Beyond the Saga "Death and the Maiden" / Mod!Challenge

Title: Death and the Maiden
Genre: Domestic Gothic Awful
Timeframe: A long, long, long time after the saga
Characters: Original

*Written for the Something Borrowed, Something New mod!challenge. I chose to go with Tier Two, and of my assigned five prompts, I managed to include four of them for certain. I didn't quite land the "Chronically Late" requirement--if they're late as a chronic issue, it's just for one day--but I got perhaps at least 1/3rd of it.

Spoiler

Trope: Moment Killer
Words: Aversion, Caustic, Threshold
Dialogue: "Or maybe it was just my imagination."
Random Story Element: Chronically Late
Picture:

*This story is actually a sequel/companion story to my still-progressing, and hence unposted, story for the Remembering Romanticism Challenge. I realize it's "back asswards" to post this one first, but, well: it had a deadline, and the other one does not.

*As it has turned out rather longer than I expected (or has any right to be), I have split it up into two posts.

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Death and the Maiden


It hadn’t been my intention to make a late arrival. But when I walked into the square, I was the only person present in the otherwise hollow-echoing empty space. The last one to show, minutes after the others had left upon their journeys. I stopped. The ground, the bonemoon white pavement tiles, was hard underneath my feet. I don’t usually go about barefooted, and although my heels are rough as old fir bark, I was learning at some length just how tender-skinned and soft my exposed feet were. The paving scratched at my soles, and I clenched my toes as best I could before I took the next step forward. Then I made myself take another one.

There wasn’t any escape from my situation, and I knew that: as I had known since I learned I was chosen to be one of the maiden candidates It was the one echoing-back thought I had left during the last hours of the night. The night (which had been potentially, believe it or not, some of the last hours of my life) had been a long stretch of darkness I could hide inside, but it couldn’t last.

Before long, I woke up again, for the last time, to see the fragile raingrey light outside the window across the room from my bed. My stomach was full of heavy sloshingwet rags, and there was a sour metal taste in my mouth.

As I walked on through the square, one carefully chosen step at a time, I was aware of the skirts of my dress rustling, the tulle petticoats scratching at me with kitten nails, about my cold legs. It was the most elaborate dress I have ever had the chance to wear: a watersilk frock with a boned sweetheart waist and flowing heavy skirts. Sady, it was also, as per the tradition, a hardbright white. White as river lilies, white as ghost skin, white as a virgin-politician's breath trapped in a bottle. I wouldn’t say I dislike the color, but it’s not one I want to wear, and that’s regardless of whether or not it suits me.

Personally, and I think my opinion here means something, I think it doesn’t. My mother might have assured me, with Finette’s assistance, that I looked fine, “oh just perfectly lovely”--but that is what they were determined to think, and it has little relation to the truth.

There was no one else in sight, and I couldn’t hear even the whisper of other human voices, as I crossed through the southern gate, and over the threshold of the side avenue, beginning the long crooked route to the governmental palace. I hadn’t been to this part of the city for some time, and the road had been repaved, with stickyblack gravel. I looked back, one last time, at the wind-twisted trees of the archway, and the twin marble owl sprites with their wings thrust rampant against the sky.

The sprites have always struck me as looking like matrons, with their round faces and large hooded eyes and flat curly waves for hair. I don’t think that was what the sculptor intended, though, so it could just be what I see. They have bared full round breasts, but in the fashion of the first empire art I have seen at the old art museum, the sculptor avoided giving them nipples.

Slowly, inevitably, I continued on my way down the street. The pavement looked flat, but it felt rough underneath my feet, with pebbles prodding, with sudden unpredictable punched-hard jolts, at my soles. I was even aware of every mote of loose dirt grit.

My breath rustled as I exhaled, and I could feel the fist of my heart pounding.

Don’t think too much, I heard rather than thought in an inane plea that couldn’t leave the confines of my head. Think when you must think just enough--

I stepped down on a smooth round rock, and jerked back, the resulting pain flushing up my legs. I continued walking by instinct alone.

Since I’m writing this down after the fact, in the past tense, you already know that I am still alive, that I was not the maiden chosen to die wearing the Queen’s face, thus (allegedly, though you had best not ever indicate this) keeping her alive for another seven years. For which I am obviously glad. I’m not at all the selfless nurturing sort, ready to part with her very breath for someone more worthy of it. Since I am usually quiet about it—unlike the man who is my father—too many people I know choose to believe otherwise. That isn’t to say I left that night at peace with the universe, and I know why.

I walked on down the street, turning at the crossing with the main avenue at the doorside wall pillars to make a detour through one of the farming neighborhoods. The footpath was plastered with thick paper layers of dead brown and copper-red orange leaves, and the air smelled of smoke. Most of the residents were gone working the harvest, but I heard the shiver-slap of a window overhead, and then a woman’s murmuring velvet-plush voice. I ignored her. I didn’t so much as look up--to see her pretend, per the custom, that she couldn’t see me.

My stomach had calmed some, but it was still tensed with a swollen full swaying. I pressed my right arm across it, as though I were holding it in place. It gave a sighing oily snarl, but only once. More importantly, and ever increasing in pressure, I had to urinate. Thanks to the ritual fast, I hadn’t anything to drink for hours, and I still had to go. I could only clench my thighs rigidly tight as I went on.



According to the rules of storytelling as I have learned them, I should provide some background so the hypothetical future reader will understand what happens. I should have already done so, but I’m making the attempt now. There’s only one problem: I don’t know how to go about telling you a story I have always known. Let alone so you’ll understand it. Maybe this will work. When I had recently turned six years old, the same year I learned to read with such ease and speed I could have learned earlier, I watched from the streetside window in the kitchen as a succession of big girls--all as looming tall as trees and pretty, their hips swaying in their white gowns, and crowns of flowers growing on their heads--walked past. It felt as though I had woken up in another dream.

I went to go outside to see what was going on. But I had no sooner touched the door handle when my mother (who was lurking behind me at the table, nursing the enfant Martes) spoke, her voice cracking through the silence that had taken over the house: Don’t go out there.

Of course, I began to cry, leaking sudden weak tears. My mother sighed, and then told me, more or less: It’s the midautumn ritual. This is your first one, so I suppose you wouldn’t know what’s going on. I don’t really know how to tell you. Your father can probably do a better job.

It was about the Queen—the girl-child god who sits upon the throne below us on Naboo, who I had been taught lived only and ever to serve the masses of her people, including those of us here on Rori. I didn’t remember what her name is, though, which made my father proud. There was a time, ages and ages ago, before time as we know it, when we were all under attack from the Chommell Republic armada. They had already taken Theede, and had their war headquarters in the palace, forcing the Queen and her court into hiding in the forests outside the city.

But she returned, making her way through the streets barefoot, her exposed hair let loose down her back, to confront the man who had claimed her throne. Prepared to sacrifice her life, or her intact virginal status, to him. Whatever it was he required.

I don’t know if she would have gone through with it, because she didn’t have to: her most loyal maiden, the foundling girl who was brought up with her but was always her attendant, and never her sister, had already arrived in the throne hall as the Queen. She cut her own throat in front of the admiral before he so much as realized she had a knife hidden in her skirts. Those who were there claimed that little white firestained flowers grew from her blood. That they opened their petals and sang as the only true Queen walked in. The armada abandoned the planet that very day.

My father explained, with my mother providing assistance: since then, every seven years, a group of thirteen girls are selected to repeat the Queen’s walk, and of them, one will be chosen to take on her appearance, and her role, for the midautumn festivities.

When I asked them what happened next, I was young enough that I didn’t predict the answer. My father has an aversion to pretty lies. He told me the truth: She dies. She dies because the Queen is too good for death, but she isn't.

The Queen cannot die. That is the reasoning, and the point. But it isn’t just any girl who can take her place. She must be one of the best: the top girl in her class, with a shining intellect, who still remains pure and naïve at heart. There aren’t many girls who fit that description here.

When another seven years passed, I wasn’t worried about being chosen. I’m no one special, even if I did finish my last term at college with unusually high marks. I did have that essay published in the arts journal, and I have my activities with Julian’s troupe, but those are not the accomplishments they’re known to look for. Moreover, I’m nineteen, which should have made me safely too old.

Then the palace messenger came to my parents’ door, and insisted on handing the notice to me, and only me. It was addressed to “the sixth daughter of Amidala Sjostrand and Cinna Blood,” without any mention of my actual name. I read through it several times, my mind numbed over, but the words didn't ever change. I was chosen for the greatest honor, for both Rori and our motherworld Naboo.

