Dungeons & Grandma's

Something unspoken unfurls in her her stomach again, yet she can feel it loosening all the same, the time for restraint was coming to an end and she would be there not a moment too late...

"My name is Xozo Seraphine.
Line blooded of Countess Seraphine.
Ghost kin of the Third Silence.
Inheritor of Folded Rites.
Initiate of the Three Resounding Echoes."

Her voice is precise, trained in the kind of cadence meant to be echoed in empty rooms. The phrasing dropped into the chamber like a relic placed on a stone altar. Not urgent or pleading just full of intent and purpose, each line balanced carefully against the one before it.

The cadence bringing her mind to the memory of how her mother once walked in her ceremony and the precise pivot of the foot at the base of the dais. She sees her cousin too during their ceremony bowing before the dais with a tremor in their voice. An act for which they were brutally punished for and she tries to not think of the fear her cousin face made when they too stepped off the dais, knowing what was coming to them.

"I return now," she says to the entire ballroom,
"not by descent, but instead to rise by distinction.
To reflect the renewal cycle.
To demonstrate the downline's readiness.
To embody the legacy that chooses itself."

The chandelier above the third tier dims slightly, but no one looks up, as of familiarity to inaction is more important.

"Legacy isn't a gift," she says.
"It's an investment, in future dignity, in inherited restraint.
It is proof, of order, of return, of elegance practiced until anything other then instinct is a mistake."

She says the last bit louder then she needs to. As if the line tested well with salons wherein it was tested or at brunches served with the in-laws. Yet clearly the loudness of it does not make it sound more correct.

Still one of the attendants on the lower tier, face wrapped in expressionless silk, nods once, mechanically. No approval or critique. Just an entry logged somewhere deep in the ballroom's ledger of responses.

"My mother stood on this floor before her exile.
My cousin vanished into service during the Tallying.
I remain not to imitate them.
But to prove our line can still reign with grace.
Proving that we are still worthy of the court's attention."

Xozo's throat trembles slightly in a way that makes the silence after each sentence feel sharper. But her effort is doing little to show the audience that her words offer anything other then contour. Her voice lacking the conviction of speaking words as if they are her personal truths born of her heart. Her voice rising slightly as she begins her next set of words as if to convince herself that everything will be alright.

"I do not seek exemption. I seek refinement. I do not need mercy from the court. Simply placement is all I ask."

That word, placement, it hits something inside her. A deep and hollow note, its feels like the exact opposite of her relationship to Eileen. She had rehearsed the word thousands of times too and yet now, in the center of this room, it rings different. Not echoing like it did in front of the mirror but rather suspended in the space before her and for the first time her voice begins to really tremble.

"I speak not to become the next…" Xozo's words falter but she recovers. "I speak to stand beside those who have shaped the court."

This line has more weight to it and Xozo feels the complexity of it in her throat as it lands, like something hard behind the teeth. She breathes once, shallowly, enough to steady herself but not enough breath to be seen with intent.

So she steadies herself with posture instead. Her shoulders square, the room watching like how a ledger watches ink, like a trap watching its bait. Her chin rising to mask the facade, titling it at that precise angle taught by a mean grand aunt who only ever corrected with silence.

She gathers herself again. "I speak to stand beside those who have shaped the courts future and to honor..."

There's a pause. She doesn't mean to leave it empty, but she has. And now she must carry the line forward like she meant for the cadence to break...
"In doing so I will not repeat the past. Instead, I will enact my will..."

She pauses again, not because she's forgotten the line, but because she realizes, too late, that she doesn't believe that she needs the next part, why was her life always up to someone else. Until eventually the silence of the ballroom forces her to say it anyway.

"...with its permission."

The silence around Xozo shifts now not in volume but in a texture that presses inward. Discomforted she finds her head turning back towards the tiers above and behind her with a glimmer of hope. Towards any of the doors that still look closed to her, hoping that any one of them might still open. Any sign that the court would meet her in open arms of welcome.

But nothing comes and instead the dais breathes just then beneath her feet. And in front of her, a large looming mirror begins to rise.

Its frame is simple, devoid of elegance or decoration. Its surface a cloudy silver sheen reflecting nothing back except for condensation of possibility still waiting for shape. Alongside the unfolding arrival of the second half of the ritual.

She keeps still now, she had hoped she would not have to face this portion, that the court would have accepted her by now. Still she remembers the teachings instructing her that movement is a form of self-assertion and the lessons of how self-assertion is a form of rebellion. So she waits, the silence of the ballroom sharpening into attention, not because it cares, but because the ritual requires observation.

The mirror flickers then and that is all the warning she receives before it begins. Her reflection appears now but it is not her present self. The hand she sees is hers, yet it wears a ring she has never owned. Her cloak appears different too and her snakes are bound and arranged like they belong to a portrait meant for palace walls. Her face seems at peace in a way that alarms her.

The image then shifts, another version replacing the last. This one is taller, shoulders back, face unreadable. The image shifts again, another appears with her mother's exact posture, the arch of the brows, the severity of elegance. A fourth shift has her face covered again, the cut of the piece worn smooth as if by ritual. A fifth and sixth iteration has her smiling too widely, too perfectly, the seventh appears with her back turned as if the mirror is beneath her and that image receives several scoffs from the crowd.

