🌿🍒 + christmas party at the manor? i will let YOU DECIDE who she runs into. let the record show ALL OF THEM would be LUCKY to smooch adella🫵
𝒰𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 ℳ𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒍𝒆𝒕𝒐𝒆. 🎁｡˚
* ❄️ 𓂃 ࣪ ˖ ➷ ❪ @domusmortis ❫
Belwood Manor boasts a fine Christmas dinner, this and every year. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme benefit every steaming soup, savory pudding, and meat pie placed at the grand feasting table; the succulence of every edible thing there only made more so under the warming glow of chandelier light as it drips, orange as hot coals, from the ceiling. Roast goose rests there as well, and a suckling pig glazed in a potionmix pool of nutmeg, cloves, and dark fruit sugars, and... hm. Well. The cooks had aspired to bake a third bird for guests too, but the tender, idiot chickling had escaped during the preparations, and their plan was failed altogether.
The chickling, affectionately named Cinderella, had so desperately wanted to partake in the people's festivities—— at least until midnight. And so, a pitying fairy godmother had dressed her for the occasion: feathers plucked, entrails expertly gutted and replaced with human ones, and then brined in rippling crepe fabrics and borrowed lady's jewels. Cinderella swanned through the parlor that holiday night, a princess thing, undetected by her cooking captors. But too early in the evening did she catch the eye of a hungry Prince Charming, and her end was to come soon after that.
With a pretty, gliding, fairy voice did the Prince lure the bird, right beneath the false refuge of a mistletoe sprig. And with greedy fingers does she intend to rip the bird wide open, lacerate and suckle meat and marrow, and leave the wishbone intact—— all to herself. The first step in this process is to hook the bird by its chin, which the Prince performs, with butcherly precision.
❝ Hello Ophelia, ❞ says the Prince, named Adelaide, quiet as a forest covered in snow, teeth gleaming winter white. ❝ I found you. And now I get to keep you. ❞ Her fingers ease along the Dare girl's lips, testing its plumpness. ❝ But you know I can't kiss you. Not here. Not in public. But in secret I can, just as often as you want. So will you tell me what you want? ❞
All the while she is grinning, but not at the girl so dewily and beseechingly blinking up at her. No, more than half of Adelaide's staring, conniving, and evil, is dedicated to Belwood's own inheritor: Adrian Vallier, who watches from a lonely corner.
