Patterns and Paint
It is a day for warpaint. One of the sort of days where one raises one's head above the lung-choking dust of ages, breathing clear for once, contemplates the bars of one's prison, and does what needs be done to survive just once more. One more sundown.
Pale paint from hairline to jawline. Black to set the eyes within, sunken jewels. Sunset colour drifting down from the cheekbones, parody of passion's flush. Knife-edge lips, dark as death, limned with aposematic poison green, warning of your words.
The Fool is the little danger you keep close to remind you that you can be wounded; the poison you drip in your own cup to harden your guts. The bitter truth you allow to wound you, that you do not atrophy, lickspittle soft, to something spineless that a strong winter could kill with no more than scorn. The Fool is a wasp kept like a pet, a coddled viper, a collared calamity.
The princess is a vestigial line of defence, holding fast while her station eats her slowly from the inside, everything she is intended to protect long gone and blown away by time, a watchdog growling at a gate behind which a farmhouse burned down generations ago. Glorie is a sentimental simpleton, married to a pointless duty no longer even ceremonial, just rote.
And the Fool is here still, and will be to the end, drawing stiletto points in eyeliner and stylised teardrops on her cheeks and resenting them, as if they could or would prevent her leaving; for the Fool is the evidently biggest fool.