lucrezia sarasin {district two} fin

Snow envelopes forsaken ground.

And the morning, calling from the peaks dusted white with winter, bathes the world in ash.

Silver blood of the darkened winter morning devours all color but the deep green of the pines. Like a great wave of a forgotten sea, it washes the clouds stark and pale like ghosts. Light had fallen away with the sun, choked out by winter's bared teeth, leaving her beneath silver and charcoal. Darkness left free to roam knows no boundaries, but she knows no fear and a shadow will not send shivers into a turmoil down her spine. She could have sworn that the wind tearing through the air was a scream and that the sky had shattered when the sun punched its fist through the barricade of lingering darkness. She declared it a battle in vain but for the frail beams that dare peek through the gray, gray, gray.

Torn open by sets of claws she can only name as coldness, this sky, kissed pale gray by the winter, bleeds white, and she cannot help but imagine it to be ash. Snow falls from the arms of the sky and nestles into the ebony fringes of her eyelashes and drinks away the warmth from the tip of her nose.

The gray sky and its ashen snow is captured in her irises. Blue ever so lightly touches her eyes — it is a sea of gray, gray, gray.

She is white as snow —
white as the dust collected on the peaks scraping against the sky, white as a watchful snow falcon perched in the shelter of the fringes of the trees. Fair flesh barely distinguishable among the land drenched in a white sea, she is nearly lost against the towers of snow.

She is fair as the moon.
Long waves of hair run down her back in pale, pale rivulets. Amber and gold once hung in curtains around the smooth curves of her face, but silver dye has long chased it away and turned the memory of the color against her skin foreign.

She is a creature of the winter.
Falling in line with the pair of snow leopards at her sides, ashen as she, no other title could crown her better. She is of the snow, she is of the winter, she is of the frosted sky.
She is a creature of the winter but no ice has crept around this blazing heart of gold.

Lips of pale rose curled into a smile, gracing across a face animated with a sentiment of joy, hold words to light a fire in cold, barren eyes. But even kind hearts like hers are no stranger to red, red rage and the darkness of the night.

Tongue sharpened and iced over by a rare bout of anger, her words — foul swears and the like — will twist and turn like serpents tangled in their own coil within the corners of her mouth. Held back by the compassion underlying broiling rage, they will turn and twist and twist and turn — and then in one deft stroke they lash the air like the blade of a sword.

Kind hearts like hers are no stranger to red, red rage and darkness of the night.

She has made her bones between the branches of the pines, kissed white by the winter, on the valleys of snow stretching out to infinity in the distance, in the castle of a mansion nestled into the mountains of District Two. She has made her bones here, where she belongs, with her sisters and snow leopards, with her diamonds and pearls.

With faux snow leopard skin draped across her shoulders to match her companions — her kind — and her pair of feline guards, Aurora and Pire, on either side, no fear dares rest upon her iron shoulders. Sauntering through a labyrinth of corridors in the mansion, trudging through snow, wherever the place, she feels almost invincible alongside her guards.

Three.
She came in three. Aellia, Euley, Lucrezia — a set of identical triplets. She came in three, but she swears she was born from the snowfall. She swears that her bones were shaped to roam the mountains and watch the snow gather like dust upon the ground from her perch in the pines.

She grew up with her eyes glued beyond the slits in the wood of the pens, bustling with animals of every kind. Sprawled out like a kingdom of the wild before her eyes, it is something of a fantasy. Animals from parrots to wolves to jaguars roam a vast reserve about a mile from the Sarasin Mansion. When she was a child, her mind would wander into the reserve, fabricating fables of her own. She once thought it to be a great jungle of nothing but wild rather than an exotic pet business run by her parents.

They call her and her sisters the heirs — the princesses destined to inherit a wild kingdom. She seldom leaves her mountains; she hears the whispers stirred in the streets of the eccentric family of zookeepers from far, far away. She'll cast a dismal glare and swallow bitter words, but nothing more.

And she wears the title of strange and eccentric and zookeeper boldly upon her skin like a crown.