This is the sort of stuff which I vomit out when I can't sleep.
Modern Narcissus-esque? Meh.
Have fun shredding it!
-Anti
Marseilles, France
1737 A.D.
His life floats on chamber music. He walks like a Bach prelude, dances like a violin concerto. His voice is a cello when dolorous and a viola when content.
His life is a smattered canvas of vibrant color, of mixed silks and jewels and balls.
Matthias Delacroix has never considered beauty, because he is surrounded by it. Delicately arranged foods and décor. A ball where the women’s gowns are so long that when they dance it’s as if they’re on cloud.
Matthias knows he must be a creature of terrible beauty. He sees his beauty in other people. Girls so similar their faces blur into a crème-colored mess on the canvas of his memory fawn over him. People listen to him. People are enchanted by him. He ensnares the senses.
But Matthias does not see his beauty for himself. He grows up, dancing through life in a light Gavotte step, unaware of the mystery of his face, unaware of the spark of his eye, the softness of his hair.
There are no mirrors in the Delacroix chateau.
He grows up surrounded by a breeze of whispers. Hushed voices rasp of a curse, an ancient curse whose poison seeps back through the Delacroix line for generations, oozing and black. A curse upon Delacroix men. Whispers can be so loud.
And they would say, and that, Matthias, is why a Delacroix man must never know himself.
Delacroix men have never been known to come to stay permanently. They flit through this life, beautiful, golden haired, waltzing with women and garbed in soft pastels like spring flowers. They are candles, vibrant and heat giving, flaming, flaming, flaming.
But wax softens and melts and morphs and the candle goes out.
And they always go out.
Because the Delacroix men always disappear.
And that, Matthias, is why a Delacroix man must never know himself.
The chateau of the noble and ancient Delacroix family is rotting from the inside. From the outside it sparkles, diamond, jewel of the French aristocracy. But when Matthias sneaks around pitter-patter through its musty corridors, he can breathe it. He can breathe the pestilence of the Delacroix men. He can sense a plague older than anything he knows.
Locked doors which he’s certain no one has ever opened.
Hidden corridors.
Plague.
The whispers of the curse befuddle him, entice him.
“Matthias,” comes a voice from beside him. Glancing up, he finds himself looking into a pair of round amber-flecked orbs whose expression spell pure adoration. She bows her head to him, and her silk rustles.
Her name is Anouk and she is desperately in love with him. He knows this because most girls are. He nods back, but his attention is focused at the dilapidated doorway at the end of the corridor. This entire area of the chateau sags, exhausted, ancient. The door is half hidden by dark and mildew, but the shine of a lock is absent.
Open? Since when has it been open?
“Matthias, what are you looking at?”
He starts, and turns to face her. She cocks her head and twists her mouth into a slight smile. Anouk is more in love with him than most girls, but he sees no interest in her. She is like every other girl, an echo of flaxen hair and rustling waltzes. She is an echo, and nothing more.
He has never seen himself, but he knows he is beautiful, and he knows he can do much better than an Echo. His shoulders heave in a sigh, and he pushes past her to the door.
It swings open easily, sending a cloud of dust into his lungs. He coughs out little clouds and doesn’t notice when the door clicks shut behind him. Locked. He is now another secret in a rotting house. He gasps at the sight of the corridor. Torch light casts a runny-egg orange glow on the gilded walls. A staircase winds haphazardly toward some unknown location. Matthias feels his legs working, feels himself making his way toward the top.
Heart beating in a furious rhythm, he steps into the room. At first, a sense of disappointment turns the corners of his mouth downward. It is another aristocratically furnished room in an aristocratically furnished chateau. Persian rugs, Renaissance paintings… Matthias sighs.
But then, in the corner of his eyes, he sees it. A mirror with an imposing frame of gold and silver inlay entwines and twists together at the top to form the word Delacroix. Daffodils rank the name, perfect metal petals open to a metal sun. Twenty-two golden blooms blink in the half-light. He peers into the mirror and a small gasp pushes itself from his lips. A young man, with surprised rosy lips set into an alabaster face. Golden hair falls in soft curls around the face. The young man in the mirror swallows.