There was one benefit, even if it meant less and less to me as the days before midautumn raced away into the past. I have confirmation that I am, regardless of whether or not I feel it, objectively more than good looking. The maiden candidates are always beautiful. Well, obviously.



When I entered the kitchen that morning in my glaring white dress, I made it obvious what we all knew: things were not, and could not be, as normal. Twelve and Hansel hunched over their plates as they picked at their breakfasts, the clockwork ticking of their forks echoing loud. They didn’t know what to say, and that was fair: neither did I. I stood there at the back of the room by the heat vent for several long delaying moments, for as long as I could. My stomach thrashed with thick boiling-hard bubbles, and I wasn’t even remotely interested in eating. My flower crown had already tilted loose. My mother came hovering over and offered to fix it for me, and most unusually for me, I allowed it.

My father came into the room. That wasn’t like him: on holidays, he doesn’t usually make his appearance in the world until over an hour into the afternoon. He squinted in the raw grey light, so he had certainly been out for his nighttime activities. But he looked put together, and he wore a fresh, if subdued black, frockcoat from the cavedark depths of his wardrobe.

He went straight to the cupboard, and my mother rushed to fetch up the windowglass jug of black tea from the side counter. They proceeded to act out a pantomime in which she made to take his mug and he tried to ascertain if there was any oat porridge left. He ended the silence first when he hissed through his teeth, and she set the jug down with a slam. Suit yourself, she would have said on any other day. As it was, I could almost hear her thinking it.

Once he managed to get his repast together, he sat down at the far end of the table. It was only then that he looked at me, with an expression I had never before seen on him. This was a side of him I hadn‘t known existed, and I gave in to my impulse to look away, turning to the window. There was a blur of inkdark blue from one of the woodjays, and I was glad for the distraction.

Cinna Blood stares people down, point blank and without blinking, without mercy. He knows the people here tend to gawk at him (inspired by either his dress, or his reputation), and he makes certain that he’s the one to stare first. He is not melancholy, or worse still, earnest.

It was my responsibility to speak first, and so I did: --How are you doing, Dad?

--Prepared to endure another day, he said. Twelve turned her attention on him with a predictable smoldering dark glare, but he didn’t seem to see her, much less ignore her, as he picked up the cream pot. --One can’t ask for much more than that.

--No, you can’t, I said. No one needed to tell me what I hadn’t forgotten. It was time, and past time, that I left to endure my walk. My skirts sighed with a sound like fire eating through paper as I went to the door. I looked back into the room, and: --Well then, I said. I’m off to face my fate.

Twelve lifted her hand in a snapped-smart salute. --Good luck.

--Don’t worry, I said. If they do choose me, I shan’t make it easy for them. I’ll make a mess of their stupid ritual. I’ll smile right in the Princess’s face before I spit on her.

My mother shook her head in the background, but Twelve and Hansel reacted as I had known they would. Hansel smirked with approval, and Twelve pumped her fist, strengthening her (mean yet dainty) bicep in one of her exaggerated poses. My father only looked at me with one of his punching-hard stares, and when he spoke, I was forewarned:

--That’s very bold of you. But in the end, I’m afraid you’re too conventional to actually have that much nerve. I glared back at him, my teeth shut on my protesting thoughts, as he continued. --You’ll follow their rules like everyone else. They knew that much when they picked you.



Soon enough, too soon for my liking, I was walking down Pascale Street. The trees were full of shivering golden apple leaves, and on occasion, the wind would shake them down in a drift of piano-plinked notes. I was glad of the bland cloudgrey paving. My feet were sore enough that I thought I must surely have several torn bleeding cuts, but when I lifted my right foot to check, there was not even one smear of blood. The skin was battered, but intact. And oh yes, I very much needed to piss. The urge had become a high-pitched squeal as I walked, and walked, as though I could just walk away from it. I could feel the swollen-fat weight of my bladder looming down.

The bridge crossing on Duck Creek was just in view up the street, and I was ready, and prepared, to go down onto the grasses near the banks where I could go in hidden peace. I forced myself to hurry my walk into a trot, my steps blurring together. There wasn’t time to bother with dignity, not when I was this close to wetting myself in that dress.

Thankfully, no one interfered as I went out into the scratching sun-dried grass, and pulled up my skirts out of the way, in a sloppy heap up to my shoulders. The creek slid past behind me, with a laughing tumbling sound, and I stayed where I was until my thighs were sore, and I had to stand. I went over to the bank and hovered over the bank to splash the shallow water over my hands.

The bridge tensed with the thumping of wheels passing over, and moving on.

It is the responsibility of the poet—and that can include the writer of prose—to see things in close relentless detail, as though you’ll never see them again: the cold water sighed against my skin. It slipped through my fingers and back into the air, and scattered back into the creek.

 

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After I left Pascale Street, I needed but another few minutes to reach the grandfather tree at the side of the parkland, with the troupe’s castle just ahead on the other side of the street. Both places, which I know, and had visted multiple times before, had turned strange. I don’t know how else to describe it. The castle was faded back like a dream, the windows glowing empty with light. The evergreen fir grove across the park meadow was a dark sharptoothed wall against the sky. But however I saw it, I still knew the place, and the grove offered another excuse to delay myself. I could hide there for a moment, for a few minutes, inside the trees’ shadows. I was about to do so. But then I heard the approaching presence of another person: a door smacking shut, and the branch snapping creak of a gate hinge. I turned (slowly, as though I was turning over a deadleaf page in a book I already knew) to see who it was.

But no, it wasn’t Gunnar, which has usually, per my luck, been the case. Julian had just closed the black salvaged iron gate behind him, and was crossing the road. He hadn’t noticed me yet, so I could watch him, the only one present who saw. He was wearing his long silk thin black raincoat, and he hunched his shoulders in against the wind I couldn’t quite feel, just as I hadn’t realized that the limon-sweet sunshine was that cold.

He had a dried root brown cigaretta readied and pinched between his fingers, and when the wind smacked his hair across his face, he spat it away. His footsteps echoed closer in my ears, as though my very hearing had sharpened. His tread had a dance to it, a particular rhythm distinctive to him, that must have always been there, but that I hadn’t before been able to know.

Then he came into the space underneath the tree with me. I don’t know what I have said to announce my presence, but he spoke first. He looked straight at me without surprise, as if he had known already, because he had been looking, that I was there.

His mouth twitched, but he didn’t quite smile. --Caterina, he said. I hope you don’t mind sharing your tree with me?

He spoke my name in his usual lingering way. That I had noticed before, more than once, and I haven’t figured out any explanation for it. If there is an explanation, that is: maybe he only just likes the way it sounds, the way it looks in his mind. Maybe that is all it has ever been.

--You shouldn’t be talking to me, I said: starting the obvious and unnecessary, and I knew that even as I spoke. But those were the only words I could manage to say.

He shrugged, his cigaretta swaying from between his teeth, and bent his head down to light it up. Once he exhaled his first gust of smoke, he said. --Then let us exist in silence.

That was fine with me. He leaned back against the trunk, the heavy branches swaying just over his head, covering him in shadow. I could just see his hand, and his pale sharp fingers, as he lifted the hot rosebud glow of his cigaretta to his mouth. He stared out across the street, and I watched with him. I wanted to sit down. I wanted to fall down, to let my legs collapse, and rest forever in the smashed flower cushion of my skirts. I wanted to go inside, into the warmth of a closed room with walls between my future and me. I wanted him to ask invite me to come in with him, and-- Well, I wanted.

The moment we were in was racing past. I could feel it slipping away into the past, into memory. I wanted to speak, but I had to be careful. Otherwise, I might say something I would live on to regret with flushed-hot cringing in the darkest hours of the morning.

It would be sincere, the bleeding truth, and hence, the worst thing I could tell him: You’re the last person I want to see before I die.

When I did end the silence by speaking, I affected an arch tone: --When I heard you at the gate just now, I thought it was Gunnar poised and ready to bombard me.

-- And then you received me instead. You’re welcome, he said.

He smashed the hot stub of his cigarette into the dirt underneath his boot heel. But though it was time, he didn’t make to leave. He stopped in front of me, so close my breath paused. I was too much aware of just how much air existed between us, and how easy it would be to cross. I looked back at him as I waited, at his winterpale eyes, his slightly chapped-dark lips, the tiny rosepink pimple on the side of his right cheek. I could smell his warm musky aftershave cologne. He offered me a wispy ghost smile, and I let my shoulders droop, the fist-clenched muscles sighing. You could say I relaxed.

