[attr="class","text"]

Shun the house...[break][break]

The scrollwork marks the gate.[break][break]

where Shuppet gather in the growing dusk.[break][break]

It slices deep, biting into the stylised woodwork above the stygian steps. It gleams in gilt filigree against the gloaming exterior of a Kalosian estate, marking that edificie of another time, another place in its own silent warning.[break][break]

The Grimwald House, 'midst its copse of spidery trees on the outskirts of Mauville, could be little else but an ill omen. A black star. A bloodclot. The memory of a murder at midnight worming like a maggot in the back of the skull. It has good bones, someone long-dead once murmured. And it does, beneath the subtle peel of its dark lacquer, beneath the dust that grimes its benighted glass, beyond the tatters of yellow tape ground into the rich, black soil by the countless comings and goings of this contractor or that - no longer marking it CONDEMNED.[break][break]

Shun the house where Shuppet gather in the growing dusk.[break][break]

They are. A seethe of them coming home. A susurrous of funereal shrouds that fill the eaves, whisper amidst the slate of the tiled roof, slither in the spaces in between. [break][break]

Where the light catches through the scarlet-gold foliage, the whole of this secluded corner of Mauville appears to bleed. It washes over the not-quite-manicured lawn, newly seeded. It slips through the tangled briar and bramble of the eastern garden, where parasitic vine grows wild over the stones and plinths in their neat rows, not yet tended to.[break][break]

It paints the silhouette of the woman at the table, strikes a rust-red smoulder from the platinum of coiffed tresses, and strikes its match in the molten amber of her gaze. It anoints the feather and the inkwell, finds the tattered garb of the Shuppet that slips down from its swarming brethren to hover above her free hand. When it nudges itself as if into the succor of her palm, it is met only by the idle tracery of metal. Five claw-tips, one for each gauntlet-ringed finger to provide barrier between she and its kind. Cold metal to graveshroud cloth and whatever manifests beneath, stirred to wakefulness as its relations drift and eddy like the tides in the high arches of the awning.[break][break]

"Good evening, Gallant," comes the metal-smooth whisper of her cadence, a blade to a whetstone. A voice like a knife through scarlet silk.[break][break]

Behind the lacquered facade and the stained glass, beneath the moth-eaten carpet and the floorboards, something shrieks loud enough that the windowpanes tremble. That it reverberates through the timber. A percussive thudding sounds. Stops. Starts. Stops again. The whole of the house in the copse of red trees falls eerily silent, broken only by the soft, whined yawn of the Zorua that had been curled nosetip-to-tailtip beside her heels, his flash of pearlescent teeth too-sharp and too-swiftly masked from view as it blinks blearily, ears swiveling toward the door. [break][break]

It isn't one of hers.[break][break]

But then, the wallpaper bled this afternoon, all oil-slick black nacre down the silk brocade, and it scarcely stopped for the whole of evening tea. There's at least one something in the basement, two someones in the stairwell, and another in the first section of the attic. No one living has occupied the Grimwald House in decades, and is their nature, its other residents are not thrilled to have her company. Not all of them, at least. But this is her house, in as much as it was ever theirs. [break][break]

Quill-tip to parchment, the ink scintillates in gold-on-red in the setting sunlight, reminds her of blood and money. [break][break]

Yumi,[break][break]

A hesitation, but never long enough to blot the ink - only to chart the sound of something being dragged down the steps and out into the garden. That one isn't hers, either. At least not yet. And there are many things she could say when she begins to write once more, too many idle little nothings and niceties, polite pleasantries that never manifest upon the parchment in any way that matters.[break][break]

There is only an address upon scarlet parchment in the setting sun. [break][break]

There is only - Do come visit - Neither a question nor a demand. [break][break]

An invitation signed simply with - [break][break]

- G.[break][break]

"You may let her in should she arrive, Godwine," Griselda muses idly, talon-tips to parchment as the Shuppet spirits the missive away.[break][break]

A flicker. A shift. A trick of the late near-dusk sun, and the Zorua is gone. If what resides in its place bears the semblance of a child, dark-haired and dark-eyed, it fidgets with a hem of black brocade in that haemic haze of sunlight. It smiles a too-sharp smile. It speaks in that metal-smooth voice, an eerily exact recitation, "You may let her in should she arrive, Godwine."[break][break]

And then it is back to the plans. To the way the paint in the foyer appears to crawl in a certain light. To the way none of the electric seems wired in quite the same way any time they check, and something screams from time to time beneath the floorboards. To the complaints of the contractors that this has moved, or that, or that they think something - something from that house - followed them home.[break][break]

There is still so very much to do.

NOTES

⬥ [break]
⬥ pkmn-hoenn.boards.net/thread/8624/vacation-time [break]
⬥