Breakfast went surprisingly well. Once Artemisia slammed the book into Geon's forehead, there was no going back to the little chaos that had been brewing before. The demon looked at her as he toyed with one of the cookies the goat maid had brought, the demon's eyes were fully directed at her, not wanting to miss any measly movement from Artemisia.This was starting to get uncomfortable. The young woman knew she was beautiful, the fact that her hair was as light as a ray of sunlight was what caught her most attention, however, she had already gotten used to it as the years passed. And people didn't tend to look at her either as if she were the last meal they would have on earth, the thing that would satisfy the hunger of the person who imprisoned her with their eyes. The way Geon looked at her was a little scary.“Umn... So... What makes me so... appetizing to demons? Like, is everyone going to feel like eating me?” Artemisia asked as she flipped through a random book on Delfine's shelf
Geon looked at Artemisia as she raved again. The girl writhed and cried tears so dark that the demon could see stars shining in them, the cries of pain were somewhat disturbing, nor Leonore creating a magical field so that it did not scare the children.Soon, the demon saw the younger Nyx coming down the stairs. The child had the fire hair so the mother, and as she had explained how clan distinctions occur. Even though he had been with the Nyx for less than a year, Geon realized that the genetics of that family, in relation to the heirous witches, were incredibly strange. Ury, as the demon called the little girl, was only a few months old, but appeared to be a two or three-year-old baby. She went down the stairs with the delicacy of a kitten while scratching her eyes and muttering "Maman", that was enough for any hunger to disappear from the demon. When the baby finished going down the steps, she approached her mother, who was trying to reverse Artemisia's state of hallucination. In
"Galia is one of the most cursed territories since the Fall of the Stars over two thousand years ago. Amazingly, it's also one of the safest places, especially Lutetia, at least a hundred years ago."Leonore began to speak Artemisia trying to remember the history classes she had. She remembered very well that she had decorated the map of Galia on account of the properties of the Carmesim, who had many other names. But I couldn't really remember any class the tutor talked about the origin of the Carmesim. The only records they had were fifty years after the family's fame began."However, things began to get strange after a few decades of the arrival of the Carmesims. Demons and devils were seen much more easily, the river that cuts through the city began to spread such a dense and extensive mist. Everything began to change, but the only place that remained intact was the Hill of Stars, which is now your property."Artemisia looked closely at the woman, things weren't making much sense
Winter 05, 1861 I feel like I'm rotting in here. As soon as winter has arrived and Mom has already been buried, her jewels have been thrown by the coffin, buried more than three meters from the surface. But I can't let them be consumed by Mom's putrid body, they were gifts that Aunt Daisy left for me, they're mine by right and my mother had stolen them. I asked one of the gardeners to go to the mansion cemetery at the northern end of the property, but she's so afraid mom's going to fetch her tonight. Pathetic. I asked the other employees too, but they refused to help me too. I see no choice but to dig myself. Dad's not coming here anytime soon, right? He's having a great time with his mistress so he can worry about his only adult female daughter. According to him, before leaving, I'm "too big and fit enough to turn around." I wanted to spit on him. Anyway... I'm going to open Mom's grave myself and get my jewelry back.Winter 14, 1861 There's something about this
"To me, this mansion smells like sun. I can't explain why it smells like that, it's just sun. A yummy smell that wakes me up in the morning and lasts until I wake up the next day after a nightmare."Artemisia was hanging out with Geon at the botanical fair. Even if she was still digesting the new diet she would need to adopt, it wouldn't hurt to at least season the meat. Sure? She prayed to the gods that she didn't...The blonde looked at the demon who walked casually next to her, he looked at the stalls of the fair with the same fascination as a child. The impressed look attracted the sellers with various objects. One woman offered a necklace with an amethyst as big as a heart, another salesman stretched out before the two a ring with a sun inside the moon, it was really beautiful, but seven hundred thousand réis was definitely a joke. The ring clearly wasn't as real as he wanted to sell. At that moment, Geon was looking at glass sculptures as small as a coin. She had to admit
"I started dreaming recently, but not an ordinary dream. Like those we travel to places I can't even imagine if I ever set foot or if I can get back there. In my dreams I am a woman, as beautiful and bright as the sun. The skin so brown and golden that it looked like it was made of gold, but it was miserably thin. This woman looked like Mom before the earth started feeding on her. I miss Mom." Geon had left her alone in the mansion. Alone for long, tortuous minutes, Artemisia tried to distract herself so that that damn poem wouldn't echo into her mind again. It's been tortuous enough to live that, she wouldn't allow herself to remember. She kept the little paper in her dress pocket again, having taken it off to make sure it wasn't worse, mentally speaking, since her arrival. Luckily she hadn't gotten to that level yet.When it was close to 2 pm, the girl decided to wait for the demon, he had the power to appear the moment he wanted. If Geon wanted to show up in the l
