Forums » Fantasy Roleplay » Trixie's Bar (Everyone welcome)

Xueqing shrugged at Silver's comment, and decided not to reply. Even with her at-times-low emotional intelligence, she knew when just not talk.

After a while, the gash was nowhere to be found. Her T-shirt and right hand were still stained with her own blood, though.

...A water sphere appeared midair, and she extended her hands into it to wash them clean.

"...Getting hurt often is a bad thing."

By the Emperors grace, it remains there, frankly its equally as surprising to me at times, but who am I to question what fate deigns.

What is certain is that you wont be the one to change that.

Her Theme. I am the female lead singer and song writer.

The wine diminished into a final garnet vortex that rotated with the fatal solemnity of a quasar. The Marchioness of Winterwake elevated the chalice and allowed the remaining liquid to traverse her tongue in a narrow penitential tide. The taste carried the funerary echo of orchards surrendered long ago to frost. Fermented promise curdled into elegy. The Princess of the Dead treated it as a trivial confession from a world already under indictment. Once judged, it was extinguished. She lowered the chalice with sacerdotal restraint while frost proliferated from her fingertips in intricate dendrites until the vessel stiffened into a small glacial ossifact. A minor monument to something tasted and dismissed.

The chair beneath the Inquisitor emitted a strained groan as timbers bowed beneath the consolidation of her monumental anatomy. Ixqueya did not recline. She descended with regulated inevitability. Callipygian enormity, wrapped in iridescent plating and dusk-warm skin, compressed the weakened carpentry with the finality of an advancing ice shelf overtaking a derelict cloister. When the Giantess adjusted the trajectory of her thigh, the motion altered the atmosphere around her. Not indulgence. Strategy. A colossal limb sheathed in interlocking obsidian segments veined with prismatic Necro Ice obstructed illicit sightlines and forced predatory gazes to collide with unyielding strength. The Winterwake Marchioness converted posture into enforcement. She converted allure into barricade. She converted the architecture of her own musculature into a tool of deterrence.

Her thoracic grandeur rose within the cuirass as two prodigious mamillary bastions disciplined beneath sculpted plate. Each unhurried inhalation elevated that sumptuous architecture in slow, inexorable swell. Flesh pressed against chitin. Softness became lure. Lure became trap. Trap became leverage. Any gaze drifting toward that opulent frontage found itself compelled upward into the glacial jurisprudence of her cerulean eyes. For the Frostmarrow scion, beauty was never indulgence. It functioned as arsenal. Curvature became vector. Voluptuousness became a means of steering the intentions of the undisciplined.

Her armor refused chromatic obedience. Surface tones migrated with uncanny sentience. Obsidian deepened into bruise-violet which brightened into venomous fuchsia before collapsing into a null-black that consumed illumination. The transformations resembled imprisoned auroral currents shifting beneath hardened surface. Each metamorphosis answered subliminal impulses from the Tlāzōtlalpan pulsing behind her sternum. The war-panoply of the Winterwake Hierophant served as a mutating doctrine of attrition and dominion expressed through chromatic volatility.

War pigment added marginal directives to this evolving exoskeleton. Turquoise slashes carved incisive diagonals across her cheekbones. Carmine crescents rested beneath her eyes as frozen tears permanently suspended in pre-fall austerity. Additional strokes traversed clavicles and deltoids. Glyphic decrees of sovereignty. Clauses of territorial prerogative. The skin of the Marchioness served as codex. Flesh served as governance.

Behind the strained chair, the wasp tail of the Frostwing inquisitor hovered in predatory poise. Segments alternated between abyssal black and incandescent fuchsia. Each ring rimmed with serrated coronas that promised laceration before puncture. The appendage never fully rested. Microscopic oscillations sampled the tensions within the tavern. The terminal aculeus shimmered with interior cyan. Necro Ice honed into a verdict. Within its hollow spine coiled cryogenic ichor capable of wrenching living heat into vitrified cessation in a single fractured moment. The tail traced narrow arcs in the air. A pendulum of conditional annihilation.

