#lufti bdw

On colours and their meanings, by Escher Krezkov

Red, for passion, and danger.

Was it any wonder why that was how she came to me? My Veronika. Auburn-haired, and scarlet-lipped. From which poured honey in my ears, gilded promises. Soliciting darkness from my hands, which stained the tarnished white of my innocence with bloody crimson.

Her eyes, green. The colour of the false hope she instilled in me. Reminder that life could still flourish in even inhospitable climes. They should have been a window into her soul, but it was my mistake to assume one had remained, if it had been there at all.

If you asked ten artists to render a temptress, you may get nine images depicting red hair and swelling bosom. The latter half was correct. But the devil that seduced me wore raven tresses as she revealed herself, having torn apart the last obstacle to our union.

"Violet," Strahdanya told me as I was dressing in stolen finery from the house of a slain merchant. "An expensive and rare hue. Rendered from the crushed shells of mollusks found only among a reef in Chaac. Reserved for royalty."

"Then how did he come upon it?" I asked as I smoothed the fine fabric over my chest. Devoid of my heartbeat, no longer heaving for breaths I needed in life.

"He was making deals with the Vistani, I suppose." The Devil answered me, lounging in the bed she had dragged Ivanov's body to join his wife's I had ran through with my rapier.

"You suppose?" I responded with incredulity.

Then the devil was back on me, draped like a shroud over my back, a hand traveling south. "It looks rather fetching on you, my beautiful boy," my Anya crooned in a pointed ear of mine. My knees weakened at the praise, and it was my folly for failing to realize it was a ploy, plucking my strings to the tune of manipulation. "You will wear this for our wedding." She stated it as fact, and it was so a few days later.

"His wife has a gown in a matching colour," I informed her, turning from the mirror that failed to reflect our forms. "Would you wear it for me, Love?"

"No," Strahdanya denied blithely, and removed herself from my person. "It was my mother's colour. Red has always looked best on me."

She was correct, as always. The only colour she wore was in her bloodstained lips, and in the jewel adorning her neck. For decades, red was the colour of survival.

The tempters that coaxed me from my undying love and loyalty to my dear wife, one wore it on his skin, the other in his eyes.

The promise of passion that lied in the righteous fury brimming in the blood of Shepherd's infernal body. It was always a deep regret I held that I had only felt it blaze through his lips against mine the one instance. Bartered for with information. Something I grew not to be proud of, but the memory of it was almost worth the shame.

And the danger latent behind Sarnax's eyes I felt when he cast me back with burning radiant flame in the crypts of Ravenloft. His scales held the promise of what I had long tasted bittered on my tongue, having thought it dead along with my heart inside my still chest. A molten voice held no malicious intent when he offered a path to redemption, with his belief in me being capable and deserving of it.

I was not, and I proved that in time, long after those who had held belief were either dust or scattered to the winds. I never deserved their love, and so I never had it. A martyr cannot love you from the realm of their God, as I had told Shepherd, in hurt, in anger, and I would have been red in the face if blood was able to rush to my cheeks. He was too lovelorn, bereft of his loss to return what I was offering him.

Yet he believed me deserving of it to his dying day, just not from him. I had given up. Until a tiny shred of new growth poked out of the ashen landscape I lorded over. Cloaked in earthen tones; rich brown curls, and pale skin, but blood-pinked in flustered attraction. The green of spring stared into my profaned soul, and lit fire in my frozen veins again.

But that bright flame burned out too fast to call it love, even if it felt close. I held faith I could stoke it again. It showed me that it was possible to do. If I had ever known how to begin with.

And when a torrent of blue came to wash my previous sins away, and indulge in a few others, I did so without as much fear, if it had not been for my Dove.

I did not feel clean, after what we had done together. This soulless corpse I inhabit too steeped in red. But maybe, and I hoped, that we could create a new colour to paint us both.

Red and blue, making violet. The colour of power, status. I knew that was what she saw in me, what she used her lips, as sweet and red as a cherry, and her wiles to angle for. Wealth. I just hoped it would be a wealth in love, of good fortune.