Dark Chocolate #9, Green Tea # 1: Hairline Fracture
Title: Hairline Fracture
Author: Memirra
Challenge: Dark Chocolate # 9 (vanity), Green Tea # 1 (daybreak)
Toppings/Extras: None
Story: Cracked Mirrors
Word Count: 563
Rating: G
Summary: Diantha has a fleeting lapse out of her arrogance.
Notes: It’s strange to write someone as conceited as Diantha this way, but also strangely fun. Maybe I just have a vendetta against the conceited, even the ones who number among my ranks of characters...
Silvery shafts of light spilled through the cracks in between the window’s ancient shutters, dappling the room with the light of a new day. Diantha didn’t care though, or couldn’t muster the nerve to, even as the birds outside stirred and began their sweet morning tunes - oh which, under any normal circumstance, she had loathed. The girl simply sat, arms wrapped around her knees which she had brought to her chest, staring at the remains of a half-shattered mirror.
Once a fine pane of oval glass, burnished and pristine, the mirror now hung lop-sided and cracked on the peeling wall, a ring of tarnish thick around what was left of its rim and its face grubby. Splinters and shards of sullied glass littered the dusty wooden floor, glimmering in a dull, threatening way.
The room around the mirror was in no better condition: the bed, held up by an ancient and knurled frame, was wrapped in a tangled mess of moth-eaten sheets and flattened pillows; dust-laden cobwebs hung almost haphazardly from the ceiling, most long-abandoned; cluttered drawers and cabinets were overflowing chaotically, spilling fourth their contents…
The mirror reflected all of this in its filthy face, but most of all, it reflected - though she was cast in shadows - Diantha.
She felt utterly disgusted at her own visage and sick almost, as if she had swallowed jagged rocks that had twisted and disfigured her stomach to the point of mutilating her innards. She sat still, though, motionless; a perturbed statue held within the gaze of a ruined mirror.
She remembered morosely how, not even a year prior, she had loved mirrors. She would stare, smiling wholeheartedly, every time she passed one, watching her doppelganger mimic her every move; she would bat her long-lashed eyes and strike a haughty pose, curling her lips into a self-satisfied smile to see it reflected back at her.
Now, though, she cringed every time she saw her reflection, self-pity and hatred welling up inside of her and rushing through her veins like a disease every time she happened upon one. Each had met the same fate - shattered unceremoniously and without a second thought, at the expense of her own hands, of which were now littered with pearly-white scarring. The mirrors that she had once adored had become nothing more than a reminder of the situation she was currently trapped in, and her reflection nothing more than a jeering spectator who wore her face and whispered in derisive undertones in the back of her mind.
And, yet, there Diantha sat, staring wistfully into the battered remains of a long-dead pane of glass, unable to rally fourth the incessant loathing that her reflection normally triggered. She was somehow hollow today, as broken as the mirror in front of her perhaps. Her mind seemed to phase into a certain emptiness as well, filled only by the echo of something that remotely resembled sorrow.
‘Maybe this was a good thing,’ some small part of her mused, so silently that Diantha, herself, may not have even heard, ‘Yes, this is a good thing…to know what it feels like to be broken…’ The thought faded, most likely deaf upon her ears, but with it, it took a sliver of the girl’s own conceit, and somewhere a thin, shallow crack edged itself down the center of a fine pane of oval glass.
Author: Memirra
Challenge: Dark Chocolate # 9 (vanity), Green Tea # 1 (daybreak)
Toppings/Extras: None
Story: Cracked Mirrors
Word Count: 563
Rating: G
Summary: Diantha has a fleeting lapse out of her arrogance.
Notes: It’s strange to write someone as conceited as Diantha this way, but also strangely fun. Maybe I just have a vendetta against the conceited, even the ones who number among my ranks of characters...
Silvery shafts of light spilled through the cracks in between the window’s ancient shutters, dappling the room with the light of a new day. Diantha didn’t care though, or couldn’t muster the nerve to, even as the birds outside stirred and began their sweet morning tunes - oh which, under any normal circumstance, she had loathed. The girl simply sat, arms wrapped around her knees which she had brought to her chest, staring at the remains of a half-shattered mirror.
Once a fine pane of oval glass, burnished and pristine, the mirror now hung lop-sided and cracked on the peeling wall, a ring of tarnish thick around what was left of its rim and its face grubby. Splinters and shards of sullied glass littered the dusty wooden floor, glimmering in a dull, threatening way.
The room around the mirror was in no better condition: the bed, held up by an ancient and knurled frame, was wrapped in a tangled mess of moth-eaten sheets and flattened pillows; dust-laden cobwebs hung almost haphazardly from the ceiling, most long-abandoned; cluttered drawers and cabinets were overflowing chaotically, spilling fourth their contents…
The mirror reflected all of this in its filthy face, but most of all, it reflected - though she was cast in shadows - Diantha.
She felt utterly disgusted at her own visage and sick almost, as if she had swallowed jagged rocks that had twisted and disfigured her stomach to the point of mutilating her innards. She sat still, though, motionless; a perturbed statue held within the gaze of a ruined mirror.
She remembered morosely how, not even a year prior, she had loved mirrors. She would stare, smiling wholeheartedly, every time she passed one, watching her doppelganger mimic her every move; she would bat her long-lashed eyes and strike a haughty pose, curling her lips into a self-satisfied smile to see it reflected back at her.
Now, though, she cringed every time she saw her reflection, self-pity and hatred welling up inside of her and rushing through her veins like a disease every time she happened upon one. Each had met the same fate - shattered unceremoniously and without a second thought, at the expense of her own hands, of which were now littered with pearly-white scarring. The mirrors that she had once adored had become nothing more than a reminder of the situation she was currently trapped in, and her reflection nothing more than a jeering spectator who wore her face and whispered in derisive undertones in the back of her mind.
And, yet, there Diantha sat, staring wistfully into the battered remains of a long-dead pane of glass, unable to rally fourth the incessant loathing that her reflection normally triggered. She was somehow hollow today, as broken as the mirror in front of her perhaps. Her mind seemed to phase into a certain emptiness as well, filled only by the echo of something that remotely resembled sorrow.
‘Maybe this was a good thing,’ some small part of her mused, so silently that Diantha, herself, may not have even heard, ‘Yes, this is a good thing…to know what it feels like to be broken…’ The thought faded, most likely deaf upon her ears, but with it, it took a sliver of the girl’s own conceit, and somewhere a thin, shallow crack edged itself down the center of a fine pane of oval glass.