Title: Burnt Spice
Fandom: Shadow Hearts: From the New World
Characters: Lady
Rating: PG
Length: 330 words
Author's Notes: ...I was really stumped on figuring out if there was a way to make spicy not related to food. XD
Summary: Sugar and spice and everything nice... that's what little girls are made of. But what of Ladies?

Her world is as real as any can be; undiluted by nostalgia, doubt, or indeed much other emotion, it is comprised of creatures that are alive and creatures that are dead, things to use and useless things to pass over, beings that couldn't even touch her before she crushed them and--

No. She's yet to be hurt by any being. She can recognize threats in her world, but she knows she is the biggest and acts accordingly. Her world is very black and red that way, death and Malice (the white stained). She is Malice too, all sharp crackling energy hidden behind a delicate face and lithe body. She is simple, and view things that way, so there is little to separate her from how things are and how she can make them be.

Sometimes, though, there are shades of blue in her mind. She remembers words that haven't been spoken by the people she's laid out to decompose in silence, nor by the people she's reanimated to walk once more, nor by the odd little man who follows and watches her. These words have a different quality to them too--if she didn't know better (and she knows, she knows not to know useless things) she'd describe it as 'playful'.

Sugar and spice, and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of.

It's her own voice singing the words, which is strange when she never speaks, but she knows that is the sound it would make. Would have made? Did make?

She might have been a little girl once, full of sugar and spice, and everything nice. Perhaps.

Now, there's only the burning bite of Malice, that spark of life burning away in very creature. And her world, so precisely real, is still bland reality--she needs to make it over. To share with it the spice overflowing in her, until it shifts, and takes the shape she wants it to be. Maybe then, she won't have leftover shades of blue in her thoughts anymore.