mark_asphodel | Fic Update and Notes: Auspice

Wow. I'm writing drabbles. How the hell did that happen?

It's not intentional; "Will" was because of the word limit, but this was an idea I'd been kicking around for ages, and when I wrote it up and had it done, it was... a drabble. Huh.

Anyway, it's about Nyna on her wedding day.

"They anointed her head with myrrh..." (Myrrh-- the resin, not the manakete-- has been used in a myriad of preparations through different cultures and centuries, ranging from perfume to medicine to an embalming agent.)

"They tipped back her head and applied carmine to her lips and kohl to her eyelashes." (Antique make-up was often pretty gross; carmine got its color from crushed bugs and kohl often contained lead sulfide.)

"the mask of white-lead on her face" (More poisonous beauty.)

"he days of decadence before shadows rose in the south" (I meant the days prior to the War of Liberation, aka the first time Medeus decided to wipe out mankind.)

"place their entrails in bowls of alabaster and look therein for portents of the future." (Augury, or reading omens from birds, was of course a key tradition in Roman and Etruscan life. I found it appropriate for the Greco-Roman influenced world of Archanea.)

"what truths, what omens, would they see?" (In terms of plain canon, this is intended to reference her secret longing for Camus and the hellstorm that comes out of it. In terms of this ficlet, there ended up being more to it.)

"she'd expected to see Artemis staring back at her." (I have issues with Nyna and I've never made a secret of it. But it can't have escaped the poor girl that Artemis-- who surely must loom in the back of Nyna's mind-- died bearing the child of a man she did not love but was obliged to marry. A man who then sat on her family's throne for a good long time, doing all kinds of harm to counteract any good he achieved during his reign. She really is in a deeply unenviable position.)

Also: 'fic number fifty. Whee.