In fair Verona, our tale begins with TRINITY ZAKARIAN, who is THIRTY-EIGHT years old. She is often called TAMORA by the MONTAGUES and works as their SOLDIER. She uses SHE/HER pronouns.
It did not come easy to her, that spark of LIFE in her eyes. Imagine the sky above, empty of all starlight, not even distant suns and galaxies coloring it with the hint of there being something more. The blank, inky sky, absent of the promise of light, is nothing more than an empty void where warmth had yet to be a thought, let alone something to crave. That is what was reflected in Trinity’s eyes, from her earliest of years. But she watched the smiles of her parents, how they traded them so sincerely and how they GLOWED. She watched how worry colored their eyes, how fear made their fingers twitch and listened as their breath would grow hushed and unsteady when she would come close. Uneasy, concerned, and fretful – all words one would use to describe when Trinity would step closer, draw nearer. Emotions and adjectives that were so UNFAMILIAR to her, yet she knew that they were the ones to use when looking upon their expressions, though she were nothing more than a child. So, as the years bled into one another, she learned to mirror the peal of laughter that trilled from her mother’s lips and the excitable light that glinted in her father’s eyes. It settled upon her like a VEIL, gently falling upon her expressions, coaxing twitches and touches that might be called mannerisms – something akin to life settled upon her like a veil.
For many years she wore it, and she wore it well. The daughter and meticulously educated heir to the Zakarian fortune, the articles said, a vision of poise and compassion. Both of those were practiced to perfection – long hours spent in front of a mirror to achieve the earnestness and ease of expression, as well as how to walk in her heels as though she were a lark, so very light. But boredom of such a structured existence, of mimicking the conflict of humanity in her everyday life, began to wear on her. The CORPSE-LIKE girl grew into a reputable woman, known for her wit and even temperament for the span of a handful of years. She married a woman of Russian birth, from the same town as she, for whom she felt some sort of fleeting intrigue and assumed that this must be the affection that people wag on about. It was naught but boredom and shallow moments of interest. Before it was all DECIMATED by a boy who was never able to grow into a man. Her sullen wife carried no love for the child they had, but when Trinity held their hand in hers, felt the tiny beat of their heart with her own fingers, she thought that this scarce warmth was something akin to the love that so many fools talked about. In that moment, there was no farce of HUMANITY in her eyes, and when she smiled it eased upon her lips – quiet and shining as the light of a slowly waning moon. Her only son, her first and last born, smiled up at her too. But he was stolen away from her all too soon, in the most mercilessly violent and brutal of ways.
The wife she had thought so quiet and meek had an array of lovers, each more greedy and violent than the last. He scoured into their house in a violent fit of rage, a man possessed with Aphrodite’s broken error, Dionysus’ BACCHANAL ways – and her son had tried to protect his mothers. A boy no more than 12, determined to protect the two woman who loved him so dearly, but he didn’t know the error of his self-sacrificing ways. The knife that had been meant for Trinity’s wife pierced her son’s heart, falling again and again long after his eyes were vacant, devoid of any its forming, shining rays. Before she was aware of what her hands were doing, the man was a corpse at her feet, BLOOD weeping from him in torrents, the knife that had pierced her son now laying in his throat. It felt warm, her firstborn and last born had. There was a moment of peace for her, then. All else slowed – all else was suspended, but her heart still beat, and she could almost hear his beat in tandem with hers. And she wanted to feel that WARMTH again, so she took to the knife to her own wife. It made her feel close to him again. The yawning wound in her chest seemed to be cauterized the more other’s around her began to bleed. This was how her legacy began.
