Would You Give Everything?

We ask this of everyone

We ask, when they come to us, full of fear or hope or promise or anger,

Would you everything to be beautiful?

The hopeful and promising ones, sometimes even the angry ones, they say, “No, no; never.” The fearful ones, they wait to see what the others say, and then they echo, sometimes without sound, “No, no; of course not.”

“Is that so?” I ask. And I turn away from them in their ragged dresses and tattered shirts, their costumes fresh from choosing, their young faces so ignorant of what life has now handed them.

“I did, you know,” I say as I turn back toward them, just in time to see their little opinions of me change. What sort of amoral harlot must I be, they wonder. Sometimes I smile. Mostly I don’t.

“I did, and you will, too.”

Sometimes then there is a chorus of denials; sometimes not.

The speech that comes after never changes.

“Surely you have noticed, even in your brief lives, that very little of worth and almost no good comes to those who are not fair to look upon. And whether or not you believe it now, I think you will come round to my way of thinking sooner than you think.”

There are usually tedious murmurs then, usually along the lines of what kind of evil sorceress I must be, what happens at the end of the day when I relax: do I then become hideously ugly (that answer, by the way, is ‘no’.), whether I have killed people (that one’s a ‘yes’.), and how on earth they’re expected to work with me, knowing that I made myself, first and foremost, physically beautiful. Every choosing, the same prattle. Mostly, it makes me smile.

*“You’ll need to change your minds, you know.”*

“I’ll be asking you to change your minds, you know.” By this point, there is silence: they are all too busy examining my every pore to see if they can imagine what I might have looked like before, when I was as young as they are now.

They’re not all hideous, of course—but none of them is perfect, not yet.

It’s the end of their first meeting with me, and for some it may be their last.

“You’re all dismissed. Tomorrow you’ll be summoned to the teaching room of my second. I don’t want to look at any of you again until you can show me absolute physical perfection. It’s your first assignment. Don’t let it be your last.”

Notes & Credits

Many items here are featured at this round of Enchantment, which is open until the 4th of September. The theme is O Valley Of Plenty, an homage to monster hunters and fantasy creatures of lore.
At Enchantment:
Gown: Silvan Moon Designs, Blood And Wine, in Prussian.
Necklace & Earrings: Bliensen & MaiTai, Alpha
Eyes: Arte, Enchant Eyes
Other Stuff:
Skin: Lumae, Lelutka Eden, T1
Hair: Exile, Jessika
Circlet: Andore, Diadem, Juliet Rare
Backdrop: Varonis, Dayport Backdrop Scene
Body: Maitreya
Head: Lelutka, EvoX Avalon