♱ @severyanin.
The tapestries that adorned the stone walls were worn, sparse where moths had nested and consumed of its once magnificent threads, woven into a dull depiction of ceremony, of angels rising into heavenly choirs, and below, the Vasilyevich’s enemies condemned to perdition. Down they tumbled, with weights about their ankles, into the pyres of hell. The hall in which Helena now stood appeared to be deserted, cloaked from ceiling to floor in tapestries of Vasilyeviches princes of former epochs. A sweet, low hum thrummed through the space, oozing from the chatter and troubadours many floors below, though Helena felt the eerie chill of desertion at her spine; its gelid fingertips crawling up her lithe neck. The room reminded her, in all its bare humility, of a priory; the quiet, the thin streaks of light seeping through half-draped windows, the stonedust and starch cold, the draft in the apse. At any moment, she suspected, field nuns and shorn-headed villeinesses could make camp here, and feel quite at home.
Helena stretches her fingertips, warm to the touch, and lays them flat across the worn, weathered face of Rostislav’s ancestors, smoothing away a thick, pounded layer of soot – as integral to the tapestry as the textiles themselves. She steals a breath, the sound of it hissing and husking through teeth, gritted to the cold, coupled with the groan of a wooden plank underfoot. She turns toward the noise, the Grand Prince’s height imposing even beneath the loftily-arched door. His eyes glowed and glowered in the dim light. Helena felt no great urge to arrange herself, to pleat her skirts, to adjust the luminous strands of dark hair escaping from beneath her veil. ‘Your Grace.’ Her voice is gossamer-thin as she lowers in a hasty bow. They will be in-laws, soon, in the convoluted, gnarled way of imperial genealogies, and she need not explain her presence. Helena glitters against the bareness of the room, the cold stone walls, the sooty carpets, and extends her neck in greeting.
Standing regally against his stark gaze, she quips: ‘I see I am not the only one needing respite from the theatrics.’ Lips purse, enigmatically twisted. She casts her gaze about the lightless, dank room, returning once more to the tapestry. ‘I cannot imagine why anyone would allow this piece to rot away. You resemble them, sire, as does the rest of your brood. Who, I wonder, is this?’ She asks, pointing to a sole figure encased by a band of repentant apostles. ‘A grandfather of the Tsar, perhaps?’