"Once and again there was a woman, that said to me. This woman loved everything very much, loved everything. She loved the land she lived in, loved her house, loved her husband, loved the child she carried in her belly. She just didn't love not being able to do anything, not being able to fulfill the dreams she had lived in her womb for the longest time. She was young, but she lived in such misery."Artemisia had lost her hunger, seeing Geon made the fact that she would have to become a cannibal come back so hard that she felt slapstruck. So it just went towards the garden, obviously with a demon occupying the place of her shadow."Did you know that in the old day people believed that children came from the stars?" Geon asked as he looked up at the sky as clear as a candle."No" Artemísia responded in a tone that meant she wanted to stay in hers, watching the flowers that were born slowly.She heard the demon sigh loudly, but did not protest her decision. The two continued to
"Then the woman began to shed her own blood on the earth."The two arrived at a house that is so hidden between the walls and shops that if Geon hadn't explained to her that the restaurant was hidden by magic, the girl would be a little scared to have been taken to that end of the world. She still felt some of the pain she had experienced in the mansion garden, the urge to cry until her eyes fell was there, buried between her bones. But i was in public and with the makeup ready, I could cry at another time. She had learned one thing from all the hell that lived in mom's house: no matter how fucked up you are, always be elegant. Not elegant for society, elegant to yourself, there are already too many problems for you to care what others think. Then she started following it to the letter, even if they resulted in maids talking about a ghost who lived in the Noctavia attic.Geon got out of the car and opened the door for her with a shadow. She laughed when she heard the scream of a
Artemisia leaned her body against the chair entirely, the truth hurting more than she could have imagined. She could tell that the stages of grief hit her too fast, so the young woman was already in anger. An outsized hatred of herself. Artemisia knew it was deadly, she saw her father die, the nannies die, the plants, the animals. It was clear as the day that it was her curse, but knowing it was so painful that it made the young woman want to vomit up all the sweets she had eaten. Suddenly something hit her too, a memory that involved stories. It was almost like a blur, but if Artemisia tried hard, she could understand that it had been a dream, a strange and a little disjointed dream. In it were three books, each of which bore a strange memory of the young woman. The first was a debt, of this she remembered better than the others, the second was pure pain, the same pain she had felt when Leonore opened that book of leather red as blood. The young woman raised her face looking towa
To the young woman's surprise, that point of darkness at the botanical fair was not a stall, in fact it was the façade of a flower shop. It didn't look like a flower shop, the dark colors and faded designs gave the impression that this shop was abandoned or that it was an old tallow, which was shattering over time. Artemisia stood for a good few minutes admiring that black blur in the midst of so much light and color. The storefront somehow reminded the young woman of herself, perhaps for the colors and the more old-fashioned style. "Maybe because you don't belong there." Again, those voices spoke deep in the young woman's mind, teasing her to make something happen. Something she had no idea what it might be, but given the illusions, or events, that had intensified morbidly over the past two days. Either way, she decided to ignore that voice, just as she had been doing since the second time she heard it — or at least trying to ignore it. "Don't be offended by witches," a female
The rest of the day Artemisia remained only immersed in her own thoughts, especially after discovering that one of the culprits of her current state is dead. The young woman really wanted to feel guilty for killing someone. Well, she felt guilty, but for that particular someone, Artemisia couldn't feel any twinges of kindness or empathy. An old subject? Yes, but the pain did not age, it renewed itself again and again, remaining fresh. It was only because the young woman couldn't feel guilty for killing the woman, she was still trying to figure out how the hell she had done that, since it was supposed to be for Hyacinth to be immortal, from earth to earth, being in a vicious circle of life.As she pulled the covers so she could warm herself from the cold that was beginning to stick to Artemisia's bones, she could feel that there was so much more to it. How would she kill such an old being, when even Death herself couldn't do that? Artemisia didn't know much of that world she had been