To her right leaned the Gravechill Bulwark. A towering monolith of sentient permafrost. The translucent surface revealed fugitive silhouettes that appeared then dissolved before comprehension. Ossuary phantoms. Nullified armies. Submerged deathscapes. Deep-carved sigils crawled across the plane in severe vertical procession. Each symbol an interdiction or obliteration clause. The Bulwark siphoned warmth and held it in mute reserve. The planks beneath its lower edge fissured in radiating fractures. Mortality attempting, and failing, to withstand immortal cold.

To her left reclined the Frostfang Mace. The weapon rested across the thigh of the Marchioness like a dormant cataclysm contemplating whether to wake. The haft wrapped in night-dark hide bore constricting ferrules inscribed with compressed maledictions. From that shaft erupted a crown of jagged Necro Ice. Each crystalline fang refracted ambient light into predatory shards. Within the translucent mass churned a deeper glacial incandescence, a polar storm awaiting liberation. When the Inquisitor shifted her hand near the grip the barbs vibrated with faint serrated resonance, reminiscent of distant bones acknowledging inevitability.

One arachnid limb descended and touched the floor in measured cadence. Tap. Pause. Tap. The rhythm infiltrated the tavern’s timber frame. The subtle percussion coaxed involuntary responses from the patrons. A mercenary’s fingers spasmed. A gambler ceased mid-deception. A barmaid’s counterfeit smile decayed when passing a man she distrusted. Each involuntary gesture exposed fissures in the human structure of the room. The Princess of Winterwake registered every weakness without lifting her eyes from the page.

Her ledger lay open. A codex bound in treated hide over a substructure of carved bone. Pages held the color of crematory ash. Columns of numbers and cabalistic sigla advanced with pitiless symmetry. This was necroeconomic jurisprudence. Mortuary arithmetic. Arcanopolitical calculus. Every digit corresponded to a body, a marrow tithe, a death-duty, a soldier, a future skeleton, a population segment entering or exiting utility. When the Marchioness amended a value, she envisioned not abstraction but ribcages and femurs. Throats and hands. Villages collapsing in statistical unison beneath her cold arithmetic. Armies recalculating their odds without knowing why.

Her philosophy permeated every measured motion of her hand. The Inquisitor believed in order as immutable axiom. Not mercy. Not egalitarian fiction. Order. Loyalty existed as lease, never gift. Devotion without competence irritated her. Courage without calculation bored her. Incompetence offended her, for the useless wasted space, time, and marrow. A traitor of talent could be repurposed. A fool could only be consumed. She respected fear when it sharpened instinct. She despised cowardice when it produced stagnation. In her worldview those incapable of contribution existed only as future substrate for necromantic infrastructure.

Even her musculature obeyed this doctrine. The faint tightening of her abdomen beneath the cuirass served structural discipline. The voluptuous gluteal mass of the Ice Marchioness shifted in infinitesimal increments to preserve her equilibrium without granting the tortured chair genuine mercy. Objects and people alike served until their function concluded. Then they forfeited relevance.
Her cerulean eyes, crucibles of cold jurisprudence, appeared focused solely upon the ledger yet consumed peripheral detail with predatory comprehension. Reflections shivering along necro-ice surfaces. Disturbed smoke currents revealing concealed agitation. The hesitation before a lie hardened into speech. The tavern unfurled itself before the Princess of the Dead as a diseased organism. A small ecosystem of appetites and failures. She sorted every soul with silent disdain. Expendable. Exploitable. Replaceable. Rarely anything more. She did not hate these people. Hatred required emotional investment. She merely recognized their insignificance.

Dust motes drifted upward when the Inquisitor turned another folio. They floated in lamplight like microscopic spirits denied interment. Ixqueya observed them for a moment then dismissed them. Transient particles with no leverage. The general who had postured earlier belonged to the same category. Brief visibility. Immediate irrelevance.
The chair groaned beneath the synthesis of her voluptuous musculature and necro-ice war-panoply. The Marchioness withheld acknowledgement. Winter did not request accommodation. Winter claimed space. Winter recorded consequences.