--There’s something I want to tell you, he said. Oh, I know. This isn’t the best time for my confessions. But it’s a time, and--I don’t know when there will be another chance.

--If this is about Hansel, I said. You can just tell him whatever it is yourself. There should be a chance for that sometime in the near future.

--It hasn’t anything to do with him. He leaned in closer, ever closer, to me: and I had to physically control myself from embracing the next move. --It’s just--

He couldn’t be about to tell me, to confess before it was too late, that he fancied me. That he wanted me as he hoped I wanted him. It wasn’t possible. I couldn’t allow myself to think it was. After all (and as I write, I am doing so to remind me of this even now) I don’t know what his amorous preferences are, and if he even wants women in that way.

(Though I’m hopeful he wouldn’t have taken that moment, of all times, to tell me: There’s something I want you to know about me I don‘t want it to be a secret with my friends, and I think we are friends But I prefer men and only men You know, like your dad.)

And then: there came a loud thrashing noise in the trees behind us, followed by another explosive crash, and another, moving through the grove. A girl in a bright salt-white gown, with thick puff-backed tulle petticoats, a dress exactly like mine, came out into the open. The sunlight rested in the flower crown perched in her glossy fire-orange hair. She held up her skirts around her knees with her fingertips as she came towards us in a tiptoeing trot, and once she was in conversation range, she opened her mouth. She was going to say whatever she wanted.

--Caterina! the girl, who I could now recognize as Janné Wilsdottar said. She came to a stop, and let her skirts sink back down. --Caterina. Do you want to be late? Because you are.

Despite her familiar address, I wouldn’t say that I know Janné at all well. She is seventeen, two years behind me, but she’s in my same year at college, and she is also applying for the university lottery. She was in my philosophy class winter term, which is how I met her. But I hadn’t seen her since I went to hand in my final essay, and we were never acquainted well enough to be friends.

When I smiled, it felt caustic: so bitterly-mean it could burn through iron. --Actually, I planned exactly that. I had hoped it would be obvious.

She chose to ignore that. She glanced down at my dirt-bruised hem, and I was surprised when she didn’t give a dainty resigned sigh. As my mother, as my eldest sisters, would have. --Good on you, she said. I’m just late through the force of my own incompetence.

She turned the force of her attention on Julian, who was watching on in amused silence, his (dark trickster crooked) eyebrows at attention. --You don’t have to laugh, you know.

That was when, of course and inevitably, Gunnar appeared on the scene. --Hey, Julian, he said (thrusting his long face, and loud shaggy voice, forward). --What are you up to with those two girls? Do you mind if I have one of them?

--You wouldn’t know what to do with them, Julian said, with the knife-sharp taunting smirk that both Gunnar and I recognized. --So the answer to that is no, Gunnar.

Gunnar drew back in a mumbling sulk, but he didn’t leave. Of course not: it takes far more than a few sharp words to do that. That’s what you think, I heard. No you get off the stage.

But I let his voice fade away into the background air as I turned back to Julian. I didn’t know what expression to show him, and so I only spoke. --I have to go now.

--I know. He bowed to me, sweeping down low with his arm out, and then turned to Janné and repeated the gesture for her. She gave forth a startled giggle-snort. He straightened up, and stepped back across the street. His shoulders were down again, and he shoved his hands away into his pockets. But when he spoke, he was the bard in the oldest oldest stories: --Be bold, oh fair and clever maidens. Be terrible, and make them quake at the sound of thy lioness footfalls...

As we walked away down the street, Janné leaned in to say, in a secret-breathing whisper: --He was not at all pleased when I showed up. I must have fairly ruined your moment. It was so obvious that, you know, he has a thing for you.

--That was just your imagination, I said.

--Right. Or maybe it was just my imagination, she said.

She must have wanted to comment further (Oh don’t be so modest, Caterina/why shouldn’t he feel such for you/if he doesn’t, that’s his loss), but she let it go. We continued on our way in silence. I stared out ahead into the distances waiting beyond the town, to the whiteglowing Dawnbreak Pillars, and up the sloping hillside behind them, to the row of tall guardian trees in marching order at the top. I wanted to go there. I wanted to be there.

But I was too heavy, too weighed down as a physical body, to vanish, to fly through the wind up to stand with those trees, and be safe. I continued to walk, trapped where I was, my feet humming with a number of stonepunched pains. Janné reached through the space between us, and took my hand up in hers. Her skin was cold, a shock of rainwater ice, as cold as mine had to be. But soon, I felt the warm blood underneath.

This was it then, the moment I had tried to avoid: thus connected, her fingers locked into mine, we went up one of the hillside paths to meet up with the main avenue, and from there, to the royal mall with the skygrey mountain of the palace standing resplendent, dominating, beyond it.



Oh, I am no poet, nor am I able to be one, but still: I call upon their art to write of the truth that is beyond beauty and hope, that you know when you walk through the dreamspace left when you’re in exile from your own life, alone with the voice in your mind. But that is all you need.


Remember: as long as you think, and know the voice of your thoughts, you know you exist outside the image others see.


There’s a part of you that believes that somehow, however improbable it might be, your thoughts will continue to exist after your death. That they must do so. They can’t possibly remain trapped, and silent and unknown, inside the room of your skull.


Yes, even that Queen, the woman whose name was lost endlessly long ago to the darkness. As she walked through the bombed ruins of the streets, she left her thoughts to drift behind her. That is how the poets, and their audiences know, she believed she would soon cease to be. Her mind, and then her body, blurred until she could only feel the air around her. This will all end soon.



Along with Janné, I was the last of the candidates, the thirteenth one, to reach the end of the journey at the mall. The other girls, the maidens made identical in their white dresses and wounded pale flowers, were already stationed all in a row with the starved thin thornshrubs alongside the walk, with haughty wooden-doll faces. They didn’t seem aware of the growing, hovering crowd as people arrived to play their own parts as the night’s audience. Janné left me to take her place in line. I saw her as she walked off, and then she was gone. I stood where I was just under the shadow of the entry archway while the people around me flowed like a creek, going on about their business. They couldn’t see me--and that meant that whatever I did now, they wouldn’t stop me.

Before I could think too much about it, I had acted, and made my exit in the space between two of the shrubs, the needles swishing over my face like broom straws, and out of sight. There was an old hole in the pavement, so I took the old gravel-stone service road that climbs further up the hillside, the way back through the oldest classical age ruins, past the Dawnbreak Pillars, and into the wilds proper. If I could make it that far: and I was light enough now, my skin blurring away, that I felt as though I could get there by my thoughts alone, the way you fly in dreams.

A household group of farm workers came into view up the road, their voices running ahead of them. The loose gravel crunching underneath their strong armored boot heels. They saw me, though they all made certain to look away, off to the side, or behind them, once they saw I was watching them, not daring to so much as meet me in the eye.

Then a man’s voice spoke just behind me, the attack I had been braced, my shoulders rigid stone-wood, against happening. --Mam. You need to come with me.

--Why exactly do I need to do that? I said, and only then did I turn on him.

He stood several discreet feet away from me, his pale silkglove hands folded in front of him. He was taller than I am, and thin with bony hips (like a little boy a little girl), the male physique I would usually find attractive. But he seemed shorter. He had thin whispyfluffed auburn hair, and doleful wood-brown eyes, and his bright black shoes were slightly dulled with graveldust. But despite his demeanor, he still knew how to give me an order, and he returned my gaze without moving. He had full command of the space he had taken up as his own.

The answer was obvious, but he still told me as if I might not know: --You still yet have a role to play today. Now come. I will not leave without you.

--You heard him when he said it the first time, missy, one of the workers said, while the others supported her with gleeful approval. (They were breaking a nigh on sacred law, and right in the face of a governmental man). --Go on and be a good girl.

--You’re welcome to show me how, I said. It was easier than I had ever found it to be to know what I wanted to say, and then fling it forth. Because I had faded faraway enough from the world, from the life I had walked away from that morning, that there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t. There weren’t any consequences that could control me. Moreover, I just didn’t care. --Go on. I’ll watch.

They all laughed, a chorus of knowing impressed hahahas, but I didn’t take my attention away from the man whose name I never did know. When I stepped closer towards him—rather than giving in and backing away—he tensed against me. Literally: I could feel the muscles in his back tighten, as he readied himself for what only I could know was next.

