin Ledgic had given her a contract, and for some weeks she had observed and taken measure of her Stormwind nobleman. He was both her plaything and her livelihood, and so she had shadowed him with distant smiles that, depending on her mood, had run the entire spectrum of passion to indifference. She knew his name, but she preferred to think of him simply as her nobleman; her most current project, her most current obsession, different from the others only in that the culmination of her observations would be the culmination of his life.

Valerias slid from her seat before the mirror, possessing the space around her by her mere existence as she moved across the room. Traces of jasmine clung to the air in her wake.

Footsteps, and she was no longer a solitary presence in an empty room; she didn't turn, reaching instead for a crystal decanter and watching the deep ruby wine cascade into a glass.

'Well. You look very–'

'Stunning,' she whispered, turning her head so that the hair swept away from her neck and fixing her eyes upon Eothan Dawn, who had come downstairs. 'I know.'

And draining the blood-wine from the glass, she took her cloak and fled into the chill evening, lifting her face to drink in the tremulous scent of things newly flowering, the promise of life borne on the wind.

And here's the second and last part. Comments, critiques, thoughts, etc., are very welcomed <3

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The vast harbour had once been a raw limestone cliff-face. For centuries it stared down at the wave-wrecked cove below, eyes clenched shut against the sting of the salt spray and the memories of all the squalls and gales that had worn and ravaged it. Then, after years of solitude: sloping white pathways, the fruit of the labour of a thousand men, the sweat of a thousand brows, all leading down to the grime of the docks below. The harbour had been made.

At the crown and the summit of this great testament to man and industry, from whence the piers and lighthouse and everchanging waves were laid out like the broad strokes of a painting, a single birch swayed, buffeted by fickle winds from the sea. And on one night in the midst of March, the branches bowed and sighed, a strange music in a desolate landscape.

Valerias Caan drifted toward the birch as a moth flutters toward a candleflame, her hand brushing the papery bark. The landscape, reflected in the soft luminosity of a gibbous moon, suited her. In the enveloping chill of the hours past midnight, there was only the whispering of the tree and a few skeletal fingers of cloud stretching across the moon.

She surveyed the stone and the sea and the sky and she smiled. The world lay at her feet. Tonight, for the first time in many nights, life was as it should be! Her eyelids drifted closed and she lifted her dark head to sample the heady smell of freedom: brine and bark, the faded remnants of her own exotic perfume, the jasmine that clung to her hair.

How sweet the night had been. A few murmured words, her fingers extended in invitation, the whiteness of her throat gleaming in the hanging oil-lamps in a nobleman's hall. A knife and then a cry, soft like the sound of a stone falling into water; Midnight stealing in to cover the garish glare of death with her tender arms. The scene had taken so long to prepare, and so little time to execute; the scene over which she had dreamed and mused and smiled.

Sighing gently as the breezes stirred her hair, the woman rested her cheek against the birch's ragged bark. Her lapis lazuli gown, richly black in the pale shadows, was stained with the blood of her nobleman; and yet unspilled blood ran through her own veins. She could feel it beneath her skin, hot and glowing and vibrant.

Valerias laughed, turning her face to the moonlight and stretching a hand toward the ethereal sky. Perhaps this was the culmination of what a Caan could be: perfection in the kiss of death, intoxication in the the promises of life.

I like this story, and so without shame, especially as I'm at last bringing the lady in question back to Stormwind and to RP, I'm giving it an upward nudge. It's so much of what Vale is!