A statue walked along an opulent hallway. Both porcelain statuary and stone hall were dressed in beautiful, rich drapings—deep blue and purple robes decorated his marble skin, and his bespoke slippers treaded plush carpets. He was, to all appearances, created for the palatial castle in which he walked: a gifted sculptor’s magnum opus come to life. There was something in his glazed blue eyes, though, that tied him in kinship even further to the hallway in which he wandered; behind its warm tapestries and plush carpets, this place was a fortress. This hall told those who passed through it that the building was not a romantic castle, and could never be one. The masses of streamers and pennants outside the edifice could not brighten its squat survivability. Like the fortress, there was something unmovable and stubborn in the porcelain statue’s face.
His colorless lips moved a little as he spoke to himself. This statue, this caryatid, had slender fingers carved with articulating joints that rasped against each other faintly as they flexed. He touched over several of the bracelets that crowded his wrists. They were braided of strands of material: fine, coarse, blonde, brunette, red. Some were mingled colors or textures. The biggest piece was one the caryatid wore as a necklace. This braid was entirely of one color and type: a slick, fine auburn that seemed redder in the flickering flames of the torches lining the hall.
Something brought the statue-man’s meandering steps to a halt some distance away from the next corridor. He stood rigid and stared at nothing, with his fingers clenched on that big necklace. He would have been a fine decoration, if he did not stand in the middle of the opulent hall. Distracted as he was, he did not turn around as a shadowed figure slipped into the hall behind him. That person crossed the carpet more quickly than the statue. Like him, this figure wore robes, but its robes were dark. The intruder’s gloved hand drew close to the sword resting at its hip as the figure moved closer to its target. The barest rasp of the blade on its leather sheath alerted the statue to danger; he whirled to face his attacker as that attacker drew the sword out and down in one solid motion. The steel blade marred the statue’s clothes, but it glanced off of his marble body.
Before the attacker could draw back for another strike, the caryatid locked his porcelain fingers around the sword with his palm against the flat of the blade; he seemed mindless of the edges that tried to bite at his hand. As he vied for the sword, the statue spat out words that coated the weapon like oil. Nothing happened, and the statue’s enemy snorted behind its mask. The caryatid gritted his teeth in irritation. He was taller than his attacker, and his arms were longer. He kept one hand locked on the blade and grasped the sword’s crossguard in the other; he made as though to pull the sword out of his attacker’s hands, and he saw the other figure tense in response. The statue then shoved forward, toward the hooded attacker; the assassin had been ready to tug, but was not prepared for the pommel that struck its own chest with the muffled clink of dusty glassware. The sword slipped from the assassin’s unprepared hands.
The oily signs that the statue had spat onto the steel moments before now flared into life. The sword was then naught but salt that coated the carpet. The figures’ footsteps skidded on the salted carpet as attacker and victim grappled. The statue was indeed taller, but his robed attacker was not daunted; it threw itself down to trip up the caryatid’s legs. Once they were wrestling on the salted carpet, the assassin positioned itself over the statue. It trapped the statue’s arms with one of its own, and then it drew a steel dagger from an ankle sheath. The statue strained to toss his attacker off of him, and the killer’s aim suffered; the knife clashed against marble wrists and snared in draping robes. Strands of hair fell from severed bracelets and necklaces.
The lordly statue shook one of its arms free from his attacker’s grip. Before the assassin could solidify its hold, the caryatid grabbed a handful of the stranger’s off-black hood. He uttered more oily words with far too many vowels and the hood, mask, and robe dissipated in a wave of noxious smoke. They left behind a woman whose masses of hair fell down around her, without her hood to hold it back.
She was plump. Probably rarely called beautiful, but often called pretty. She was naked, apparently anatomically correct, and still straddling the robed statue. From her innumerable tresses of long hair to her bare toes, she was entirely made of translucent glass. Strands of crystalline hair made rainbows in the torchlight as they swayed behind her.
“Marina,” the caryatid hissed. His face was eternally locked into its serene beauty, but his glazed eyes flashed with anger. “What is the meaning of this?” Mindless of his words or of her nakedness, the chubby glass woman strained to slice at the statue’s wrists with her dagger. He drew back his free arm and struck her in the face. Her glass chin did not break, but the force made her long, glassy hair clatter against itself with all the cacophony of windchimes in a hurricane. It stunned her long enough for him to shove her off of him.
The caryatid rose to his feet and gathered his tattered robes around himself. As Marina rose to her feet after him, the statue’s eyes narrowed. He backed away from her. Before she could close the distance, he held out a marble hand and spoke more strange words. His carefully articulated marble fingers flexed in alchemical signs. The two of them barely heard the pop of displaced air over the clinking of Marina’s glassy hair, but the sudden appearance of a wall between them where there had been none was hard to miss.
“Really?” Marina said. Her voice was mislabeled—less a voice than the sound of a wet finger running along the edge of a glass. It was a sound made to hurt people’s ears, but the caryatid seemed unperturbed—until Marina’s fist burst through the wall. At that, the statue gathered up his tattered robes and sped off in the direction he’d been heading toward before the interruption.
Through the hole she’d made in the fragile air-turned-wall, Marina watched the caryatid go. “Arcas!” was the last thing Marina heard him say. She looked down at her naked, see-through skin, and at the salt that was all that remained of her sword. Marina bent over, with a clinking accompaniment from her hair, to retrieve her dagger. The glass golem also picked up a braided necklace that had been sheared straight through. With the dagger and the hair, but without her hood, Marina the glass golem did not leave nearly as quietly as she’d come.
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