More versions then begin to appear. One dressed like a bride from an ancient family, her snakes still. One fading into transparency, as if made to be seen through. One appears to weep while holding a sleeping child. Another watches with cold apathy, knife in hand. Soon the iterations blend, crowding the mirror like petals pressed between pages. None of the iterations ever meet her eyes though and that realization makes her feel the most out of place.

Still somehow Xozo somehow finds a way to hold herself still. She would not flinch or react to any of this even as her insides tighten at the mirrors classification system. For it was known not to ask who someone is and yet always knew what someone could be.

Then all the reflections vanish at once. The sheen of mirror turning an inky deep black. Not the color of absence, but of verdict. In the center, a word begins to write itself, slow and without flourish, as though the mirror has done this many times before.

PENDING

Holding her breath Xozo waits for more to come is was not a sentence, not a punishment, just a statement of pending intent, the absence yet of resolution. Which is in some ways a crueler kind of answer for Xozo who has already expected a better outcome.

And then, very faintly, near the bottom edge of the mirror, too low for most nobles to notice, but precisely where Xozo might be, a new word appears.

Etched. Not projected, not written, etched.

Useless

Eilieen was practically sprinting now, or the closest thing to it. She had made it down to floor three and yet every time she found a staircase it moved before she could descend it, around her nobles have already begun to look away as if the performance was completed. The ritual another file closed and yet every time Eileen looked at the dais she could still feel it was going on. She had to reach her, she had too before the ritual was finished.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The verdict doesn't feel cold in the way she had though it would be, instead it feels like a hush entombed in its own silence, why was she comforted by that, she wonders.

Her thought seeming to prompt the dais to begin splitting just slightly beneath her feet, not cracking, but parting. A shape descends then from above, slow as a breath caught in the throat. A scale not made of gold or silver or platinum or jade. But of bone, polished, ancestral, weighted by ritual.

Its arms extend wide but not in welcome. Its chains do not jangle but they do hum. On one side of the scale hangs the expression: Nothing. On the other side hangs the expression: Expectation. Folded small and neatly balanced. There is no instruction, no invitation. Only a phrase which is not spoken, not declared but felt in the teeth.

"Let the weight be witnessed." breathes one of the nobles from behind Xozo.

Xozo does not move either for she does not ask what she is meant to place upon the scale or why no one had ever mentioned it to her. Why did her cousin not have to face it... Why did it feel like she had to perform... Why did Eileen never have too...

Her thoughts cut off as the chains shift, not downward but inward. The scale contracting and adjusting, its arms folding closed. The pan with nothing dipping slightly lower, the slightest fraction of a degree, like a breath caught midway through a decision. And then it stops.

A verdict etches itself across the central fulcrum in the same pale scrawl and the mirror replaces itself with the same word as well.

Tolerated

Eileen steps off the staircase and on to the second floor, beads of sweat are streaming down her face. Approaching a railing to find another staircase she stops, a bone white scale has been added to the theatrics and its clearly made a verdict. Her mind slows for a moment before her voice sharpens to that of a polite shout as she pulls out the pass from her robe. "I will remember the one who helps me find the staircase down, I wish to speak with Xozo immediately."

The verdict feels... it feels... worse. Xozo finds herself stepping backward down from the dais now, her mind reeling at the thought and the ballroom breathes again not in relief, or in surprise but in continuity. As though the system, briefly paused, has resumed its sacred indifference.

Chairs shift too, as fans open back up and she begins to pass out something that looks like gratitude but smells like chalk. A ripple of muted conversation spreads like linen being straightened after a spill.

Not one pays any attention to Xozo and so she waits still and alone. Her posture, correct in decorum because she knew that to collapse would be unsightly. Still she could feel her façade cracking from the oldest kind of terror, the fear that to be real for yourself would always be deemed unacceptable by others.

And then someone from the tiered seats, a voice, calm, pleasant, and sharpened like an heirloom letter opener approaches Xozo. "Legacy," she begins, her voice calm and pleasant, softened by a kindness that feels too polished to be real. "Is not a gift we remember fondly. It is what we others can deny, long enough to control."

And so she steps back further out of the center, her very being dismissed. The dais exhaling in kind. The chandeliers flickering once in a sigh of bureaucracy above in recognition of the trial being over. And yet it feels like nothing has changed for her here, in a place that was supposed to be her home.

Except beneath her ribs, beneath her name, beneath the part of her that still believes in shape, she holds a memory, of a cookie, of a wrapper, of kindness, of fate.

The alcove was designed to feel safe. Not warm or welcoming, just safe. There's a difference too she had been told, by some uncle of hers with that thing on their face.

The alcove of course was tucked just off the ballroom's main spiral staircase, beneath a forgotten frieze that once depicted a story about inheritance and birthright. The alcove sits just beneath, a single bench, comfortable, but not inviting. A candle sits unlit there too in a niche too small for sculpture. The air seemingly still in the alcove, like it's been trained not to breathe too loudly.

