“Books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless.”
book quotes. | @corruptedscars
❝ … i agree. but precious things must be handled gently — and it is precious to me. ❞ the tome in question is a weathered thing; its pages loose from its spine, its oxblood cover bleached and blurred by its time out of doors before it came into her hands. she had found it in her youth, a relic half-buried in the sweet black dirt at the edge of the forest. hidden, or perhaps willfully forgotten. curiosity, that crooked finger ever beckoning, had pressed her to take it for herself. it had been left unwanted anyhow, and who better to take it than a morbid misfit girl ?
the pages unfolded upon an anthology of peculiar, bawdy stories. lurid tales of phantoms infatuated with strange women. of strange women lusting after awful shapes in the dark. every tale of blood, salt, and wretched desire. the unloved bearing down upon the unloved bringing the world around them to a tremble in exquisite horror and ecstasy. such stories cut a hot slash across the chaste, austere world her parents had erected around her, and washing herself in the rich red waters that poured through the tear, she found herself quite awake and quite aware. altered so swiftly and irrevocably in the way you only can be as a teenager. oh, how lamb longed to experience such sensations anew again.
while need had once dictated that it be hidden many times over — in the earth, under floorboards, in the boughs of trees — by some miracle it is with her still.
holding the crumbling thing in her arms now, she thinks of the goblets of deepest red - whether blood or wine she knows not - situated about his tent. the spills across cushion and dirt both she’s occasioned to see there. a tidy man with his own appearance, yes, but with another’s belongings …. ?
still, it is no great jewel, she reasons with herself. what brings pleasure to one should be free to bring pleasure to another, if indeed he finds it to be anything more than tawdry trash. she holds it out for his taking then, silently willing herself to be quite alright should it never return to her hands.
❝ … go on, then. i particularly like the story of Elnara and her great wish for a lover ... positively wretched. ❞ , she smiles, with as much fondness as one might have for their own child. ❝ ... promise to share your thoughts with me ? ❞
