taxonomites | oo3 → my heart heard it and all to pieces fell [ accidental visual / location: castello petrana ]

All Hallows Eve doesn't mean much to Petra, hailing as she does from Elenia and Deira and no place that celebrates this holiday; the festivities pass her by and she spends her evening in front of one of the library's fireplaces, not really reading and, by a certain point, almost dozing. The insulation of a sprawling castle's thick stone leaves her mostly unaware of what's going on outside her walls, and thus wholly unprepared for the footsteps that don't belong.

...it is moments later that the tablet is knocked on by her scrambling hands, wineglass shattered and spilled across the floor as she retreats from the fireplace and hits the table behind her with her back. Whatever she's reacting to is obscured by her skirts and the poor angle, but the high, harsh note of fear in her voice is unmistakable.

"-no, I don't understand, he wrote to me-" she flinches and the tablet is jolted again, and her voice is quieter when she continues moments later, lying, "No, I didn't, of course I didn't, why should I?"

What Petrana sees is this:

He is tall - above six foot but perhaps a shade less so than her own husband - and his cloak is folded over his arm. His hair is long and prematurely white, catching the firelight like a blasphemous halo and he smiles at her, with a distance in his eyes (almost black when he is lit from behind) that followed her for years after their parting. In her mind's eye he's still the poised madman of the downfall in his youth, not yet thirty and so cold, and to see him stroll into her library as though he owns it, as though he owns her and is merely returning to see to her health and loyalty, she's too thrown to see the discrepancy with even the time that passed before his death.

He speaks to her quietly, with narrow focus, and it might be puzzling to anyone observing how she could be jerked forward when it becomes clear, as she no longer blocks the view, that there isn't anyone in front of her - and yet the jet locket that she wears is broken and the snap of it has marked her neck. She hears his footsteps fading toward the door, and kneels in her pooled skirts to try, with shaking hands, to collect the beads that fell.

[visual]