And oh yes, as it happened, I did know. --No. I’m done. If you’re so dead set on bringing them one final little lost maiden, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Oh, I know!

Everyone—and I was aware, at the edge of my consciousness, that other people, first a couple of stragglers, and then more and more, were coming over from the mall, from the hillside paths, to see just what was up—was watching me. They were all listening.

The man, the palace android, the Princess’s own fetch-me boy, looked on without any reaction. I wanted to punch that relentless bland smug expression off his face. I had my right hand already locked into a fist against the side of my skirts. But I don’t have a good track record when it comes to fights, and I knew I wouldn’t succeed in so much as touching him. I would have to go with another sort of assault. My breath was flying wild as I exhaled.

(Yes, I can admit that I thought distinctly, as though he could possibly hear it and know: Oh I’ll show you, Dad. They were wrong. I can break every rule when it matters.)

--Here. You can have this dress to start with. I started unfastening the long row of tooth white lake pearl buttons on the bodice, my fingers stumbling. --If you show up in this, they’ll have their maiden. You’ll do a better job of it than I ever would.

Having thus began, I continued to strip: I made my way, clawing and thrashing forth, from the dress as I pulled it back up and over my head. One of the seams broke open with a pleasing crack. Once I was free, I shook my head, scattering the pale moth-drifting petals from my crown. Then I threw the wadded up cloud of the dress at the government man. It landed straight in his chest, and slid down into a fainted heap at his feet. Someone in the audience laughed.

But I wasn’t finished yet. I pulled up off the rasping petticoats, and the silk underslip, with fine whitework embroidery that no one else was supposed to see. I kicked them across the road. It felt as though I was tearing off my skin, rather than just removing the clothing I covered it with, but I didn’t stop. I took off my chemise. I took off my underwear.

--Oooooh, a boy said near the front of the crowd. It sounded like Gunnar, and that was because it was Gunnar: I could just see him as a blur at the corner of my eye.

My body wasn’t the blank page marble forms the sculptors of old gave the owlsprites, or the moon maidens, or the trickster-girls in their armored skirts. I was flushed feverwarm, and I could feel the heat glowing like lamplight off my skin. My breasts swayed as I straightened up again, and for good, and tossed my underwear onto a torn rumpled pile of flowers.

After a moment, I could feel it as I blended into the air around me. Oh, I wasn’t invisible, the color of nothing: the others present could still see me, and they still remember me. (As Rose would say later: “Oh, they’ll tell their grandchildren about this someday”) But I was safe I was close enough to flying off that they could no more touch me than they could the air.

The audience had begun to disperse, with most of the people wandering back to the mall, back to the assigned festivities. The governmental man was already gone. The air brushed me in a light silken scarf breeze, and the hairs on my arms stood up bristling and strawsharp at the chill. I folded my right arm over my breasts, and pressed my thighs together.

Julian and Gunnar walked up to me. Gunnar was grinning, and I could well imagine what he wanted to say, but Julian shut him up with a fierce snapped look. --Good show there, he said.

--Ah, thank you. You can even take some of the credit if you want, I said.

He only smiled, slightly and wryly, and refrained from comment. He looked me in the eye, without any nervous blushing: even though I stood before him naked, my true skin revealed. He took off his coat and handed it over to me, and I accepted it. It was loose on me, but I’m tall enough that I only had to roll up the cuffs a few times. I picked up my underthings, and Gunnar went over and snatched up the dress. The man hadn’t bothered to take it back with him.

As we walked back up the hillside path, Julian put his arm around me, and I let myself lean in against his shoulder. It took some of the weight off the heartbeat-throbbing pain in my feet. Gunnar took up the rear, still holding his collapsed girl-ghost prize of the dress.

We hadn’t gotten far when Janné came down the path to meet us, along with another girl I hadn’t ever seen before. -It’s all right, Caterina. You can come back. They’ve chosen the decoy-maiden.

--Oh, I said. That was all I could say at first, as the muscles in my legs turned to so much mud, and I had to force myself to remain upright. --Oh. Do either of you know her?

Janné shook her head, and turned to the other girl standing next to her. She was dark, with black-as-midnight hair in braided loops, and she looked painfully young. As though her face truly was a “newly opened flower.” --Doesn’t she go to your school, Druzella?

--She does, but I wouldn’t say I know her, Druzella said. She isn’t in my year, and she’s on the senate track. You know what that means.

We all knew exactly what it meant. There was a boom overhead, like the echo of a blast-rifle shot cracking open the sky, and I startled back. But it was only the opening fireworks. As I watched, another spark flew into the air above the palace, and erupted into a shower of golden burning birds with fevered ruby eyes. The girl who had already lost her name, even though she still lived, had taken the throne. Underneath the whine of the fireworks, I could hear the sound of cheering.

I don’t know who she was, but I know what she had become: She wore the bloodbright red dress with firebug lights a-glow on the skirts, the sleeve cuffs trimmed with stolen nightdark soft fur. The pearl crown was perched on her fine ordinary brown hair. She smiled down, upon the masses of people she couldn’t quite see, at her people, with her new face.


After all that, and in the end, I get to continue on with my life. I returned home that night, along with the crowded group of my family, and back to my tower room. I went back to my studies as I prepare for the lottery-test, for my one great go at getting into one of the universities. I finished with the novel I had been reading. Since I was still on break, I commenced reading another one. I still don’t know what Julian feels for me, even as I spend hours of time assisting him on the stage set for the troupe’s upcoming production. And when I’m alone at night in my room, with my desk lamp throwing light on the walls, I have written this as a story.

I sat out the rest of the festivities. While the fireworks danced in the sky over the mall, and the crowds talked in a ceaseless rainstorm buzz, I sat on the old woodstone wall in front of the Jedi temple. The local Master and Paddywan were at the mall, where they would observe the proceedings. The temple was just another part of the darkening night.

Twelve came to find me there after her dance company’s performance. She sat down on the wall, hoisting her bronze silk skirts, with thick auburn leaves on the peeking underskirt, up to her thighs. (And just as it was with more than a few of our birthdays, I liked her costume far more than mine.) She gave me a little drawstring bag of canela sugardrops, and I popped two of them in my mouth and smashed them down between my teeth. I wasn’t hungry, but I appreciated the sweet burning taste. I swung my legs back and forth, brushing the stones with my heels.

We sat in silence for a few minutes before she spoke. --I heard all about what happened. Though I don't know that I believe everything Gunnar says. Did you really strip completely naked?

--Yes, I said. You can tell Dad it's all true. As it turns out, I do know how to rebel.

--The old man doesn’t know what he’s talking about she said. Her face, with the lilywhite powder and garnet-bruised eyes, had an emerald tint as the motherworld swung up higher in the sky. The fireworks crashed again. --As usual.

I was still wearing Julian’s coat buttoned up over my royal underslip. It had smelled like him at first (like his skin, like his cologne) but before long, too soon for my liking, I couldn’t pick up his scent anymore, and now the coat only reminded me of myself. My mother had given me a pair of laceknit grey stockings her one friend provided, so my feet were more or less warm. I wasn’t looking forward to the trip home. I wouldn’t be able to wear shoes for another two days.

When you’re a little kid, you still ask the questions everyone else knows have answers that are not truly answers, as they cannot be spoken aloud.

I still don’t understand—not so I can believe it, as a truth beyond the stories—and that might be because I don’t know what happened, long ago, before the beginning.

Why was the Queen barefoot: Because the Chommell guards had taken her shoes, and the drooping shadows of her stockings, away from her. Thinking that alone would keep her trapped in place. But oh, they didn’t know--they could not so much as guess--what she could endure.

What did she do when she saw her maiden lying dead: Her maiden who was her one true sweet friend, and her lover. She collapsed down onto her knees. Her mind was full of a howling wind that ripped her thoughts into shreds. Her face broke apart as she wept.


While I sat on that wall hidden away in the velvet-thick darkness, as I continued to live, my heart beating its relentless rhythm, the girl in the bleeding-red dress left the throne, and walked across the lawn to the temple hidden in the aspen grove. The two moon-maiden statues—those girls with powerful thighs and dancing braids and flat chests under their armored chemises—stood over her with the trees as she took up the moon-sickle knife. As she held it up into the light reflected from dead Veruna, she heard herself swallow a mouthful of spit for the last time. She spent her final thought on her true Queen: the girl she could but imitate, who needed her to accept her death. Then she made her move.

Death came to guide her away, and she squeezed her eyes shut (like a little girl, like a child, who hides from the world in darkness)--and accepted his hand, his cold, oh so cold, bony twig fingers, in her own. She didn't dare to let go.’

