❝ Anitchka, Anitchka, will you not invite me in? ❞
In which a girl is indebted to a wintry demon for saving her life, and the gold from her fingertips is a magic whose price she must repay tenfold. Unless she guesses his name first.
| loosely based...
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IF THE DEMON APPEARS in the hearth by the edge of the hamlet tonight, he will chance upon a girl's face at the window, her cheeks apple coloured, hair down, ribbon twirling in her frail fingers. "Where is he, Dmitri?" She asks, glancing beyond the bare, dying branches of the trees outside, their trunks thinned by the winter.
He flitters to the window. "Eager are we, Bones?"
"I-," Anitchka mutters softly, "I'm not sure what to expect."
And it is the truth stripped down to her bones; she is all parts afraid as she is enthralled, but most of all it is the uncertainty of it that looms in her mind.
She cranes her neck, watching a lone man wander in the sea of white, the deep blues of his officer uniform crisp and proud. His gait is unlike any she has seen before, seeming to pass over the space, the layers of snow pulling around him in waves. It's as though she has witnessed this scene before, in an odd dream, the kind that sinks into memory. Perhaps once upon a dream, a nightmare, a cruel fantasy, Anitchka has had her breath stolen by a mysterious man swimming through the snow. Then he is raising his head slowly, eyes gleaming wicked colours from under his cap, meeting hers in the beginning of a winter crusted tale that bears the lull of death. They aren't peeking, no, they're watching her carefully, unraveling her secrets, peeling off the layers of her being.
Her eyes refuse to stray, caught in his peculiar, still gaze.
Anitchka whirls around from the window, back pressed against the wall, heart hammering.
If only, if only she recognised the familiarity in that gaze, the crawl in his steps, and the wickedness the villagers whisper and fear.
A rush of breath escapes her. One, two, three. Her fingers inch to the glass pane of the windows, face lining slowly against it. But there is no man, none at all, nothing besides the endless expanse of white and winter fed trees.
And then three knocks resonate on her door, patterned with perfection. "Anitchka, Anitchka," it slides under her doors, crawls over the floors, "I am here as promised. Will you let me in now?"
She gathers her dress, his curious eyes burning in her mind. It reels in faded, flickering moments that they had once walked and strayed a path known to them, only them.
His voice creeps along the walls, breathing a caress into her ear, comforting and daunting all at once. "Anitchka, Anitchka, please let me in."
"Who is he?" She asks of Dmitri, the memory of his gaze holding hers running through her.
"You should find out," he shrugs. "But for that, you must open your doors first."
She is unsure of what compels her to do it but Anitchka stumbles downstairs, and grips the handle, knuckles white. "Tell me, who are you and what do you want from me?"
A mirthless laugh sweeps across the porch, unshaken by the cold, tearing the dead leaves off the branches of the birch trees. "Today I am a Count. You know that already, Anitchka."
