elspeth eon | nine | fin

She was sunlight skin in the house of horrors and a curse book laid on a bed of bone. She was the five o'clock am feeling in a gut that today would be different and she and Umbria would find a better way to live than in this hell on earth.

House of Eons.

She popped a bubble, plum lipstick sticking to sugary sweet bubblegum, and smiled with lemonade in her hand. "This place holds danger," she started, "this place could kill me dead." She shrugged and walked inside anyway.

Her room was not technically her room, but she had been living in it for three and a half years and she couldn't wait to see a bitch try and take it from her. "Someone tried that once. It didn't work out well."

On top of her bedside table was a lamp that hadn't worked for months, and five candles: green, blue, red, white, and purple: earth, water, fire, wind, and spirit. Within the drawers were little dolls, each tagged with a different person's name. Some had kneedles jutting from their stomachs and others remained untouched. Some were missing entire limbs and some would never. be. fucking. touched.

Unless the owners of those dolls tried kicking her out. Then, not only would she beat their asses to a pulp, but she might have saw to it that they had a headache for the next several weeks or that they couldn't sleep, or some other inconvenience she could think up.

"Yes, my magic fucking works. Wanna find out?" (Possibly works.) She hadn't ever been able to prove herself right, but the others hadn't been able to prove her wrong. She switched her lemonade for another item lurking within the drawers, just on the other side of her tarot cards and spell book: a bottle of clear liquor. She poured a couple shots into her cup and stirred it with her finger before sucking the liquid off.

"Bet you like that, huh, perv?" She spat on the floor to get the sour, bitter taste out of her mouth-- "Tastes like shit--" and she tossed the entire glass out the window.

She crawled into her bed, knowing dawn was fast approaching. Her knuckles were swollen and she had a pretty impressive cut, just below her hairline by her left temple. Her mother would have scolded her for becoming the person she had become-- and Umbria too. But honestly, she didn't mind. Her mother had been a shitty mother, straight up. A good friend, but a terrible fucking mother.

Espie looked at the ceiling of her room, where plastic stars still shined as light has started to resurface. "When she died, we didn't have anyone or anywhere to run to. Did I ever tell you that? She refused to accept she was dying-- said her magic would save her." Her mother had given Espie the deck of tarot cards in her bedside table. She pulled them out and held them close to her chest.

"We were only twelve years old. That's bullshit, innit? We slept on the roof of a factory for a couple of weeks before we found this shit show."

Her brown hair was a sea around her head, eyes that were too big for her blinking more often than usual. Elspeth Eon never blinked first.

It was a fair trade: room and board, a decent paycheck, and all she had to do was fight when asked. She had won and she had lost, and she had stood on the cement and scrapped for so long that parts of the expierences were beaten out of her memory.

"I don't know how many fights I've been in. Five hundred? Enough to last a lifetime."

Her eyes blinked again. She was grateful for the darkness, though it quickly faded. This was her favorite time of day. It was why her sleep schedule was so fucked. From seven in the evening to about two am, she slept. But she was always up before the sunrise.

"Cheers to my weird ass." she said, swigging alcohol straight from the bottle, and then, "I want a cigarette."

Ashes on the mattress, smoke dancing in gray light. "Liquor lips and sugar tits-- that's me." The sun finally broke the horizon and the gray became bluer than her right eye. She smiled at the sunrise, shuffling her cards in front of her. Crossed legs, cigarette in mouth.

"The lady." she said, then cackled. "I'm a lady: pure and fine--" she flipped the card around in her hands-- "No good for screwing, but a beautiful mind. Ha!"

She shoved the entire deck back into her drawer.

Elspeth Eon hated to be called a fucking lady. It felt like a term meant to belittle a woman. To call a man a warrior and a woman a lady? How were they supposed to be even?

"And I ain't a lady. Hear me?"

She put her cigarette out on the floor and stood, taking pride of her throne:

"I am the fucking queen."