He is her bridegroom. She has never been kissed, nor even thought of kissing anyone, before this, and he is her very first and her last. When he kisses her, it is but a breath of dank burial cave air against her mouth. She finds that she likes it.

But that girl down in the high palace on Naboo, the girl who is always dressed in blood, is not a god. Someday, like every other Queen who has worn her face, and been called by her name, she will fall to the fate of all life. She will die.


The bards of the oldest times knew that: when they sang the story of her death before the Queen, her whitedoll face cracked in half, and there was naught but blackness behind it.


It’s a dream, and only a dream, that you escape from back into the world of your bedroom, back to your knowing mind: your face wet with confused soft tears, though you don’t remember weeping. You can believe me. If it isn’t the truth, it should be.

 

Okay, I intend to come back and do some more in-depth commenting here, but for now I just wanted to say WOW. I don't know what I expected but this absolutely was and wasn't that, and I loved it! It's so fascinating to see how you've spun the sort of royalty-mystique around Naboo's queens into quite possibly the most dystopian take I've ever seen from your Naboo stories. (And that is truly saying something!) The ending really surprised me, in a good way -- I was really wondering if Caterina was doomed. It's not a happy ending exactly; the sacrifice went on regardless and someone had to go (even though as Caterina says in the end, it doesn't grant immortality to the queen, just the facade of it). And I really like the closing thought:

That's one that I'll probably interpret a little different each time I read, and it just works

 

An interesting story about the Queens of Naboo with all their habits and rituals of blood.

 

So many layers of self-knowledge here ...

Another intriguing detail of the ritual.

Lovely!

And so readers get pulled, reluctantly, out of the perilous barefoot walk and back into safety. This tale reminded me of Jackson's "The Lottery", read so long ago, but I do recall the sense of 'whatever happens, the ritual must take place or we all are doomed instead of only one.'

 

You should be made Minister of Education on Naboo. Or be the royal bard/ poet. Once more you sucked us all in with your first words and gave us a true surprise in the end. Great stuff!

 

Firstly, I want to thank everyone who put forth this story in the recent Favorites of Fanfic festival. (The Headsplode Category one in particular.)

Now onto the replies.

*


Kahara: Okay, I intend to come back and do some more in-depth commenting here, but for now I just wanted to say WOW. I don't know what I expected but this absolutely was and wasn't that, and I loved it! It's so fascinating to see how you've spun the sort of royalty-mystique around Naboo's queens into quite possibly the most dystopian take I've ever seen from your Naboo stories. (And that is truly saying something!)

You have a good point there. Once again, I have to wonder why it is that I look upon Naboo--the beautiful world with queens-with-great dresses-but make it democracy that was the homeworld for the twins' mother--and see problems, and I have to consider that the problem may just be with me. On the other hand, it's also the homeworld to Palpatine, one of the most evil beings to rule the known galaxy. (Which I have always found to be an interesting choice on Lucas' part.) So perhaps that contradiction has always been there.

Before I went with the story you see here, I did consider a more light-hearted idea--of a conflicted bride on her wedding day, on Naboo at the height of its culture. (So taking place firmly within the Saga.) A surreal romcom of sorts. I don't know what it says about me that I took that picture, and went straight on past that to some ritual human sacrifice. Which does feel, for me, like a reasonable endgame for the Naboo royalty-mythos.

The Queen must be forever a girl just entering maidenhood. She must never die.

The ending really surprised me, in a good way -- I was really wondering if Caterina was doomed. It's not a happy ending exactly; the sacrifice went on regardless and someone had to go (even though as Caterina says in the end, it doesn't grant immortality to the queen, just the facade of it).

Since she's writing this story in the past tense, I don't think it should be too much of a surprise that she lived on to see another day. But she didn't know that would be the case at the time, and I guess that really comes through. But as you said, the sacrifice went on as it has for centuries--and another girl did lose her identity and then her life.

And I really like the closing thought:

"If it isn’t the truth, it should be."
That's one that I'll probably interpret a little different each time I read, and it just works


I'm glad you like it, because to be quite honest, I wrote that at high speed in the last minutes before the deadline, more on instinct than anything else, and I couldn't tell if I wasn't just producing verbal mush. In retrospect, I'm glad I got this story in on time--the stakes weren't that real, but I still needed to prove something to myself--but I don't need to pull that trick off again anytime soon.

And as always, thanks for reading and commenting!

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earlybird-obi-wan: An interesting story about the Queens of Naboo with all their habits and rituals of blood.

"Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."

--Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

That about sums it up. Thanks for reading and commenting!

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devilinthedetails: Death and the Maiden is one of the most darkly fascinating motifs to me so it is so cool to see your take on that classic motif in this story. Combine that motif with the Naboo setting (Naboo is one of my absolute favorite Star Wars planets) and you have one very engaged reader in me!

Just to clarify, but the story is actually set on Rori, one of Naboo's three moons in the Legendary EU. (Though I was originally going to set it on Naboo proper before I decided to try out something new-but-similar setting wise, leading me up to the moons where once the spice miners raged.) And culturally, while Rori has tended to be the wild rebellious satellite, it is still closely connected to Mother Naboo, and the culture reflects that.

And I'm glad the classic motif of death and the maiden works here, because I sort of pulled that title out near the end after a few other ones failed to take. I had intended to use this particular title for a Naboo story--for obvious reasons--for sometime, and I did use it once years ago on another story of mine for a while before I decided another title would work better. So this time it finally stuck.

What an opening paragraph. It is so very immersive. All my senses are engaged through the multi-sensory details. I feel like I can see and hear the scene as I am plunged into it. And there is also the eerie vibe capture by our character being alone in the "hollow-echoing space." Very atmospheric start indeed. Well done!

Thanks so much! There are times when I wonder if I get too overly bogged down in ornate description--though it all started back in my apprenticeship days because I couldn't help but think "If I don't describe this scene relentlessly, how will they ever be able to picture it in their minds?" And of course, description is always doing more than merely relating how a setting looks.

I love the focus on white here. It works well both with the Death and the Maiden motif (the Maiden traditionally depicted in white to contrast with the black of death) that you allude to in your title and with the women in a white dress that you received as your image prompt. Such beautiful and haunting language and imagery here!

Yes, I must admit that I was in luck when by sheer chance (considering that I did take the last number standing in that category) I received that particular image, as I could tell straight away that it would play to my strengths. And obviously, I went to town with it.

I love the worldbuilding details you include here. It makes the story feel so thoughtful and deeply fleshed out.

*Takes a bow." I try.

This part gave me shivers in the best way. So heartbreaking. Really captures the tragic nature of this ritual sacrifice. Which again connects very well with that Death and the Maiden motif.

The Queen (like the Crown in the UK monarchy) is a role bigger than the any of the actual girls who have taken it on. A role that has become ever more godlike with the ages. Only the best maiden, she who is the smartest and the purest of heart, can be offered up to her. That is the nature of sacrifice.

"--That’s very bold of you. But in the end, I’m afraid you’re too conventional to actually have that much nerve. I glared back at him, my teeth shut on my protesting thoughts, as he continued. --You’ll follow their rules like everyone else. They knew that much when they picked you."
This just rang so true. Reading it was like a gutpunch. So powerful and profound.

It's definitely a gut punch moment there, which I give myself first as I deliver it to to my character and through her anyone who reads it. As I told my father once (though he didn't really get it) "My writing is not a warm hug. It's a punch in the face."

I love the reflection on poetry and the role of the poetry here. It fits well with the Naboo setting and your language itself feels so poetic. Very nice.

You just know that Naboo must have a long and strong poetic tradition as pretty as the scenery, even if it's never in the movies/EU past and Disney. (Though they are action movies, and no one's going to stop to quote a relevant sonnet in the middle of a gunfight.)

And I'm an actual poet ("I are a serious poet. This are a serious sonnet"), or at least, I used to be one. I'm actually rather disappointed that I didn't ever use that get-of-jail free card during the Kessel Run. I haven't ever written actual Naboo poetry, and that would have been the time.

Pandora said: ↑
It would be sincere, the bleeding truth, and hence, the worst thing I could tell him: You’re the last person I want to see before I die.
My heart broke again reading this bit.

Awww. Now I just have to write the other stories that come before this one so we can all see how they got to that moment.

Thank you for sharing this entry with us! It was an excellent read!

You're welcome, and thanks so much for reading and commenting!