Her nature reflected that theology. The Princess of Winterwake curated survival into architecture. She interpreted weakness into resource. She treated compassion as a calibrated pacing of cruelty rather than its contradiction. Mercy existed only as strategic deferment. She valued competence, obedience, and intelligent fear. She had no interest in the sentimental or the fragile.

Ixqueya Jorgenskull continued to etch mortality into numbers. The Gravechill Bulwark waited at her flank. The Frostfang Mace slumbered across her thigh. Her wasp tail described silent clauses in the tavern air. Her armor shifted through chromatic augury. She sat enthroned within the tavern’s rancid conviviality as a cold hierophant presiding over a congregation incapable of recognizing its own disposability.

Around her mortals whispered and laughed. None perceived that their breath already nourished the Necro Ice sustaining her contemplation. None realized that some of their futures might soon become entries in the ashen ledger.
The Marchioness of Winterwake realized it.The knowledge pleased her with a deep and immutable frost.

The girl, not aware of this, looked at Mathius. She never had explored this place much. "If I may ask, is there a bathr-"

Suddenly, she felt insecure. Not out of guilt or sin, not out of inner problems... just insecure, coming from an outside force.

This unsettled her, and her eyes searched around for the source. The newcomer... "Um, sorry to say, but... your vibe's off. What are you doing there?" She watched with some concern.

"Past the kitchen. First door" he already knew what she was going to ask..

"I'm not gonna try to heal her again. It's like pissing in the wind, and it drains my own energy and life each time I do" he shifted in his large chair and the wood frame creaked beneath his weight.

The sensation reached the Marchioness of Winterwake as a minute distortion in the tavern’s psychic weather. A small knot of apprehension. Not from the usual menagerie of sodden degenerates, but from the war-marred girl attempting, with wounded animal courage, to locate the source of her unease. Ixqueya felt the eyes on her. Felt the nascent attempt at appraisal. Ironic that, in a room crowded with inbred mediocrities and pickled cowards, it was the half-ruined child who noticed the presence of purgatory first.

Ixqueya did not reward the scrutiny immediately. The Princess of the Dead completed the line she was inscribing, amended a digit with glacial exactitude, allowed the ink to settle. Only then did her gaze ascend from the ledger. Cerulean irides lifted with the slow inevitability of a verdict. War-paint remained immaculate. Turquoise barges along the cheekbones. Carmine crescents frozen beneath her lower lids like clotted tears. The Frostmarrow inquisitor watched the girl’s stare try to climb her height, stumble across necro-ice armament, falter at the sight of arachnid limbs and wasp tail, struggle to convert voluptuous enormity and predatory stillness into some coherent taxonomy of threat. The attempt never quite resolved. The child’s instincts reached the right altar, yet lacked the liturgy to name it.

The air between them condensed. Heat thinned in a quiet centrifuge around the table. Vapour from nearby mouths thickened into pallid ghosts that hovered before lips. The tension did not roar. It accreted. Ionization of atmosphere. A pressure system of unspoken evaluation. Ixqueya let the silence saturate until the girl’s little protest about “vibes” and “what are you doing there” hung naked between them. Only then did the Marchioness reply, voice low and flawless, each syllable honed.

“Accounting. Studying the heat.”

The words landed with the tonal gravity of an executioner’s decree. No theatrics. No preamble. Function articulated as fact. Afterwards the Princess of Winterwake permitted her gaze a more granular survey. It moved over stained cloth, poorly cleaned wounds, the contrived asymmetry of someone who understood that feigned fragility confuses brutes. After a heartbeat she looked unimpressed.

“Your injuries are superficial,” Ixqueya said, tone clinical. “Sufficient to deceive drunkards and men who cannot distinguish performance from peril. Not sufficient to persuade anything that has watched viscera steam on snow.”

