Two Eyes Cenote [m] Tea Party

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That evening, when @Eset returned to her chambers:

Legend’s eyes were stuffed to the front of a beautiful amber flower, peachy leaves and blooms dried but with so many crevices for her mind to busy with. Crumbly in her pads, if she fumbled with it enough. Lovingly, longingly had she grown obsessed even with the wreath that Eset had! Put her claws all over it, put her nose in it to try and pick up scents she could only smell poorly, and now she was at the edge of the woman’s bedfurs dangling the bloom.

When Eset came in, she chimed up with a chirpy voice and a breath of air that was still being taken by all the pretty around her! Where was her pretty?! She couldn’t wait to talk to Eset. Bored, bored, bored and more bored. When would someone give HER attention! “ESET! YA- Ah!” Her tail shivered out. “Yah got so many pretties!” She said with the most wondrous tone, her curious, now squinty eyes falling on a hawk feather. “What this?” Quickly dropping the amber flower upon her bed, she reached over and pinched the hawk feather between her toes with examining eyeballs. Her brows were lazy as she spun it around. Looked pretty! She smelled it— a sniff. Sniff, sniff, sniff! It smelled so pretty! Pretty smells. She envied all of Eset’s riches deeply. Which she was so glad that Eset was so nice to share her pretties for the night with her! Wait a minute.. Oh, oh, oh! Wait a minute! It smelled..vaguely of.. And then her eyes started to narrow as she started to turn through gears.

Evenings give to her morbid thoughts. Her eyes wander absently over Legend on her bedfurs, rifling past Keiko’s kanzashi that a few days prior had been priceless to her.

Legend holds Senmut’s red hawk feather in the air for examination. She reads her suspicion.

“I am not sleeping with him, Legend.” But she would not criticize her for assuming-

Eset was a whore, after all.

She lifts Khusobek’s captive flower, the one she’d found impossibly beautiful, and stares at the reflection within it. Her face appears too symmetrical. She has a desire to halve herself.

“The feather is an offering for Hathor’s shrine. Once it is erected,” she places the amber back onto the stone shelf near her bed and turns to the mazoi.

“You may have it, if you wish. Take it all.” What use could the servant have for such fine things, anyway? She had been given so many reasons to look down on herself that she couldn’t be bothered considering any more.

Her claw pointed towards Eset with her next words, lively. "I didn't say that!" Pretty feather. Pretty flower. Pretty wreath. "I just thoughts it- and you said it!"
Things she had never been given release to see.

Amten said such things would taint her.

"Really?"

She found little there, in the thoughts of Senmut in the beds of others. She knew people shared one another. Knew bodies were things. Knew she did not own him. Knew she was only mazoi. She tried to feel an attachment to care that Eset prompted, but it did not come.

She did not understand.

It confused her that she did not.

More again.

She felt only attached to the idea that she could be allowed space, allowed affection in Akashingo's life. In Erpa-ha's.

Between the feather and Eset, she turned her head now. A puzzle playing out upon her face, a connection she wished to understand. Eset offered. Yet it did not feel pleasing, the thought of taking them. "Well, I don't want them that bad." The feather was floating aimlessly to the ground when she next dropped it, her ears stayed on a turn for Eset's voice. It changed colors. And when it changed colors, when it rolled across her eyes in waves not familiar, it brought the mazoi to a focus. The demon child halted in her thought flurries to understand this one. A sense of settle. "What's gotten ya so generous? You don' like em?"

“They are only pretty things, Legend. Pleasing to the eyes. For a time.”

The hebsut's chamber in the blue palace had always been meticulously arranged. She’d have been cross once to see her things thrown astray. But she perches among the clutter with hardly more than a passing glance to the chaos. Her withdrawn attention holds over Legend’s pelt of soot that had finally come to a standstill.

“Did you enjoy the party?”

Kicked back in Eset's bed, her paws crossed lazily. Party, party! With her lip scrunched in thought, she rolled her eyes off to the ceiling to think. Hesitant at first, then a uprising pitch to her voice once she hit a settle.

"Yeah!" she announced, letting her shoulders then slouch off. "I guess it was okay." Bringing her eyes down, soon she spun Eset's bedfur's with a claw. The Pharaoh was happy, but Legend was everything except accompanied. "Didn't do much. Drinks were nice." And strong.

"What'd you do?" She knew, but she didn't know. Her eyes squinted, then her claw pointed ton Eset, curious. "Yah enjoy making those fancy dinners with ahhh-ah---," the name was on the tip of her tongue. "K-Keikooo-shmo?"

“Keiko; she made them. I served.”

