A simple life.

[BellaDorma]

Bella sat calmly, her legs up on the table, long soft leather boots laced up to her knees and she wore a simple fitted tunic of the same material. She peered out the small window in her room. The servants quarters in the Dej’Dynastus house were not overly large, but it was a vast improvement from her small basement cot at her old job. The window looked out onto a tiny but flourishing garden where the servants gathered tomatoes, lettuce and other vegetables. A few beehives thrummed with life in one corner, the bees produced the honey used in the kitchens. The lanky form of a young male lion lay underneath her chair, his white chest heaving up and down as he slept. Bella leaned back in her chair, a pair of safety goggles on her face, her tongue poking out the side of her mouth in concentration. She could hear footsteps coming down the hall, Probably lady Maggie coming down to tell her it was time to take the evenings bread out of the ovens.

She wasn’t particularly good at actually cooking the bread, her skill left much to be desired, but she felt useful making the rounds completing what the other servants didn’t finish. Taking the laundry down from the lines, great white flapping sheets for the beds, heavy velvet robes for the magus and the ever interesting assortment of undergarments of the ladies of the household. Smelling the fresh smell of lightly perfumed detergent, feeling the soft fabrics as she first removed them from the line and then gently folded them into baskets. Going to the flower garden and picking the large heavy blooms of the purple and yellow irises that were a favorite of the family, gently arranging them and placing them in the appropriate vases around the house. There were also kitchen duties, ladling the heady soup, pulling the bread from the ovens, slicing them and setting them alongside bowls of honey, wheeling the serving carts through the rich and empty halls, one outside each of the masters door for them to open and bring in the food at their leisure.

Occasionally one of the little bells inside her room would ring and she would follow its attached string up the stairs to the main hall to its source where she would be asked to take a package or a letter, sealed in deep red wax, marked with the house’s seal. She would put on her traveling cloak and go outside to the stables, taking her very own mount from the stables, a lovely male hawk strider with bright green plumage and lead him out into the warm sunshine to run her errand.

One would almost think the world a peaceful and easy place to be.



http://i160.photobucket.com/albums/t163/rachelvasb/bella.jpg

[Lysimachus]

One would almost think the world a peaceful and easy place to be.


Though if one were to think such a thing...
then they would be sorely mistaken.

For despite all of these simple pleasures and day-to-day activities, the inconspicuous servant of Dynastus Hall was indirectly engaging herself in an ongoing production fraught with danger, intrigue, and politicking. How many letters had she politely and without recourse delivered?

What could these letters contain? More than likely an order for candlewax -- or, perhaps, another book had broken its magical bindings, and Nevitt Autumnburst, the Hall's chamberlain, sent out for reparative materials. But amongst all these unremarkable epistles would lie, certainly and occasionally, a portion of text suggesting fraud on the Marquess' part.

Or, perhaps, a letter from the Marchioness to one of her previous (and numerous) illicit lovers.

Or, indeed, an appeal to a shadowy agent for demonic materiel.

Or an admission of treason.

But alas, such dire predilections for so expansive a House were not for Bella's diversion. She tended to her tasks, and she performed admirably -- often to greater product than many of the other servants. And, perhaps, she enjoyed her work.

So, for now, she does live a simple life.

But when the darkness closes once again around her employers, would she, in her predisposition towards this uniformity of being, rise to face it?

~~~

(( Excerpted from the Hall Log of the magister Nevitt Autumnburst ))

" ...
Viola Secura -- Cloth Weaver -- Progress Acceptable
No Further Notes
Lienden Moonwash -- Stableboy -- Progress Acceptable
No Further Notes
Bella Dorma -- House Maid -- Progress Acceptable
Note: Bella has demonstrated the usage of numerous cantrips in her work -- particularly in relation to the beasts of the Menagerie. Note that these observations may as has occurred before be a product of the Hall's abjurations. Under Eye.
... "

fin