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Findswoman: WOW. Where even to begin here! This was absolutely amazing from start to finish, and I mean that. You managed to craft an entire detailed and intricate Naboo-adjacent ritual and its background history, and all the implications thereof, out of that “white dress and bare feet image” (and I won’t lie, I smiled a big dumb grin when you received that prompt, because I knew you’d love it and do great things with it).

As you may remember, I picked that prompt, the last one standing in its category, just because I wanted a picture. And as soon as I saw the picture, it did feel as though it had been chosen just for me. (In the sort of luck I don't usually have with roulettes.) No surprise that I took it and went off to Naboo, and from there to my new setting on Rori. I just went where it led me.

You took that old concept of “le roi est mort, vive le roi” (I guess in this case technically “la reine”) into some very cool darkgothic territory with this story—and showed one woman’s brazen act of rebellion against all the impossible ideals that go along with it. But of course, the thing is, even with Caterina’s act of rebellion and the story she writes about it (very cool moment of writerly self-consciousness, there), the cycle still goes on—the ritual still completes itself, and always will. It’s almost as if the whole episode had been “only [one’s] imagination.”

"La virge est mort, vive la reine," indeed.

[As an aside, I couldn't find the right word for "maiden" here. Google translate went with "jeune fille" which I believe means "young girl" and wasn't quite what I was going for. This isn't quite it, either, but I don't know French, and I'm stuck on this one.]

Caterina definitely reached a mindset beyond regular life, beyond the fear that she might be the chosen maiden, where she found it easier in many ways to rebel than to continue along with the rules. But the ritual is bigger than any one person, and well established--long ago enough that its origins are probably obscured, and it's only occurred to me now as I write these replies that it might have started in part as a way to keep the Rorians from getting too rebellious--and truthfully, she could only save herself. The whole episode probably didn't seem quite real afterwards. But as her sister says, those who were there to see it will be talking about it for a long time.

What a touch of genius to meld that prompt quote into one of the central themes of the story! Your Naboo stories (and, in this case, Naboo-adjacent—another cool touch) are always so penetrating, powerful, and just plain gorgeous; this one was no exception, and I’m so glad you were able to finish it for the challenge.

Considering the circumstances under which I entered the challenge, so am I: I was sitting here at work, and was just about to write the post to claim my prompt, when the phone rang--and it was the vet at the emergency vet clinic calling to tell me Isobel had gone into cardiac arrest. When I hung up, she was dead. Somehow, as I moved about in numbed shock, I went back and wrote the post. I didn't actually care so much at that point, but I needed something to do. The whole thing could have felt cursed to me, but instead, I felt I needed to write this story, when I have missed similar deadlines in the past with barely a shrug as they waltzed by.

(And I’ll say it makes me very eager and curious to see what you come up with for your romanticism prompt!)

It will probably be a while yet before that story sees the light of the boards, though I hope to get back to work on it soon. (I'm dealing with a rather large pile up of stories right now.) I can say though, without offering up any actual spoilers, that there won't be any ritual human sacrifice in that one, so it will be somewhat more cheerful.

Congratulations on a job beautifully done, my friend.

Thank you, and as always, thanks so much for reading and commenting!

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pronker: So many layers of self-knowledge here ...

Learning those hard lessons of life anew during the long walk of fear.

Another intriguing detail of the ritual.

It seemed obvious to me that the handmaidens are meant to be invisible in plain sight, which means that they are not to be seen nor acknowledged in any way. I couldn't say, in most of the scenes where they appear, whether the other characters present--besides Padmé, that is--are deliberately ignoring them, or genuinely don't notice them. (Yet E.K. Johnston had a bit in one of her YA My Fanfiction is Canon Now books in which the handmaidens inspired a hooded dress fad amongst the general public. No, I don't think so.)

So that carries on into the ritual walk, along with perhaps a dash of respect for the possibly doomed.

Be bold, be mad, oh fair and clever maidens. Be terrible, and make them quake at the sound of thy lioness footfalls--
Lovely!

And practically an invitation for her to rebel as she did: be mad, be bold, indeed.

"And when I’m alone at night in my room, with my desk lamp throwing light on the walls, I have written this as a story."
And so readers get pulled, reluctantly, out of the perilous barefoot walk and back into safety. This tale reminded me of Jackson's "The Lottery", read so long ago, but I do recall the sense of 'whatever happens, the ritual must take place or we all are doomed instead of only one.'

I didn't have The Lottery (which I haven't read in some time because I don't need the nightmares) in mind when I was writing, but it's possible that it was there just a little in the subconscious back of my mind. Though in that story, no one rebelled against the ritual--the chosen victim protested that "It isn't fair, it isn't right," as they closed in on her at the end, but only because of her personal plight, not the larger picture. And while Caterina does rebel, she also has no impact on the ritual as a whole, which will happen again in seven years.

Finally, thanks for reading and commenting!

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Mira_Jade: Wow, so this is just . . . wow.

*When words fail us, we have emojis.* (Admittedly typed by someone who never uses them.)

My usual habit of quoting specific lines from a story isn't quite going to work here, since most of my quotes are going to be me grabbing striking turns of phrase from your prose and going: gah, gorgeous! So I'm going to format this a little differently and say as a collective response to the whole: gah, your prose is so ridiculously gorgeous! It's lush and romantic, even when this is such a dark (even awful, as you noted) story with a heavy gothic shadow hanging overhead like a scyth waiting to fall.

I do have a reputation for pretty writing--and when I was in graduate school, it was what I was mostly known for. (Guess where I came in on the beauty for its own sake vs. meaning debate in poetics.) For me, the language makes the story. It is all you have to set the scene so it appears in the mind's eye, not just what it looks like, but what it feels like. That's why I used to say you need to hit hard with heavy gothic imagery right off the bat so they know this is going to be darkasouterspace and all bets for happy endings are off. I sort of went with a more gradual approach here, but obviously, that sense of a hovering dreadful shadow still came across.

I have to applaud how this almost didn't feel like a Star Wars story, and even then, certainly not one set in the far future. It almost felt like the distant past, especially with some of your more earthly descriptions of paper/lilies/iron/pavement, all the while still managing to feel alien and sci-fi. I'm having trouble finding the right words, so I hope that I'm expressing myself well enough. I just have to say that it's a very unique tone you struck, and I really, really enjoyed reading it.

I can see that--and when I was first getting the story worked out I did briefly consider having it take place in the far distant past. But the setting was determined by the Thomas Cole painting "Empire: Decline" that started it all off with the still unfinished story for the Romanticism challenge: and as the title indicates, this isn't about a society at the beginning, but in its decline and end. History doesn't move in one direction of ever increasing progress, much as people like to think it does. There have certainly been numerous changes in both Naboo and its satellites and the galaxy since the saga which Caterina has no reason to mention, but which are implied: for example, she never mentions bacta, that medicinal placebo, and I have the idea that at some point in what for her is the far distant past, the stuff just ran out--and given that medical progress had been halted by relying so absolutely on it for almost all ills for so very long, society at a near galactic level was thrown into disarray.

But again, this would be ancient history that she wouldn't even think about here.

It isn't an easy thing to write a story in the far distant future, or the past, and make it both seem like a different time and still like Star Wars. It did occur to me that this wasn't quite a Star Warsy story--though I then focused on that deadline and moved on. And to be honest, I think I've reached the limits of what I can do writing about the Star Wars galaxy, and this world/storyline might well be my last major Hurrah! in that galaxy. (It's petty, but I should be happy to never have to refer to a toilet as a "fresher" again.) Of course, I thought I was done with it in 2011, and was just going to take what I had learned to write the occasional original space opera, and well.

(Also: if every picture movie and etc. are holo this and holo that, is it really necessary to always include the "holo" part?)

As always, your Nabooian lore is just . . . dark and twisty and yet it completely fits in with the queen/handmaiden dynamic we see in canon. I appreciate how you took your picture prompt and created this entire bit of worldbuilding around it; your quote, too, went a long way to developing your theme, and you worked your words and trope in so seamlessly that I wouldn't know what was a prompt and what was your own work without prior knowledge!

Since I write the darkest and twistiest version of Naboo around, I'm honestly sometimes surprised anyone wants to read it. (And I don't think it's all 100% pitchblack and hopeless.) But it is all based in what I see in the canon, so that must be why it works in the end.