There was no malice in the judgement. Only a merciless accuracy. One corner of her mouth lifted by a fraction, something like a mirthless acknowledgement.

“The ruse will function on lesser minds. Keep it. It is a serviceable mask in a civilization of half-blind mollusks.”

The Marchioness inhaled once, delicately. Beneath the tavern’s broth of sweat, alcohol and old smoke, she found the more interesting strata. Powder burns. Cold metal. The faint, indelible tincture of mortality encountered and survived.

“You carry the scent of the only divinity this macroverse has never managed to displace,” the Inquisitor continued. “Death has breathed on you. Marked you. Stood within a blade’s breadth of claiming you. It did not. Not on that day. Not on this one. You are still something more than a carcass-in-waiting.”

Her attention drifted back to the ledger for a moment, as if to remind the girl where true importance resided. Numbers. Ratios. Probabilities. The vast arithmetic of ruin.

“I am no threat to you in this moment. No great fulmination coiled above your head. I sit as observer. Auditor. My presence is unadulterated. What you taste as menace is only the unfamiliar, and you have mistaken the unknown for malice.”

At last the cerulean gaze fixed her again, sharp and measuring, but not hostile.

“You are too intelligent to indulge such myopic sagacity. Learn to discern between the thing that is here to harvest you and the thing that is here to count who will be harvested. Today you belong to the latter category, not the former.”

With that the Princess of the Dead resumed her quiet numeration, pen moving with predatory grace. The tension did not vanish. It simply reclassified itself. The girl had been weighed, logged, and, for now, spared.

"...anyone know what she meant by 'viscera steam', 'ruse', 'mollusk', 'fulmination', 'unadulterated' and 'myopic sagatory'?"
While she understood roughly what the Princess of Death meant - death is irreplaceable and will one day find way to her, but just not now - she's utterly confused with... the words specifically.

Also, her wounds had been healed on her own with starlight magic.

Sighing, she shifted her focus on the purple dimensional bag, and grabbed. With a light motion she stood up, but she still felt slightly lightheaded. Nonetheless, she carefully stepped to the location Mathius instructed.

"Don't we all have our own wounds, anyway?"

The Son of Russ's lip curled up over his canine-like teeth as he looked at the stranger who had entered. Everything about her seemed to anger the Astartes Sergeant. Although the fissiparous nature between the two Astartes was evident, he was all but sure his Brother-Captain felt the same disdain. All he saw from her was a threat, possibly to the Imperium and to the subjects of the Allfather. His braided hair felt tighter upon his scalp as he scowled at what he saw as nothing more than a Xeno deserving of the Allfather's judgement.


He cast a glance to Lord General Drakenfell to guage his reaction to this stranger. He was able to note the difference in how they perceived her. He turned away and he took a few heavy swings of Mjod, the Fenrisian Ale Mathius brought to him.

Aleksandr offered a nod to the Spacemarine, acknowledging this.

" Tactical Discretion, Lord Graystorm, The cold cannot bother a Son of Russ. The principle weapon of Chaos is deception; our principle defense is our discipline. Let them starve, we refuse the bait. "

The girl’s starlight clung to her skin like a borrowed benediction. Pretty. Ephemeral. Exhausting itself even as it glittered.
Ixqueya watched the faint astral sheen in the wounds the child believed mended. The glow reminded the Marchioness of Winterwake of a dying coal that refused to understand it was already ash in progress. Fire always behaved like that. It mistook expenditure for triumph. It bellowed while it diminished. It consumed itself in order to remain itself.

Fire, in the end, is nothing but a tantrum of matter.

To burn, it must implore. It begs for fuel. It devours atmosphere. It mutilates structure. It screams itself into momentary dominance by accelerating its own annihilation. Each spark is a tiny promissory note written against a finite ledger of energy. A pyre is only a more elaborate bankruptcy. Even their vaunted battle-flames, those fervid auroras they imagine descended from some radiant patron, are nothing else. Collective combustion. Magnified expenditure. Their so-called sacred blaze is merely a more ornate method of depletion.