A small voice in his head. Know thyself.
Tentatively, he reaches a hand toward the beautiful man before him. “Hello,” he says, and the man in front of him mouths the words back at him. Still staring at the man, Matthias sinks to the ground, enraptured. The man stares back at him adoringly. “You’re beautiful,” he says, and is relieved to see that the man thinks he’s beautiful as well.
And in an instant Matthias is in love and his heart burns for the beautiful man in front of him. “I love you.” he says, and the man says it back.
Days pass.
Nights pass.
Still Matthias lies before the beautiful man, burning, burning, burning with love for the gorgeous creature before him.
He does not eat.
He does not sleep.
Slowly, surely, Matthias Delacroix fades. His face is pressed against the mirror, and he begs for someone, anyone to let him be forever with his beloved.
And he feels himself sinking, changing. The world around him fades. He sinks into himself, folds and hardens, twists into the framework of the cursed thing, a shiny metal daffodil.
The Delacroix men don’t stay for long.
-----
The first days of his disappearance, there is anxiety.
The first weeks of his disappearance, there are whispers.
After a month, it is accepted and left behind in the past. Matthias was a Delacroix, and Delacroix men don’t stay for long.
But Anouk doesn’t accept. Anouk doesn’t forget. She searches tirelessly behind every door, every crevice until she finds herself in a richly furnished room. On the far side of the wall is a mirror. She looks into it and screams.
Her eyes are met with twenty-three identical pairs of blue ones. Twenty-three identical golden haired Delacroix men stare at her, and at the front of the group is…
“Matthias!”
Twenty-three generations of Delacroix men, trapped by the knowledge of their own bodies. With a shriek, she throws herself into the mirror.
A crash pierces the still night air and echoes, echoes, echoes. Shooting stars of glass fly through the air and shatter on the Persian rug, shimmering in the black.
Pale quivering lips set into an “O” stand poised to release a shriek, but the silence remains. She stands, motionless, eyes drawn to the sparkling mess she’s created.
Crimson crosses her white hands in angry zigzags. She wipes them on her dress, blood meets silk. Slowly, deliberately, she walks toward the empty frame which had been the mirror. En pointe, her finger dances over the golden blooms and she silently counts them.
Twenty-three.
Twenty-three little daffodils.
Her heart beats against her rib cage, a rabid animal. His name flutters from her lips. “Matthias,” she rasps. “Matthias,” Echo, echo, echo.
Small footsteps come to a halt behind her. She does not turn.
“Mademoiselle Anouk? What has happened? I heard a crash!”
No answer.
“Mademoiselle?”
No answer.
“Dinner will be served sortly.”
“Matthias,”
A pause. “Are you quite well, mademoiselle?”
“Yes,” Anouk points to one of the daffodils, the twenty-third. “Yes, I have found the marquis.”
A small gasp escapes the servant. “The curse—! It’s true!”
Anouk fingers a sliver of the Delacroix mirror. A flash of blue eyes. Golden hair. And then it’s gone.
“Matthias,”
At the bottom of the mirror, hand-in-hand with the golden daffodils, loop a pattern of letter’s that make Anouk’s skin bristle with sudden chill.
Know thyself.
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Canary word: Present
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,861 Reviews
*Pounces*
I read this and enjoyed it a lot on my first read. But on my second read, I started looking at it in my usual way.
My problem mostly lies with the girl at the end. Such stubborn women are not introduced, when you have the opportunity to show them earlier. Much earlier. Weave in the girls who never seem to take no for an answer from the most beautiful boy into the rest of the story. Use it to give him even more of an ego, and make Anouk less of a rarity, and a duex ex machina to find him.
My main complaint, I suppose, is this didn't stick with me past a few moments. I came back to this a few days after reading and found myself remembering the story and not wanting to read again. There was hardly anything haunting in the story. Nothing that truly made it stick with me.
I will say that you created the element of surprise with the 23 identical men in the mirror, but by then I had nearly expected it. There wasn't much of a shock value, nor was there a resolution to the curse (which I assume has been broken, now that the mirror is shattered? You never answer that).
