open.

[cozen]

WHO: Bastien, Lexie, & whoever wanders through.
WHAT: A funeral for a hat
WHEN: Nowish
WHERE: One of the Gallows’ gardens
NOTES: All Are Welcome.

Despite rumors of its involvement in the sexual fantasies of a mysterious Orlesian noble as early as 9:34, the deceased was in fact born in the autumn of 9:35, when its final stitches were tied off by a Marcher milliner seeking to draw some of the Orlesians wintering in Kirkwall into her shop. Unfortunately, the hat’s style—bold purple, wide-brimmed, with a tall tapered crown scrunched to lean sideways—had plummeted out of favor only a few weeks prior to the hat’s birth, after the spectacular embarrassment of Lord Junien Delannoy at the hands of Lady Sefridis Badeaux made it impossible to wear such a hat in public without inviting sly comments about custard and infanticide.

As the hat’s prominent placement in her display drove away far more customers than it drew in, the milliner was forced to close shop the following year. During the liquidation of her inventory, the hat found its way onto the head of the ambitious but straight-up stupid twenty-year-old son of a local magistrate, Lloyd, who allowed it to ruin seven of his attempts to marry above his station before he threw it off the edge of Hightown’s great black cliffs in a fit of pique.

A few months later, with the city still smoldering from the local mage rebellion, the elderly Muriel found the hat tangled in old netting at the docks and came to the imaginative conclusion that its owner had perished in the Chantry explosion or subsequent combat. She took the hat home, tenderly cleaned it and redid some of the stitching, and gave it a place of honor above her fireplace. It remained there until her death in 9:43, after which her eldest son took it down, blew dust off of the top, sneezed twice, and tossed it into a bag of items to sell to cover the costs of her funeral.

For the remaining two years of its life, the hat resided on the unreachable, barely-visible highest shelves of Edelina Barnier’s Fashion Emporium—best known in Kirkwall as a place to find odd articles of clothing for theme parties—between a mask fashioned to look like a webbed frog foot and a hat with garishly oversized elven ears attached to the sides. They became very close.

Finally, in Haring 9:45, the hat was plucked out of its place on the shelf by a mustached Orlesian who carried it across the harbor in a sack, cleaned it, fitted it with a new red ribbon and porcelain button and several plumes of rich blue cloth vaguely evoking a burst of feathers, and wore it for two experimental seconds in front of a grimy old mirror before wincing and pulling it back off. Then he grasped the brim in one hand, the crown in the other, and, with deadly precision, pulled the hat apart at its seam. It was ten years old.

Comments

[coquettish_trees]

Alexandrie, herself hatless out of respect for Bastien’s loss—how vulgar it would have been to flaunt a still living hat of her own—obliges as soon as the hand is offered, pressing it sympathetically between hers with a look of immense sorrow before nodding her head in a gesture both affirmation of her desire and respect for the space the bereaved is offering her.

The chill of the night breeze tugs at the few slender curls of hair she has let hang by her face, the light of the pyre shining dully on the dark velvet of her cloak as she turns to face it. It is a moment still before she releases Bastien’s hand to take a small step towards the flames and the fabric which they have begun to blacken, perhaps needing his strength, perhaps reluctant to withdraw her own. The breath she takes is a deep one, redolent with the carefully laid out herbs that burn alongside the deceased.

“It fills me with a deep and empty ache that I was never to truly know you,” Alexandrie intones, her voice low with ceremony. “That you were to exist for me only in song and story, a figure of mystery and legend.

“I imagined your majesty a hundred times, but in this life, I shall never see it. Only shall I view the poor shell that once held it, never in my sight caressed by anything but fire.” A hand emerges from the cloak to cover her mouth briefly, to disguise the hitch in her inhale.

“How cruel and capricious, this world. How cold it has become. How much colder it shall when this, your last flame, is out.”