Cold is simpler. Cold does not plead.

Ice does not need permission. It does not ask for breath. It does not roar. It waits. It receives. It inherits every system that fails to maintain its frantic expenditure. When engines falter. When suns exhaust their hydrogen. When blood ceases to pay the impossible interest rate demanded by heat. Cold remains. It is not an actor. It is the default condition.

The girl’s starlight bandages proved that perfectly. Somewhere, a star hemorrhages radiance into uncaring void so that one small creature can stitch herself back together for another handful of years. The star bleeds so she can feel less fragile. A pathetic exchange, if one extends the arithmetic beyond a single lifespan. The star will swell. Then collapse. Its corpse will scatter across a universe that will no longer remember this tavern. Or this child. Or the petty skirmish that justified the spell.

Entropy does not negotiate with sentimental thaumaturgy. It records the transaction and waits.

The Lord General’s interior fire, that vaunted inner conflagration he wrapped himself in like a sermon, was no different. He mistook his endurance for immortality. He interpreted his defiance as refutation of the winter pressing against his armor. He had stared into other tempests and survived, so he believed that survival to be a permanent quality. As if history were a verdict rather than a sequence of reprieves.

Flame can repel frost for a time. That much the Marchioness of the Dead conceded. Ice does not contest that. A torch held against a glacier will carve momentary caverns. Fires do consume forests. Volcanoes do erase valleys. Yet all of them cool, in the end. The mountain’s heart solidifies. The ashfield hardens. The glacier advances over blackened stumps and seals them under indifferent strata. The fire has spent itself for spectacle. The ice has simply outlived the tantrum.

Even their rhetoric tastes of combustion.

They glorify heat. Passion. Fury. Zeal. They deify motion toward exhaustion. They call it courage that they run toward bullets and claws. They call it valor that they feed their bodies into the furnaces of war. They confuse willingness to die with transcendence of death. The arithmetic does not change simply because they howl while they are reduced to components.

All systems arc toward quiet.

Empires, once swollen with parades and declamations, become footnotes in decayed annals. Cities that believed themselves eternal are eaten by mold and root and silence. Theologies that promised permanence disintegrate into contradictory footnotes in some future heretic’s commentary. Stars balloon into swollen, senescent monstrosities before they collapse into dwarfs or fracture into shrapnel. Universes themselves cool into thin, almost featureless threnodies of low energy. Even the laws that describe those processes may unravel when their scaffolding decays.

They speak of fire as if it conquers. In truth it only accelerates the bill. It rises. It sustains itself by aggressive waste. Then it collapses into the very stillness it attempted to defy.

Purgatory is patient. Purgatory is the remainder after every flamboyant subtraction.

When the last empire has forgotten how to speak its own founding oaths, there will still be a place where its architects are processed. Not judged by their banners. Nor by their creeds. Nor by whose effigy they bent the knee to. All of that is ephemera. Crosscurrents. Decorative turbulence. In the ledger, the questions are simple. How did you spend what you were given. How much ruin did you purchase with your brief conflagration. How much order did you leave behind when your fire guttered out.

The philosophies of the living concern themselves with meaning. The Princess of Winterwake concerned herself with consequence. Meaning is whatever story the flame tells itself while it crackles. Consequence is the residue that remains in the ash after the crackling stops. They kneel before symbols, sigils, banners, idols. They argue metaphysics like insects debating the theology of a lamp. The lamp will burn out. The insects will die. The darkness will repossess the room.

Purgatory is not darkness in their crude sense. It is the interval. The accounting chamber. The cold vestibule where narratives are stripped away from what actually occurred. No one’s fire is bright there. No one’s laughter is loud. Battle hymns sound like childish boasts when recited next to mass graves. A king and a conscript weigh the same when one converts both into remains.

