Submission (#6503) Approved

Unlocking higher resonance status, here's the Noble rank mini requirement, "Depict a treasured possession or a gift for a treasured gift/mentor"!

471 words

Edited! Changed to a falcon talon :)

Ming Xiao fiddles with her necklace. It’s been carefully preserved and protected by a porcelain coating, while the real treasure remains hidden underneath the fragile exterior. One of the only true gifts she’s ever received, the Madam wears it on her person most days.

It’s irresponsible to dwell on impossible things, of course, but sometimes it’s better to dig a nail into the flesh of one’s sorrows than be trapped in a cavern of self loathing.

Passion is fleeting, and always manages to roar into a fiery inferno; seething and spitting heated fury, but written into fate to die a silent death. Ming Xiao’s fire once raged from a symphony of pain and loss, but the embers still crackle magnanimously inside her chest with the low, dull thump of a dead heartbeat.

Curling a nail around the milky talon encased in delicately detailed brush stroke patterns and a breakable glass structure, Ming Xiao shakes it. It gives a low rattle inside its porcelain prison, fated to tremble in place on the swell of her chest.

The cord it’s attached to loops around her neck; not tight, but close enough to her skin to feel like fingertips dragging across her tendons and burrowing into the muscle of her soul.

Irakliy didn’t leave her with much of anything, but that’s for the best. Ming Xiao will always have the deep scars to prove his existence long after he’s left her to rot in the grave she’s made for herself.

Tugging the cord, she wrenches it forward enough to wonder what might happen if she were to smash the object of her illusions against the wall again. To watch it callously as its exterior shredded and splintered apart, exposing the calcified deposit inside.

It’s part of Irakliy’s falconry collection, of course; he hadn’t hesitated to gift one to her at her request, casually thrown out one night as she manicured and painted her own claws. He’d paid for it to be preserved for her personal viewing, but that had broken off and crumbled the first time she’d flew into a fit of rage, seeking to destroy the last vestiges of his memory.

But of course—when confronted with the sight of the Peregrine claw amidst a sea of shards from what once was a beautifully lacquered black and gold shell, Ming Xiao could not.

The treasure’s gone through a few coatings at this point. With each cocoon she sheds, though, her fragile heart begins to temper and mend once more. Now, fifteen carefully commissioned paintings in, Ming Xiao can safely presume to admit that she’s made the gift entirely her own.

She rattles the sorrowful little thing.

Maybe one day Irakliy will return once more to reclaim his belongings; but the Madam’s heart is no longer a gift she will so freely give away.