The five elements did all come together remarkably well--the words, the picture, the trope, the story element. As I mentioned before, I don't usually have this sort of luck with roulette challenges. And the process of figuring out how the trope would work in this one story helped me develop the larger narrative. (And led to Julian and Gunnar being Completely Incompatible Roommates.) I also came up with a second story, the barely started "Untitled," which is for another mini challenge which I shall share later.

Every choice in storytelling can close off other possibilities--but sometimes they open them.

In particular, these passages stood out to me for their descriptive quality:

[quotes snipped]

Thanks!

(And I just love how you included your random element. Even if it's not chronically late, this still informed your story and built both characters here in a very creative way.)

The late part came to the story naturally--and then I remembered it was supposed to be "chronically late." But I figured that 1/3rd of an element still counted for something.

Then, these passages really stood out to me:

"I ignored her. I didn’t so much as look up--to see her pretend, per the custom, that she couldn’t see me."
I appreciate how this mirrored her first interaction with one of the maidens when she was a child - which was a ghostly, eerie encounter all its own.

It was certainly that, which is why she has remembered it for so long. Like a dream brought to the waking world.

"The maiden candidates are always beautiful. Well, obviously."
Obviously.

Or: When your doubts about your appearance are laid to rest--but you're facing down possible death.

Pandora said: ↑
He is not melancholy, or worse still, earnest.
What a wonderful bit of characterization, for both characters!

It does sum them both up pretty well--both Caterina's father and Caterina in observing him. There's a story here--though one I don't think I'll ever write--about what was in his mind that day. Especially later when the family is about to head out to the "festivities."

"It is the responsibility of the poet—and that can include the writer of prose—to see things in close relentless detail, as though you’ll never see them again: the cold water sighed against my skin. It slipped through my fingers and back into the air, and scattered back into the creek."
Gorgeous! I really love than sense of awareness with the first person POV, speaking as both the narrator in the character's voice and for the author, too.

She's figuring out how to tell stories (and each one is its own beast, of course) as she goes.

Pandora said: ↑
It would be sincere, the bleeding truth, and hence, the worst thing I could tell him: You’re the last person I want to see before I die.


And if she had been chosen that day, he would have never known.

"But when he spoke again, he was the bard in the oldest oldest stories: --Be bold, be mad, oh fair and clever maidens. Be terrible, and make them quake at the sound of thy lioness footfalls--"
I just loved this!

He was moved to a moment of rebellious poetry at just the right moment.

"--That was just your imagination, I said.

--Right. Or maybe it was just my imagination, she said."
I appreciate how girlish this was - two maidens smiling about a boy - against the very heavy backdrop of impending doom. This felt like the calm eye in the midst of a storm. A fantastic inclusion of your dialogue prompt!

But was it just her imagination?

As of the story's telling, she still doesn't know--and the reason she hasn't done the obvious thing and just asked him is because she's afraid that yes, it was.

"That is how the poets, and their audiences know, she believed she would soon cease to be. Her mind, and then her body, blurred until she could only feel the air around her. This will all end soon."
*chills* What a way to describe bravery . . .

Or: Bravery is that state you reach beyond fear, when you have nothing left to lose. "The truth that is beyond beauty and hope."

"Oh, I am no poet, nor am I able to be one, but still: I call upon their art to write of the truth that is beyond beauty and hope, that you know when you walk through the dreamspace left when you’re in exile from your own life, alone with the voice in your mind. But that is all you need."
This struck me, and I had to go back and read it more than once.

It was all she needed to act, blasting through one rule after another.

I wasn't invisible, the color of nothing - this was so powerful and evocative, and really a tagline for all of your handmaiden stories as a whole! What a perfect way to summarize Caterina's act of defiance and rebellion!

Just: they could no more touch me than they could the air.

And it all happened, really, because of that little passive-aggressively sniveling governmental man coming to retrieve the straying maiden. He can take that dress and all it implies-and shove it.

"I don’t know who she was, but I know what she had become: She wore the bloodbright red dress with firebug lights a-glow on the skirts, the sleeve cuffs trimmed with stolen nightdark soft fur. The pearl crown was perched on her fine ordinary brown hair. She smiled down, upon the masses of people she couldn’t quite see, at her people, with her new face."
No matter Caterina's breaking her own individual link in the chain, the circle still continues as the ritual is completed and there's something so heartbreakingly finite about that - death and the maiden, indeed! This . . . I could see Padmé staring down from the windows of the palace in TPM here, and it gave that scene a completely different context that I'm still struggling to find the right words to express.

She could save herself on her terms (though her chances of being chosen weren't all that high) by rebelling against playing the game at all. But she can't change a firmly entrenched tradition. Of course, the ritual went on. And seven years later, it will happen again as though she never rebelled at all.

I was playing with the image of that infamous red throneroom gown of Padmé's here--that (and this is obviously just my opinion) overrated red gown she wears only at the beginning of many a costume change and yet has become the eternal image of her in TPM--because it is so iconic. Though the basics are the same, I do imagine it as looking somewhat different.

Pandora said: ↑
If it isn’t the truth, it should be.
Yep, that line is going to linger with me!

I have to say it's done pretty well for a line I wrote on instinct in a blitz of exhaustion before a looming deadline.

Thank you so much for sharing this story with us! This was a masterful interpretation of your prompts, and I'm looking forward to reading your answer to the Remembering Romanticism challenge all the more so now, too.

You're welcome, and thank you so much for reading and commenting!

And hopefully, I will have the Remembering Romanticism story finished, edited, and posted before 2024.

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AzureAngel2: You should be made Minister of Education on Naboo. Or be the royal bard/ poet. Once more you sucked us all in with your first words and gave us a true surprise in the end. Great stuff!

They really should have a royal bard/poet in the Naboo court, considering its highly artistic culture. I don't know if I would be the best candidate though, as I'm far too cynical for their worldview.

Thank you, and thanks for reading and commenting!

 

It's kind of astonishing, how pretty yet how foreboding this feels all at once.

I actually thought how much I like the phrase "fragile raingrey light" before "I woke up again, for the last time" really landed, so that was a bit of whiplash

This is an immediately recognizable feeling, though I would never have thought to word it quite like this. You do have such a talent for descriptive writing.

Spoken like a true fellow cat lady

This is such a fascinating bit of - meta isn't quite the right word, nor is breaking the fourth wall quite the right phrase, but it has that sort of feel to it, and I wouldn't have expected it, yet it doesn't diminish the "Domestic Gothic Awful" at all somehow.

Can't say I blame her there

How do you tell someone else what it feels like to breathe, or think? This is an oblique yet very effective way to show just how embedded in their culture this ritual is, and by extension, what an immense, almost unthinkable effort of will it would take to defy it.

I mean, I kind of appreciate the bluntness, and the insistence on telling the reality of it. The pretty lies aren't really serving anything at all, are they now?

Oh, you have a Julian too! I admit that I looked at the beginning of this fic when you first posted it, but to be honest I just couldn't face "Domestic Gothic Awful" right then, so I didn't get very far and hadn't at all realized that we were both writing a Julian for this challenge. It's been one of my favorite names for decades, so I heartily approve

I should think not.

Okay, this is totally irreverent and only marginally related, but it reminded me of some post I saw somewhere recently offering up a more interesting than standard answer for "how are you": "the horrors persist, but so do I"

I just really love this statement, and how true it is, and the double meaning considering the narrator's current situation.

That's just an excellent bit of wording; I could instantly imagine it.

And this is an extremely powerful line.

And what a moment killer it is

I think I like her

I think I like him, too

I know I like this. It made me pause in my following of the narrative to just sit with the realization of this for a moment.

Atta girl, Caterina.

THAT'S RIGHT

Good for him, being decent and courteous about all of this.

I recognize the outfit, of course, but somehow this paragraph just feels horrifying

As one does. But seriously, imagine the emotional aftermath of this - what else could you do but write it out?

That's one heck of an ending. Very, very impressively done from beginning to end - which is, of course, no surprise at all

 

Gabri_Jade: It's kind of astonishing, how pretty yet how foreboding this feels all at once.

Pretty and foreboding is what I do: as I said once, if you set the tone by starting out with a barrage of dark/gothic/ominous imagery, they were warned.

I actually thought how much I like the phrase "fragile raingrey light" before "I woke up again, for the last time" really landed, so that was a bit of whiplash

It does sound more ominous than its actual meaning, that this is the time she wakes up where she stays awake and gets up for the day. What a day, though.

"My stomach was full of heavy sloshingwet rags,"
This is an immediately recognizable feeling, though I would never have thought to word it quite like this. You do have such a talent for descriptive writing.