A harried look slides past Legend to the corners of her bedroom. It was all in service, as her possessions were for a mazoi’s amusement. Nothing belonged to her.  If someone wanted to, they could harm her. They did not have to have a reason.  Pharaoh could not trust the hebsut to keep Muat-riya in her stead. Eset could not even be depended on to collect herbs off the cenote without becoming a liability.

“When will you return to Akashingo?” She asks, feeling an emptiness about the pack fracturing. She would miss Legend.

The shoulders on the imp raised up, up, and dropped in a fast shrug. "No one tells me nothin'!" Then, she tossed up one of those pretty trinkets in the air again with her paw. She wasn't able to catch it, but the bedfurs did.

"Maybe, ahhh, mm, couple days, yeah? Don't know where they're putting me," she said matter-of-factly with a sassy head bounce each word. Frustrated!

Then, she laid down with crossed paws and a slouched back. Her lip pouted, annoyed. "Which sucks. Who am I supposed to talk to?" Khukhu was staying, she moped. Eset was staying, she moped. Senmut, busy. "You gotta stay permanently here?"

“I am not returning to Akashingo.”

The resolve in her own voice catches her off guard; she is surprised to feel it. A history of wolf had been stained into the murals of the mesa- but before Nazli’s mark, before her own, Muat-riya had been untouched. Wounds would not be washed away, nor would old memories cease to be excavated, but something existed here in these walls.

“There are reports to deliver between the palaces,” Eset’s face is now intent upon the mazoi. “Will you come back?”

She would keep a room for Legend. She would fill it with pretty things.

Contemplation-- She listened to Eset talk with half listening ears. Or maybe she wasn't listening at all. Maybe entirely focused.

Then, her squinty, owlish eyes squinted more. "Mmm," she hummed, and after a moment of contemplation, her voice came to a decision. "Yeah!" She also wanted to see Eset. 
Because Legend knew she saw through her.

And that made things much more fun. 

She also liked her loads. Extra flavor to an already spicy meal.

Besides, who else was gonna talk to her! Legend got bored just thinking about not visiting. "I'll come visit you and stuff. Beats pissing." She huffed and grumbled and bored again.

"Reports. You need.. a messenger?" A ticking clock and thoughtful eyes that soon lit up from the ashes of their boredom. Carefully, she watched Eset! Lords, heavens above, can SOMEONE give her a job! 

Legend comes alive with the proposition like a feverous wildcat set on the trail of her hunt, eager for task, and the hebsut gives a swift nod of gratitude.

“Yes, regular messages to delivered to the Erpa-ha,” a pause, and her eyes find the tops of her feet in guilty thought, “I will have one to be sent very soon, in a week’s time.”

"Oh, that's good," she pointed her claw at Eset, all furrowed with her brows and strong with her words. "I was gettin' bored. I'm SO bored!" she whined and flopped back to stare at Eset. At the request, there flowered in the pit of her soul something to reach for.
Something she couldn't wait to tear apart.

Then, a cheeky smile pulled its way at her lips. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. "Count on-- me!" The devils eyes, but the devil felt nothing but praise. Then, she flipped upright quickly on her stomach, changing positions throughout the second. Could not look on one direction.

"So--," she stalled, then moped with her lip before it fixed itself. Pages, flipping through her head. "You happy with the arrangements?" That's different for you, isn't it? "Hebsut! Eset!" She tested it on her tongue while trying to dance pride in the words. Didn't work out well. A serf. A fellahin.

Still a serf in cursive letters.
How'd she deal with that, anyways?

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Happy?

She’d let her naivety succumb to some false narrative of success here: head of the dark and beautiful palace of Muat-riya, hosting the most influential guests, flaunting the most ornamented halls. It was a laugh. All of Toula's gifted power, all her trust placed wrongly into the palms of a foolish girl.

Eset looks blankly about in the lowlight. There is no reason to lie here. Legend knows exactly where she comes from. How she's been put to service. What she really is.

“I was almost raped the other day.” The confession is so... inconsequential. She supposes she should feel some way about that. “Pharaoh and the mazoi had to save me. I am humiliated, Legend.”

“And Zaahira -" Zaahira. Humiliated.

“Nothing has changed.”

Master; her new title. The irony of it bitters her tongue.

She looks at Legend. Putting it to words, it helps. But it is at the expense of the raven, unfairly so. She says no more.

They are women.

A tale as old as time.

To be repeated until dead.

They are women.

Legend is forced to listen.

Where those that did not want to listen lived in the diamond dust to tear the rest of their lungs. Days, ripped from hands and fingertips where it was only them. Where the world continued, and it was them.

Always them.

They are women.

