stoneface.

[Luz Cresceno]

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Her mannerisms had never given her sufficient cause to pause; they were but a fact of her existence, as unquestionable as hair color or the coordinates of especial sparkles in her eyes. (E7, A5 and F12, for the excessively curious.) If there was poetry to her words, it was stolen from book or bygone acquaintance, and too meager to make Luz stray on syllables, sentences, or emotion-curdled paragraphs. Yet to hear that styling of speech reflected in another? A deeper mirror than she cared to glance at. However, his delivery didn’t carry the usual symptoms of mockery: dead-eyes, words doused lovingly with vitriol, mouth exaggerations. Truly, she delighted in it. There was verity to it; there was unapologetic ugliness laced amongst the consonants, as oft can be said of bald statements. Jealousy vibrated her heart-strings to the key of E-sharp – for her words had been but a slippery tumble, and his seemed so stark and meaningful. Yet even that fell away after a moment, tripping the light fantastic over the bumpier vertebrae. Her fingers found the opal necklace too easily (for she was fast forming a habit of attachment to that particular ornament) and toyed, making small metal noises against the evening’s other symphonies. “Epic,” she said, astounding us all once again with her incredible command of vocabulary under pressure. Another failed word – these days, she was raking in her dud tropes by the dozens. That had not always been so. But she did not consider this; a smile, so much more than the customary bent line, spoke bigger volumes about her current cognition. “I like those things you said,” said Luz Cresceno, lazily initiating eye-contact, her statement rendered as offhand as ‘Mary-Beth, cerulean jumpsuits are so old-hat.’ Approval had temporarily stalled a few mechanisms, such as the great and driving need to suddenly spit out some wry wit. Thank god and goddess that her face remained slack, excepting certain eyebrow-betrayals and a bit of a grin, which mussed the rest of her facial geography. “Enchanté, then, Skoll – warrior, seer of many horrors, possessor of many other titles. Care for a walk?” She was already standing as she asked, much to the dismay of many bones and muscles that made their feelings known with a series of cracks, rumbles, snapping sounds. Luz Cresceno, after all, was not so young as she used to be. Her countenance made appropriate expressions for endurable pain. Without offering her palm to him as politeness dictates (perhaps to emphasize her state as not-heroine, nor dutiful daughter) she took a stride or two before ultimately turning. Some beam of moonlight got snared by the tangled masses of her curls; her stature seemed once more so casual, so come-hither, so incidentally Luz Cresceno. A moment more and it was gone. In its wake? A suspicious smile, but I suspect that the astronomer requires no other kinds.

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