The starlight that knitted the girl’s skin is finite. The inner blaze that lets the general stand within gales of annihilation is finite. The little hearths in their chests that they mistake for their “will” are finite. Even the great furnaces behind their proudest suns are finite. Heat is a temporary asymmetry in an ocean that wants nothing more doctrinal than equilibrium. Everything they call courage. Or faith. Or transcendence. Is built on the capacity to spend that asymmetry in a direction they approve of.

Ixqueya knew better. The Marchioness had seen enough winters to comprehend the pattern. Fire shouts. Ice endures. Fire consumes and diminishes. Ice waits and inherits. The only question worth asking is whether something sensible is built in the interval between ignition and extinguishment. Most do not manage even that. They squander themselves in spectacle and call it glory.

When the general imagines his inner conflagration outmatching her cold, he confuses intransigence with victory. They all do. They shout that they do not fear death. They declare that they have conquered it, as if marching toward it repeatedly somehow alters its nature. It does not. The corpse does not care how many times the body previously survived. Purgatory does not offer premium accommodations to those who arrived loudly.

In the end, the girl’s starlight will gutter. The general’s inward blaze will falter. Their worlds will collapse into relic strata. Their patron deities will become abandoned statuary in a cosmos that no longer remembers their names. All that fire will prove it ever truly accomplished is to hasten the moment when ice, or its conceptual equivalent, may resume its natural primacy.

Entropy is not an antagonist. It is conclusion. They may delay it. They may postpone it. They may scorch a few more hours out of a failing star or throw more bodies into the furnace of a doomed campaign. They cannot circumvent it.

When the last flame sighs into exhaustion, something like Ixqueya will be waiting. Whether in her current form or as some colder analogue inscribed into the last viable structure of reality, the function will persist. To count. To classify. To receive. Not as a judge in their theatrical sense. As a final witness.

Their banners. Their catechisms. Their vaunted fires. All of it will resolve into ash and memory. Memory will rot. Ash will drift. What remains is the quiet. The cold. The ledger.

Fire spends itself to shout that it exists. Winter does not need to shout. Winter is there when the shouting stops.

"So what, are you two gonna censored or fight? Either way, put on a show."

Of course Xueqing wouldn't hear that - she was in another room, refreshing herself while dealing with her bloodstained clothes. Alone.

While death is the eternal result, life is more like the burst of motion, and both have some sort of beauty...

"That nice doctor lady would help, but I think she's vewee busy."

The tavern kept its ordinary metabolism. Tankards thudded. Dice ticked. Laughter braided itself through smoke. A fiddle worried at a tune near the bar. The air was stratified with ale. Tallow. Wet wool steaming itself dry. Nothing in the room petrified for Zubaida. She was not a comet demanding witness. She was a presence that could exist without annexing attention.

She sat near the hearth where iron cradled flame like a patient creature. The fire did not rage. It labored. Coals nested beneath split logs. Heat rose in slow, persuasive pulses. Firelight washed over timber. Pewter. Faces. It found her as if by preference and lingered. Moving across black fabric and goldwork. Catching on gemstones. Sliding down draped chains. Returning again to her skin.

Her posture carried the unmistakable cadence of a holy mother. Upright without rigidity. Relaxed without laxity. Hands gathered in her lap with deliberate tenderness. The kind that implies the habit of soothing. The practice of listening. Shoulders held a calm jurisdiction. She watched the coal-core where combustion becomes most lucid. Where radiance is no longer ornament. Where it is instruction. Her worship of the Lord of Light lived there. Not in proclamation. In alignment. In the way she allowed flame to tutor patience. To remind her that warmth can be sovereign without being violent.

Her perfume arrived as a slow intimacy. It unfurled. Balsamic resins warmed by the hearth. Amber and benzoin. Saffron’s dry gold threaded through the composition. Myrrh and olibanum gave it a sacral smokiness without harshness. A faint rose attar softened the edges into something skin-close and exorbitant. Beneath it. A cool, powdered nuance of orris. As the heat rose, the fragrance lifted with it. Turning the tavern’s usual stew of beer and smoke into something fleetingly more exalted.