Her eyes, they sewed the blurry lines between them to make a bridge. They made the room their own now. Eset found home here. But now she would never live here.

She mentioned Zaahira. Eset needed to say no more.

They are women.

The sickly twist in her throat, her own stomach eating itself into a cannibalism that she allowed return scarcely.

Eset had danced these moons away with laughter and the joyous extension of bountiful parties in shadow. With no sense of self. With no memory of love for your own skin. With the static noise of every second that your sense of self was taken playing in your head again, again, again. Until you were nothing.

They are women.

Legend hardened. She squinted, she looked away when she stopped.

Of course it would be Eset. Where the claws of Shuyet still raked her stomach. Where she was now ruined.

And Legend knew that being a survivor only meant so much when you would never be the same woman, girl, you once were. Eset spoke to her now as a husk.

Zaahira, mazoi, jodai, to blame as the rest now.

Legend felt bitter and cold. Someone she was so far from, and so close to, and so distant from, and so warm to, suffered the same story in different prose.

She should’ve known. Perhaps she did. Or that Legend chose to play in her own mind of fantasy and pleasure, and joy and lost, where she could repeat the familiarity she’d known. Something she could understand, and found comfort in, and affection in. But where Legend lived under the structure of this, she picked up the pieces of her disconnect and looked to the somber picture of Eset. 

There came a moment again, where she didn’t need to say more. She was fellahin.

Still a serf.

Still a slave to her own bones.

With blood she couldn’t escape.

And a home rewritten scarred.

But Legend knew.

And no one would know, but she hurt too as a devils child and imp blood. Because she didn’t understand.

They are women.

For Eset, there was the look of wolf. As people, and a person. And softness, and vulnerability. 

Nothing has changed.

“Tell me,” Legend pained to think, and she hated feeling such, to think at all, but she wished to know, “what the world has done for you.” Her chest and her heart, they were ill.

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It was always with her. Not an undercurrent, or memory, but in the twice-breathed air between she and Legend. 

She had become separate when it happened, a fragment of herself forever caught in that initial time. She’d rebuilt without and around it. 

But it was not in her, it was her. 

“I deserve it. He is half of me. He is attached to my soul.” A smell and taste she cannot forget because it is her own. 

As she lifts his eyes to look into the mazoi’s, the greater horror is that she is not alone. Her pain is Legend’s.

She had no name for what she felt.

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"No, you don't."

Her claw pointed directly at Eset's chest. Next, a big breath and the devil flipped onto her stomach, her eyes squinty. "He's just some weird perv." The rest of Akashingo gawking had been too.

Legend thought real hard now, then rolled on her back.

"I mean, seriously, tell me what the worlds done for you. Your life been shit. A serf in one dynasty, fellahin next. You ever have control before? Like, real control?" Frowning, she tilted her head. "'Cause it seems like all you've been is fucked over."

And she felt a pull at that, though she could not place why. Did not question why. But what she did not know was that she too had been, countlessly. But unlike Legend would ever be, she would never be--, Eset was worth saving.

She flinches- startled as much by her friend's words as her own quick motion. Her heart pounds defensively. A laugh broils in her throat but the almond-shaped eyes are devoid of humor.

“And so? The world is cruel! We must live in it.” Through the mess of possessions she whirls on the mazoi, feet splayed and copper-ridged spine leaping in justification of her work here!

Before her, the woman is unguarded. It is unquestionably strange to see her like this, and for the first time, Eset realizes the manic expression she sees every day is not the natural one. She stares into her steel eyes, trying to understand this other Legend, to puzzle out how she inhabits two selves.

But in the space between two breaths, the hebsut remembers herself again. A flicker of horror is followed by an apologetic veil of calm. The edge of her tail hovers nervously about her ankles.

“Forgive me,” she whispers, turning her eyes away.

All right things and none that would protect them from it. That was why the rules laid out were not for them to conform to when they bored of them. Life was more simple than complex strings leading them to even more complicated paths. Eset would learn what Legend long already had.

"That's why you grow cruel back."

She would wear Shuyet's fate like a collar.

"Yah know what you should do?" 

A pointed claw, and squinted eyes. Eset should follow in her path.

"One day, you should steal that power and turn it into somethin' even crueler. Make everyone else 'live in it'." 

Legend’s dogma is the absence of hope. Without a lowered head, Eset considers it, turning the words over in her mind like she would palm a jewel. Like a priestess would pour herself over walls of ancient scripture. She feels her wolf’s soul wither and shrivel, small and dry and perhaps never to feel dignity again.

This world could be beautiful. She wanted it to be beautiful.

But from the wilderness, the coyote called for her retribution.