This is the space Xozo had always been told, where the edges could be felt, as if that moniker was meant to make it feel softer here. Not that it helped, for the alcove had one strict rule, that only one person was ever allowed to sit there.

But the room's illusion of privacy was also part of the ritual, the alcove was open for all to see and it was where despair felt like reflection and the silence the space granted her now didn't feel like a gift, it felt more like a pressure. A pressure forcing the mind to repress itself until her posture was re-corrected. Until her breath could be re-contained.

For their is no room for crying or laughing or just being sad in the alcove, for not even that is allowed. Instead it only offers just enough silence to perform the self unraveling.

Until that is Eileen steps into the alcove, seemingly unbothered by the rule posted above the bench. Gentle as ever she arrive like a passing through curtains made of hush and she does not look at the walls or the architecture or marvel at the posture Xozo uses to hide herself.

Instead she looks at Xozo in the same way she had looked at the Little Wibbler like from before. Her approach not slow with caution, but with consideration and so she sits near by on the bench, enough to be reached, but not enough to impose.

Eileen then takes off her shawl which is soft and well worn in a way that suggests memory more than age. She sets it in between the distance between them not as a gift or as a solution, just as an offering.

"It smells like cedar," Eileen says, finally. "And a drawer that once held letters someone meant to send." She doesn't elaborate on it though.

Xozo doesn't ask either but her fingers, tentative, find the scarf and curl into it like someone remembering how to touch kindness. Eileen watches out of the corner of her eyes too, not with expectation but with space and with grace.

Then, in a voice just above the silence, she tells a story. Not because the alcove needs one or because some ritual commands it. But because something in Xozo still knows how to listen to itself."

"Once there was a tree who grew sideways.
Not for lack of light.
But because the roots beneath her whispered: Only this way counts.
So she curved.
And curved.
And forgot she ever meant to reach toward anything else."

The story isn't wise, it doesn't even feel finished. It just feels true and that make Xozo's breath catch in a way she doesn't expect and she finds herself speaking for the first time not as a name or lineage, but as herself. "But what if I'm too late to grow straight, grow right, grow correct?"

And Eileen, her smile, warmer than sunlight, answers, "Then grow strange little one. Grow however you want. Even if its just for yourself. But whatever direction you go. Grow."

A silence follows now, not heavy or orchestrated. Instead it feels permitted in the right way, in an emotional way that doesn't feel controlled. As if to say that this was the ritual's intended outcome. As if everything that was done, was to be justified. As if one was supposed to act thankful for its continuance despite its obvious cascading despicable failures.

And that's when the system falters. The entire floor, designed for suppressing emotions and binding ones self in silence, feeling more and more like a tragedy. Two presences, two minds working together to split the silence in opposition to a ritual of ascension revealed to be one designed to break.

The tea tray itself on the table in front of the bench, the first to catch the incongruity. The lack of concurrence of code making it tremble. A candle on the wall is next, long since trained not to flicker but this time it simply becomes unlit.

A moment that forces Eileen to lift the scarf that is now between them and wrapping it around her shoulders.

And the system in that quiet, cold, safeness of the alcove, designed to help people erase themselves, registers something it cannot log.

Two women. Sitting together.
Not repairing.
Not pleading.
Just being.

And the rituals of the level, elegant and terrible, recalibrate for one more slice.

A noble appears soon after waiting by threshold of the alcove like a punctuation a sentence forgot was coming. Dressed not in grandeur, but in dignity the noble feels like an archivist of decorum, stitched into protocol. They bow of course to the Distinguished Delay with the precision of someone who's corrected posture their entire life. "You've been missed," they say, voice pleasant and recessed then they turn to Xozo, "Your final rite begins shortly."

Before Xozo can speak Eileen places a hand on Xozo's lap in reassurance but she does not talk to Xozo she speaks only to the noble. "I think we've seen enough rites today, love."

The noble blinks, just once. Their expression does not falter, but their breath pauses, the kind of inhale a government administrator takes before issuing consequences. "You misunderstand what you're giving up." the noble says to Xozo.

"No. I don't think we do dear. I just see what she was never offered. Nor will, ever be offered." states Eileen politely.

The noble holds still. Not out of poise. Out of uncertainty. The protocol unprepared for any refusal that doesn't sound like rebellion. A fact that is keenly made behind them by a second and third candle which flutters. Or in the way one of the sconces, for just a moment, fails to recognize an absent light source and therefore dims in confusion.

Xozo then stands and bows to the noble and scoots over and next to Eileen.

The noble does not speak again. But in the space behind them, something in the corridor adjusts, a ripple through the chandelier lattice, a ledger sealing itself with no entries, a chair on the fifth tier becomes vacant, without having ever been occupied.

While further down the spiral, way out the way, a waiter turns to deliver a tray into a receptacle. But they pause and then walk the other way instead.

And while nothing is ever announced. In its own quiet way, the Eye above does not glance but still records, a line of process filed somewhere deep, all to far away from even its own routines:

Presence: THE DISTINGUISHED DELAY
Final rite: Proceeded in requested absence.
Award: Bearer of Roomful Permission
System note: Watch for soft refusals. They ripple.