Rainbows and Raiments
The princess stands beneath a torrent of light, breaking into rainbows on the sharp darkness of the crown, turned by brightness into a paper outline filled with a riotous churn of devastating colour.
The conduit of the crown is reversed here, in this process, this maintenance procedure: in this ritual chamber, instead of a vessel to be overfilled with screaming elder family, the princess herself is laid to machinic slumber, accumulated intangibly within the spire's vaults as a sleeping voice, to one day wake within the chorus of rulers past.
In principle, at least; there will be no successor to the princess, the people and the very society which produced them gone to dust and silence. There is no purpose to this, now; and yet, ritual remains.
They both attend. Ser Glorie is, of course, the royal person's bodyguard; she stands with her back to the light, watching the door implacably for imaginary dangers. The Fool stands beside her, elbows almost brushing, and stares at the figure within the light.
The process throws off heat like a furnace. Glorie glistens impassively in her armour. The Fool simply wilts, in nothing but a light shift, hair a plastered mess, skin trickling and tickling with sweat; she bares irritated teeth at the knight's stolidity.
"Knight, art not hot?" the Fool demands, and Glorie turns impassive eyes on her, unwavering in the propriety of their direction even when the Fool makes a show of thumbing her neckline away from her skin, opening a delightful sightline downward, ostensibly for circulating air; the Fool pants, equal parts theatrical, genuinely overheated, and eternally furious at Glorie's trembling-maiden, pining, and total restraint.
"Needst not lose thine own composure for my hotness," Glorie says, straight-faced, and the Fool presses her teeth together until they ache, to keep caged the sudden vivid fantasy of sinking them, growling, into the flesh of the knight's shoulder.