Her hair fell long and heavy. A dark spill interrupted by the unmistakable signature of piebaldism. Not fashion. Not affectation. True contrast where ivory ran through obsidian. The pale portions caught the fire’s coruscation and brightened. Dimmed. Brightened again. A gold circlet rested at her brow. Not gaudy. Assured. Its central ornament glinted when the flame leaned toward her.

The same phenomenon touched her skin. Firelight revealed it with gentleness. Patches of lighter pigment on her forehead. Along the collarbone. On one forearm, where the sleeve’s cut conceded a glimpse. Ivory against warmth. A cartography authored by providence rather than vanity. In this glow it read like sun-bleaching on desert stone. Evidence of long fidelity to brightness. It did not diminish her beauty. It made it singular. It gave the eye places to linger. Then remember.

Her face held a rare balance. Severity without cruelty. Mercy without softness becoming weakness. High cheekbones caught the hearth’s aureate wash. A straight nose with an aristocratic line. Lips full and disciplined. Glossed in a tone between smoked rose and pomegranate rind. Her eyes were honey-brown. Resinous. Luminous. They held the fire’s reflection in miniature. She did not stare like a predator. She regarded like a teacher. Warm. Maternal. Wise.

Her cosmetics were executed with a practised hand. Kohl traced her eyes in a clean, elongated sweep. Shadow in ember tones. Burnished ochres and deep siennas. Blended as if dusk itself had been milled into powder. A subtle sheen rested on the high points of cheek and collarbone so the fire could find her and answer her with light. Brows were shaped with restraint. Lashes thickened without theatrical excess. The effect was not gaudiness. It was intention. Aesthetic discipline as reverence.

Her attire obeyed the same principle. Black fabric cut close with confident structure. Bordered in ornate goldwork that traced her lines with deliberate emphasis. The neckline was daring and unapologetic. Framing her cleavage as something sovereign rather than merely exposed. Gemstones at her throat and bodice flashed with controlled scintillation when she shifted her breath. At her hips, layered chains and diamond-shaped ornaments draped in weighted swags. They answered her smallest movement with a faint, crystalline murmur. She was holy. She was sensate. Those facts did not conflict. Sanctity, in her, did not mean erasure. It meant mastery.

She remained there. Near the crackle and the coal-glow. Letting a European hearth become a modest surrogate for the desert’s remembered sun. The tavern continued its ordinary noise around her. She did not seize it. She did not need to. She simply sat as a warm certainty in a cold world. Perfumed. Composed. Eyes fixed on flame.

Fumizuki waves to greet the new arrival. "Hewwo and welcome to Twixie's Bar. I'm Fumizuki."

The door did not open. It made an entrance. Tonatiuh Xīhuitzin arrived with the insolence of a curtain lift. He paused on the threshold as if waiting for applause that the room did not deserve to give. Then he glided forward, shoulders rolling like a dancer warming into a number. One hand lifted. Wrist loose. Fingers poised. The gesture was pure theatre. An invitation. A warning. A promise that the air itself was about to be improved.

Behind him, four skeletons strode in formation. Not shuffling dead. A runway cohort. Vertebra proud. Jaws angled like they had opinions. They wore his wares as if even bone understood hierarchy. Velvet. Bone-trim. Necro-ice beadwork that sparked cold blue along hems like frostfire trying to flirt. Tona turned once in the aisle, letting violet-and-gold shimmer under candlelight. Wet-jade sheen. Turquoise runes. Bone edging that made the garments look expensive enough to offend the poor. He planted a hand on his hip. Cocked his head. Smiled at the tavern like it had personally disappointed him.

Then he spoke. Loud enough to claim the room. Warm enough to make people forgive him for doing it. “Everyone breathe.” He fanned a hand, shooing dread as if it were smoke. “Do not clutch your purses. Do not clutch your prayers. If you must clutch something, clutch your *standards*, because they are clearly slipping.”