Thanks!

the tulle petticoats scratching at me with kitten nails,
Spoken like a true fellow cat lady

Of course, though I have taken a certain liberty here for the sake of pretty poetics: the tulle isn't anywhere as sharp as kitten nails (and as you probably know, they are born with itty bitty razor claws) because if it were, it would be drawing blood.

"Since I’m writing this down after the fact, in the past tense, you already know that I am still alive, that I was not the maiden chosen to die wearing the Queen’s face, thus (allegedly, though you had best not ever indicate this) keeping her alive for another seven years."
This is such a fascinating bit of - meta isn't quite the right word, nor is breaking the fourth wall quite the right phrase, but it has that sort of feel to it, and I wouldn't have expected it, yet it doesn't diminish the "Domestic Gothic Awful" at all somehow.

The fact that this is all in the past-tense alone indicates that she wasn't the chosen maiden, but yes: going by the responses I have gotten, this doesn't diminish the overall dread. And the fact that they have this ritual sacrifice at all serves up all the "Domestic Gothic Awful" on its own.

For which I am obviously glad. I’m not at all the selfless nurturing sort, ready to part with her very breath for someone more worthy of it.
Can't say I blame her there

The Rorian spriit of rebellion lives on.

There’s only one problem: I don’t know how to go about telling you a story I have always known.
How do you tell someone else what it feels like to breathe, or think? This is an oblique yet very effective way to show just how embedded in their culture this ritual is, and by extension, what an immense, almost unthinkable effort of will it would take to defy it.

Since she wants to be a writer, she is addressing a half-imagined audience, so she does try to tell the story. Which indeed she has known so long (long enough she hasn't usually consciously thought of it) that she wouldn't try to tell it as she sees it if it weren't for recently survived events.

"When I asked them what happened next, I was young enough that I didn’t predict the answer. My father has an aversion to pretty lies. He told me the truth: She dies. She dies because the Queen is too good for death, but she isn't."
I mean, I kind of appreciate the bluntness, and the insistence on telling the reality of it. The pretty lies aren't really serving anything at all, are they now?

And really: were they ever anything but pretty lies?

Oh, you have a Julian too! I admit that I looked at the beginning of this fic when you first posted it, but to be honest I just couldn't face "Domestic Gothic Awful" right then, so I didn't get very far and hadn't at all realized that we were both writing a Julian for this challenge. It's been one of my favorite names for decades, so I heartily approve

Okay, confession time: I was trying to decide how I wanted to name Julian--who is based off a character of my sister's from our junior high shaggy dog story days originally named Gunther--when I chanced upon your Julian. Since Julian is one of my favorite names as well, to the point where I had to take an official moratorium on using it for fictional characters, it would be most accurate to say that not much inspiration was required for me to do what I'm always on the verge of doing. But still.

"When I entered the kitchen that morning in my glaring white dress, I made it obvious what we all knew: things were not, and could not be, as normal."
I should think not.

Yes, it isn't as though any of them forgot what day this is.

Okay, this is totally irreverent and only marginally related, but it reminded me of some post I saw somewhere recently offering up a more interesting than standard answer for "how are you": "the horrors persist, but so do I"

That sounds like something Caterina's dad would say. (I might have to steal it...)

It is the responsibility of the poet—and that can include the writer of prose—to see things in close relentless detail, as though you’ll never see them again:
I just really love this statement, and how true it is, and the double meaning considering the narrator's current situation.

Interestingly, she is interpreting this mandate in an aesthetic sense, but not a political one. The most political reading I could see here would be capturing moments in time for history before it's too late.

The evergreen fir grove across the park meadow was a dark sharptoothed wall against the sky
That's just an excellent bit of wording; I could instantly imagine it.

That's what I was going for.

"It would be sincere, the bleeding truth, and hence, the worst thing I could tell him: You’re the last person I want to see before I die."
And this is an extremely powerful line.

And she never utters it aloud, and he doesn't know.

"And then: there came a loud thrashing noise in the trees behind us, followed by another explosive crash, and another, moving through the grove. A girl in a bright salt-white gown, with thick puff-backed tulle petticoats, a dress exactly like mine, came out into the open. The sunlight rested in the flower crown perched in her glossy fire-orange hair. She held up her skirts around her knees with her fingertips as she came towards us in a tiptoeing trot, and once she was in conversation range, she opened her mouth. She was going to say whatever she wanted."
And what a moment killer it is

Indeed: as the TVTropes page sort of says, the spirit of that moment is gone now, and it will be a long time, if ever, before they get it back.

--Caterina! the girl, who I could now recognize as Janné Wilsdottar said. She came to a stop, and let her skirts sink back down. --Caterina. Do you want to be late? Because you are.
I think I like her

Even if she did ruin the Moment. (She also is aware of the ambience of the scene enough to pick up that's what she accidentally did, so there's that in her favor.)

"--I know. He bowed to me, sweeping down low with his arm out, and then turned to Janné and repeated the gesture for her. She gave forth a startled giggle-snort. He straightened up, and stepped back across the street. His shoulders were down again, and he shoved his hands away into his pockets. But when he spoke, he was the bard in the oldest oldest stories: --Be bold, oh fair and clever maidens. Be terrible, and make them quake at the sound of thy lioness footfalls..."
I think I like him, too

He knows just what to say to them at that moment.

I know I like this. It made me pause in my following of the narrative to just sit with the realization of this for a moment.

It's as though, during this long walk, she feels as though she is floating in the exiled space between life and death, brought on the possibility--even though honestly, her chances of being chosen were never the best--that she has only hours left to live, and that she will cease to be, and all she has thought and been will cease to be as well.

They couldn’t see me--and that meant that whatever I did now, they wouldn’t stop me.
Atta girl, Caterina.

Again: it's that moment where she finds it easier to break the rules than go along with them.

--Here. You can have this dress to start with. I started unfastening the long row of tooth white lake pearl buttons on the bodice, my fingers stumbling. --If you show up in this, they’ll have their maiden. You’ll do a better job of it than I ever would.
THAT'S RIGHT

HE DESERVES ALL OF THIS.

"He only smiled, slightly and wryly, and refrained from comment. He looked me in the eye, without any nervous blushing: even though I stood before him naked, my true skin revealed. He took off his coat and handed it over to me, and I accepted it. It was loose on me, but I’m tall enough that I only had to roll up the cuffs a few times."
Good for him, being decent and courteous about all of this.

Only Gunnar would still be pleased about seeing a NAKED GIRL under these circumstances.

I don’t know who she was, but I know what she had become: She wore the bloodbright red dress with firebug lights a-glow on the skirts, the sleeve cuffs trimmed with stolen nightdark soft fur. The pearl crown was perched on her fine ordinary brown hair. She smiled down, upon the masses of people she couldn’t quite see, at her people, with her new face.
I recognize the outfit, of course, but somehow this paragraph just feels horrifying

While her dress is based off in the famous (and overrated) one from The Phantom Menace, I do it see it as being in an overall different style. (For example: I picture the sacrifice's dress with a fitted waist and much more narrow cuffs. The fabric is different and a brighter red as well.) I didn't realize just how much until I saw a picture of it shortly after I wrote this story. But the resemblance is what leads to the horror.

After all that, and in the end, I get to continue on with my life. I returned home that night, along with the crowded group of my family, and back to my tower room. I went back to my studies as I prepare for the lottery-test, for my one great go at getting into one of the universities. I finished with the novel I had been reading. Since I was still on break, I commenced reading another one. I still don’t know what Julian feels for me, even as I spend hours of time assisting him on the stage set for the troupe’s upcoming production. And when I’m alone at night in my room, with my desk lamp throwing light on the walls, I have written this as a story.
As one does. But seriously, imagine the emotional aftermath of this - what else could you do but write it out?

As she says, she went back to Real Life, where not much at all changed--the Moment with Julian certainly seems to be gone for now--but that also gives her the space to deal with the aftermath.

It’s a dream, and only a dream, that you escape from back into the world of your bedroom, back to your knowing mind: your face wet with confused soft tears, though you don’t remember weeping. You can believe me. If it isn’t the truth, it should be.
That's one heck of an ending. Very, very impressively done from beginning to end - which is, of course, no surprise at all

As I have mentioned in earlier replies, I wrote that ending in the last few scrambled moments before the deadline, going more on instinct than anything else. (I also didn't have time to revise the story as a whole, so it is more unpolished than I would like, and I will probably edit it someday.) So I'm surprised, but glad, it works for people.

Finally, thanks for reading and commenting!