"I was hoping this time it would work." Geon said as the shadows danced around the fireplace. Artemisia looked at the demon with a raised eyebrow, it was not impressive to the young woman that it had happened more times than she would have liked—that at the moment, within the will of the young woman, the amount of times her soul could possess people and kill the owners of the bodies was faithfully clinging to zero—but it was still a little curious to think that perhaps that possession had been the one that had worked out the best. Even if it was a slightly vague definition of what "getting it right" is. If Helleborus hoped to have one more chance at life, run through green fields in the spring, and remain reclusive in the arms of a loving family during the winter, Artemisia felt a little sad to give her the bad answer about the woman's choices. "What happened to the other times?" Artemisia asked as she shrunk her legs until she could hug them. The cold was beginning to affect the
She stood staring at the countertop, for several minutes her mind had begun to get unbearably high. Part of the young woman was trying to believe that Geon had never really said whether or not he knew about what happened to Artemisia, even before she was "born," it had said only a small omission, nothing that was important enough that it could hurt or give that nagging feeling of being deceived. On the other hand, the other voice that screamed in Artemisia's mind said how much she would have been spared from all that misfortune, would not have freed her from more than twenty years of such agony, but would have saved her long enough for the young woman to understand everything that had happened and had happened. She could taste the bitter taste of betrayal, that pungent thing that stuck to her taste buds and stayed there until the young woman went mad with so much bitterness. She wanted to believe that it would give the final card of her insanity, finally letting what was supposed to
“Oh, you are here.” The demon spoke when he finally saw the young man in the middle of the living room. "I went to let Leonore know we're here, I wouldn't want to have an angry witch running after me." He turned away from the window, heading towards the couch.There were a few suitcases occupying the piece of furniture, Artemisia was quick to recognize them as they were the same ones she had used when moving into the mansion, theoretically several weeks earlier, in what would have been the beginning of spring.The young woman wanted to laugh about it, minutes after listening to the creature's whole lecture about the weather, she would be seeing the suitcases she had used to store some things before leaving her mother's house, it would be winter again, as it had been a season before.“I'll prepare lunch for you, apparently your body can't go too long without food. Try to find something warm to wear, Leonore's clan is looking for what could have caused this regretful winter.” Geon said
Maybe having followed that entity was a bad idea, but giving up in the middle of that situation seemed a bit extreme to do. Artemisia looked at the white immensity as she walked with that being, each step made her regret her decision even more, it was a bad choice.And then there was the fact that she was the one who wanted to find out more about the family curse, abandoning that would be an extremely shameful sign of cowardice. The only one to blame for being in that situation was Artemisia, the creature being there or not was just a curious part of the consequence.“You've heard his whole story, haven't you?” a creature asked as they stopped in front of a flower bed full of tulips."Yes." The young woman smiled, looking closely at the small flowers that grew amidst the blanket of snow. She had heard of these things before, flowers that bloomed during the winter, growing through the snow and into the dim sunlight. Artemisia didn't know how to explain it very well, but that vision ma
The moment Artemisia left that eye-filled place, the cold of the sudden winter hit her like an arrow. The whole green field that the young woman had seen through the window was now a white immensity. The story Tinea told her the day before sounded again, all over again, it was already starting to irritate Artemisia. She just wanted to live miserably well, she didn't want to have to go through it all and know that when she finally got rid of that life, the young woman's soul would still beg for death for the last life. She could be absolutely sure that everything would be repeated again, from the days in the snow to begging an immortal woman for the gift of being reborn. The young woman looked for somewhere to sit, some corner that wasn't fully covered in snow, which was a somewhat impossible request. The white robe doubled in size with each passing minute, Artemisia could feel the skirt start to get hard and icy, no longer able to have the same movements as a normal skirt. But she w
If someone told Artemisia that one day she would wake up in the middle of winter, she would believe it. Which might be surprising, but even then, the young woman would trust the words of the person she told her that. It didn't need to explain in more detail, to say how one day the sun burned and the next day it was cold as a curse, the young woman would believe it. It was funnier that way. What's more, so many things had happened to the young woman that this would be just another normal day. Artemisia was willing to ask Geon again if he was hiding anything from her, it was clear as a crystal, at the moment the night before she had asked the demon, his expression could not be the best. Something inside the young woman said he was lying. She could call it something over-suspicious, perhaps. Artemisia went to sleep with Tinea's voice explaining to her about the flower that insisted on keeping in her life, but carrying an extensive secret like an apron, the young woman also woke up he