He took three more steps. The skeletons pivoted with him, a synchronized flourish. One snapped a cape outward in a clean arc. Another presented a ribbon like a royal decree. Two posed at either side as if the tavern were suddenly worthy of choreography. Tona’s smile widened. He tilted his chin toward the nearest table of staring men. “And do not fear. The greatest sword-swallowing mouth in this entire sodden establishment has arrived.” He tapped his own throat with two fingers. Velvet confidence. “Yes. *Higher.* I heard the rumors. I am here to confirm them. Consider this my charitable donation to your grim little lives.”

A ripple of laughter moved through the room. Nervous first. Then helpless. He let it happen. He *fed* on it. “Now.” He spread his arms, robes catching candlelight like stained glass. “I know this bar. I can smell it. The wet wool. The stale courage. The regret that has been reheated too many times. I am not here to judge you.”

A beat. Then his expression turned pitying, deliciously dramatic. “I am here to brighten this dreadful pit with my superior taste in fashion. Because death itself knows these people have no taste.”

He leaned toward the ceiling as if confiding in the rafters. “Death is a connoisseur. Death has standards. Death takes one look at this room and says, ‘No. I will not be seen here. I have an image.’” He snapped his fingers. The skeletons strutted. They moved down the central aisle with crisp heel-to-toe precision. One stopped to turn, offering the sharp angle of a shoulder piece. Another tilted a skull to show off bone filigree and turquoise beadwork. The third flared a hem so the necro-ice stitching caught the light and threw it back in glittering little insults. The fourth held swatches aloft like sacred relics. The tavern became a catwalk by force of audacity. Tables turned into seats. Patrons turned into audience. Nobody had voted on it.

Tona watched them with a proud, exaggerated hand to his chest, as if the sight moved him spiritually. “Look at them.” His voice softened into mock-reverence. “Polite. Disciplined. Better posture than half the living. That one has never once spilled ale on itself. Can any of you say the same.” He turned his head. And found her.

Ixqueya, alone at her ledger. Brooding like a cathedral in winter. Ice in the eyes. Warpaint immaculate. The room’s mood bending around her like weather around a mountain. Tona’s whole demeanor changed into delighted mischief. He approached her table with a flourish that respected her space while still making the act of approaching feel like an event. He bowed, not low. Not submissive. More like a man acknowledging an equal threat with a joke on his lips. “My Marchioness.” He placed a hand over his heart and let the other hand drift out, palm up, as if offering her the entire room and apologizing for the quality. “I have never seen anyone brood with such… professional artistry. Truly. If gloom were a textile, you would have it cut to perfection and stitched into an heirloom.”

He angled his body sideways so the lamplight kissed the runes on his sleeves. He was performing even while he spoke. A slight pivot. A controlled turn of the wrist. A half-smirk that suggested he knew exactly how charming he was being and found it amusing. “I came because I sensed a deficit.” He nodded at her ledger. “Not in your numbers. In your surroundings.”

He glanced around the tavern again, visibly pained. “Death knows these people have no taste.” He pronounced it like a scandal. “They think ‘well-made’ means ‘still holding together.’ They think ‘color’ is something you catch from a rash. They think a ‘silhouette’ is a threat.” His expression turned theatrically mournful. “Alas.” He sighed, long and dramatic. “I cannot work miracles.”

Then he brightened instantly, as if he had remembered he was the miracle. “But I can commit tasteful arson.” He spread two fingers like scissors. “I can cut. I can shape. I can make misery look intentional. And if the world insists on being dreary, I can at least force it to be well-dressed.” He leaned in just slightly. His voice dropped, silky and delighted. “Tell me, Lady Winter. Are you here to count threats. Or to punish yourself with bad ambience.” His eyes flicked to her inked columns, then back to her face. “Because I am prepared to rescue you from this aesthetic crime scene.” He gestured behind him. “My chorus is warmed up. My bones are obedient. My taste is violent. Give me a single nod and I will turn this miserable room into something that deserves your shadow.”