That's where you're really lacking in terms of plot. Try to get a more horroresque feel to this, so there's a ghost in the mirror for readers. I was sort of captured the first time but not so much the second time.
I also agree with Octave about how some of the prose is a bit too purple. Where you begin losing that is when he's exploring the castle; you could have him encounter things that are ugly for the first time, which shock him. Or, you could have him see everything as beautiful, but it shouldn't be (although you've just established that he doesn't see all women as beautiful, which would be a contradiction). Do something to when the castle is unknown to him. When the actual setting is unknown to him. You have the perfect set-up in the line "he's never paid much to beauty, because he is accustomed to it." What if he is suddenly in a place where he is not surrounded by it? What does he do?
That's just my suggestion for making the end a bit more gripping. It'd be an even sharper contrast when he finds beauty again; he's so starved for it from his surroundings, and starved to see himself, that he gets captured.
Drop me a line if you have any questions or comments.
~Rosey
First things first, this is gorgeous. oo As mentioned by Gryphon, the atmosphere is thick and rich, almost decadent.
However, I think my problem with this piece also lies in its decadence. There's a fine line between beautiful prose and flowery prose, and in my personal opinion, you stepped over it a few times. I can't pinpoint the exact parts, but know that once or twice, while I read this story, I was tempted to skim over a good deal of it. Beautiful is beautiful, but I think you could stand to cut a few sentences and descriptions. It all seems too much sometimes. Then again, I was never big on description, so please take my words with a huge grain of salt. oo
Aside from that, I have a few nitpicks here and there. First, Anouk was there when Mathias brushed past her into the corridor. She would know the general direction in which she went, right? So it makes no sense for her to search every single place in the mansion and not check the area where he disappeared to right before he vanished. If anything, I expect her to search that area first. oo" Also, she's the last one to see him alive. Wouldn't they question her?
Second, if Delacroix men disappear so often, how does their line live on? It's really nitpicky, but it bothered me towards the end, when Matthias disappeared without an heir. oo Nothing big. Also, if he's really quite a society man, then why hasn't he seen himself in other people's mirrors? I can understand why his house doesn't have any mirrors, but what about other people's houses? And wouldn't he fear the mirror if he's never seen one before?
They're all tiny nitpicks and my suspension of disbelief does hold up against them (except for the last one, but it didn't really hit me until I started mulling over the piece for a while). ^^
I wish I could be more helpful, but I can't. You did a wonderful job with this piece. I just hope I made sense. >>
Sincerely,
Octave
Dude. This was gorgeous. It just lilted along, glossy and rich. Seriously, the atmosphere was just so heavy and decadent and distant. Lovely.
Mmm, methinks some quotation marks would not be amiss? Running into the echo of this later on was odd when I read through it quickly. I stumbled over it because I knew how the the narration worked and then that seemed to throw me for a loop, as if there were a narrator speaking directly to Matthias. Perhaps make it a bit more clear that is not what happened?
It might just be me and my deathly fear of this word in poorly written fiction *cough Eye of Argon cough*, but I seriously cannot stand the word "orb" being used for "eye". Is it really too much for it to just be "eyes" here instead of "orbs"? We still get the effect of the rest of the sentence's lovely language.
"he sees nothing interesting in her"? The way this is phrased now, it sounds like he doesn't see her showing any interest in him, which we know isn't true because it says that she is in love with him. Just a little weird wording.
Ow ow ow ow. She doesn't have any glass shards in her hands. Seriously, *winces* that would hurt soooooo badly. Ow ow ow ow. *phantom pain and all that*
I thought they'd given up looking for him at this point. Hasn't it been like a month or something? Why is this guy asking her if there had been others searching before this? Did he hear her calling Matthias' name? Did he think she saw him? *confused*
This was lovely, as I said before. It balanced out its richness with its length so that the level of description didn't become overpowering. The narration was suitably tragic and cold. Really, quite fantastic. You should not sleep more often.
~GryphonFledgling