A man named Faron Vasiliev approached her, keen to have someone with her meticulous reputation in his motley crew of luxe-living cutthroats. The Zakarian name still carried a noble tone to it – for who could feel nothing but pity for the family of a woman who was left so traumatized after the HORRIFIC murders that occurred in her home? When she arrived in Verona, it was to plant her seed as a business-woman of noble quality in the city, as well as to further relations between her late Russian-liege and the great Montague don. In Verona she has grown, silent and thorned, feeling more and more the warmth begin to weep out of her like the blood that wept so quietly from her son’s wounds. Her ROOTS have sunk deep within the ranks of the great Montagues, her loyalty to them based purely on the amount of jewels they will allow her to liberate – on the opportunities they give her to remember what it felt like to feel warm, even if it is at the cost of another’s life, for a handful of minutes where she did not feel as if she were slowly decaying. The people of the city believe that they have borne witness to the worst already, that all the MONSTERS they see, they can give a name to. What they don’t know is that she had learned to hide her monstrous ways and hide them well. She’s always been a corpse-like girl, waiting for the world to be just as dead inside as she.
TOMAS SABELLO & CELESTE DUVAL: Leverage. She isn’t motivated much save for her own self-satisfaction which can, unfortunately, be found in the act of undoing others. It’s almost like a hobby – a means of keeping her mind stimulated so that it doesn’t stagnate from disuse. Completely by chance, she had stumbled upon the two in a little private area of the Twelfth Night. It had been roped off, likely to prepare for a new exhibit, and she had slipped past the velvet ropes only to pause when she heard soft, quiet voices. One of them had sounded like Celeste’s husband, and the other had was unfamiliar to her, although it wasn’t for long. There were few in the city who didn’t know the face of Juliana Capulet. The way that they looked at one another, sitting so close with their heads nearly touching, had told her all that she needed to know. It was becoming rather boring within the Montague ranks, without Faron to wreak havoc with – now that he was six feet under and buried rather deep. But she wasn’t that sorry. It was entertaining enough to wreak havoc on her own.
GRACE DALY: Sycophant. It isn’t often that she finds herself fond of someone that was still alive and breathing, but Grace was the exception. The affection is completely debased, of course. Founded purely in the fact that whatever the younger woman reaches for, she loses because she wants for it so ardently that she smothers it. But Grace seems to know that if she were to mimic Trinity’s practiced restraint that there might yet be hope for her and the ambitions that she nurses so well. Whereas Trinity is content to watch another woman be as destructive as she wishes, marring all else to her heart’s content. What the eldest Daly woman doesn’t know, though, might very well be the death of her. And there is a lot she doesn’t know about Trinity Zakarian – such as this: the woman doesn’t have a heart. One might think they are safe from the bite of her bullet or the pointed edge of her blade because they are privy to her smiles and favor. But her heart died long ago, and there is no hope of retrieving it. No matter how much you wish and want for it. And let it be known, that she has tried.
ALVA FAE: Amusement. She is used to having people shudder when she walks into a room, or hold their breath until she casts her gaze away from them. But she evokes are rather particular reaction out of Alva that has her blood singing, that has her questing for more if only to watch the tortured way they swallow down their palpable discomfort. Choke on it. Only to swallow it down once more. There are times when she looks at them and thinks of her son, thinks of all that he could have been if only he weren’t nothing more than a pile of white bones. In those moments she thinks that he might see something in her that repulses him all the more and makes him shy away. In those moments are when she wants to drag them closes, wants to whisper in their ear and watch whatever it is that she evokes from them smother them until they’re on their knees, crawling away. For now, though, she’ll settle for these small moments shared with them – at least, until she’s grown tired. Then we shall see.
MONA CHEN: Ire. It is so rare that she finds things stirring her to action, that she has difficulty recognizing it. But when she discovered the likes of Mona Chen, the great madame of the Dark Lady, what she felt was so palpable and vicious that it sang in her veins: unabated loathing. She saw the way that others looked at the Mona, with their eyes alight and full of want, as though they would happily eat from the palm of her hand. They looked at Trinity like that too, with soft eyes and lips curving into wanting, pleading smiles. But unlike Trinity, Mona need not don a mask, no, she was the mask that she were – whereas Trinity? Felt nothing and wanted for nothing, not their money, not their adoration. All that she wanted was their heart in her hands so that she might remember what warmth others could carry. The great Madame of Verona robbed that opportunity from her, though, since none would even think to glance her way when the two were in the same room. So she would pay for that – and pay for it dearly.
Trinity is portrayed by ANGELA SARAFYAN and was written by ROSEY. She is currently TAKEN by RACH.
