Irene Sovetskaya yearns for vengeance.
After a strong suspicion of the Emperor's hand in her parents' assassination, the newly titled Countess desires to spill the blood of the monarchy. To do so, she must be admitted to the royal court, and marryin...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
c: cocorrina
CHAPTER SEVEN
•• ━━━━━ ••●•• ━━━━━ ••
TEN OF SWORDS
THE STAIRS THAT LED to the cellar of the Borgin and Burkes shop were narrow and winded, taking the form of the chipped seashells that Abraxas used to enrich his ships. With each tentative step, they grated underneath Irene's soles, the pitched sound reverberating throughout the hollowed dungeons. Dampness adhered to every inch of the perimeter, the murky ambiance of an underground establishment merging with the potent waft of the sewage ducts.
Her thoughts bellowed similarly—they whined like ruined pieces of an archaic clock, cogs that had not been greased and polished. Sovetskaya could barely focus on what was in front of her, her mind still on Tom Riddle's earlier words.
Dead. She was, supposedly, dead. In the ways that mattered, anyhow. It explained the vacancy in her abdomen, the perpetual sensation of desolation that had imprinted her existence. It was an indefinable coldness, a sense of being disengaged from sanity. Sovetskaya had no pulse, no heartbeat, and her limbs were frigid. If Riddle was right, though, then her state of existence had transmuted into something else, where it was not the electrical impulses inside her body that made her organs function, but the undoubted presence of death and sorcery. They pulsed through her system like a vital serum, keeping her viscera from succumbing to the frailty of mortality.
Perturbing, certainly, yet oddly enthralling in its own morbid, twisted way. Sovetskaya had questioned such things before, though she had deemed those thoughts to be absurd. If she could eat, sleep and breathe, then how could she be dead? Still, there was no denying the pale appearance of her skin which had, on multiple occasions, frightened the staff of her Manor and required extensive powdering. Her limbs had always been cold, clammy, as though there was no circulation to fully warm her up. Abraxas had complained of it. Tom had noticed it. More importantly, the rotten monstrosity inside her, the calamity that screeched for retaliation, for scheming—it was something entirely born out of death and darkness, though dimmed by her sturdy rationale.
Irene had assumed it to be the trauma of a near-death experience. They said such things left one hollow, with an abyss of nightmares to occupy one's thoughts, and that it was hard to recover. There had been a sullied grave in the muscle of her heart, a place where her soul had rested for the past six years, seeking to awaken from its fatal slumber. Now, with the newly acquired information, it seemed to metastasize into something new, with more parts machine than human. Each step felt light, tentative—she toyed with the laws of life and death, twirling on edges like a prima ballerina, too gracious to fall onto one side or the other. It was then that she discerned the true nature of her sorcery, a power she had shunned out of fear and resentment, and debated Riddle's words.
