KILIAN TADEJ / 35+ / ringmaster / astral courtless / thought + illusion
Curious things happen when one is offered a ripe apple.
It had lain in the devil’s strewn hand, politely tendered, coruscating with traitors’ blood. A substantial, comforting clout, with shiny red flesh and a sweetly, soothsaying fragrance beneath the surface. A fruit of knowledge; of good and evil; of contingency and poisonous deception. A forbidden treat, the likes of which good girls and boys had been warned about.
It winks a newly polished glint against a velvet waistcoat.
Another apple, another temptation. A single bubble of inscrutable nectar.
It’s only polite to sup such a generous fare—to never waste what precious sustenance is given.
“Eat. Drink. Dine from the orchard of light and eventide flowers, and you will find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Hold your breath. Close your eyes and count to three. The stars will grant your every whimsical desire to life—go on, have a bite.”
Persuasion is a delicious red fruit, and the devil-man extracts sweet ambrosia with an answering grin as wide and white as the rising moon. With one bite the weary of reality is replaced by an illusory enchantment, glinting like firefly nail polish and rising in white-fairytale clusters and constellations. Stars. Galaxies. Infinities of cosmoses far beyond the periphery of knowability, where mavericks rule and darkness waits. And there— just there— dressed in the shimmering rips and velvet gossamer of midnight astral is the Pied Piper himself.
Listen carefully to the snickering wind, and hear those gentle strains of the piper’s play.
“Nothing to be a’feard, my child. Pass the knap of the hill, your white chariot waits to take thee to dreamland.”
The words are nothing short from the bite of fruit between his lips: refreshing and sweet, filtering a thick, delicious juice of irony. He offers a proverbial harvest to the new ilk, urging them to savor the flavor. Though it hardly seems fair; wayward children could never be able to fully appreciate the gesture— would never be able to name the strangest of sugars that quell his tongue. For how could a bewitched soul be expected to know of a contract that’s been signed and sealed before they could even break the sallow skin of a mere apple?
Off you be, now, sweetling. The chariot’s ready.
dailybridgerton
jbbartram-illu
snowghoul
