Photo credit Laetitia Casta

"Shaping reality is merely a matter of knowing where to apply pressure."

---

Celine is a beautiful woman at first glance: Fair skin, shapely features, lustrous gray eyes, and hair that is truly red—not the orange some people pretend is red.

Upon closer inspection, however, the truth of her begins to surface, like a dark shape circling in the water below...a silhouette unnervingly larger than the boat, perhaps. Her flesh is like porcelain, pale as milk and nearly artificial in its flawlessness. Her bone structure is symmetrical, too regular to be genuinely lovely, untouchable and mechanical under scrutiny as a masterfully carved statue, and nearly as warm. Her eyes are depthless and unfeeling as worked iron, reflecting little of the light around them and nothing of the soul within. Her crimson tresses are indeed of a compelling vermilion hue—one all too familiar to that hollow at the base of the spine, where the fears of old live, and remember.

The longer one is in the room with her, the less comfortable most tend to grow. She recognizes this—relishes it as a form of control. Her every movement and word seem calculated, even the roving of her gaze no more spontaneous than the inevitable reaction between spark and kindling.

Most unsettling of all, though, is Celine's voice:

Imagine, if you will, a glass. One of those glasses that is as wide as your average shot glass, but much taller—the kind of glass that contains very expensive and exotic drinks, which are served only at the most exclusive clubs, where only the richest, coolest people are allowed in and even the bouncer has some semblance of style.

Now, imagine that it is made out of pure darkness.

Not ordinary, trashy, everynight darkness. No, that darkness is merely a shadow of this darkness: The deepest darkness that is found only in the softest, hottest, most secret heart of the night, where lovers whisper lies in the grip of passion and shady business is conducted between men of power who will put on an altogether different face in the morning, and who were probably not even elected to their positions, but got them instead through years and years of living as hard as they can in the ebony, silken embrace of this special darkness.

Imagine that there are ice cubes in the glass. They are red—not just crimson, but a special, unique, distinctive red, the kind of red that gets sticky and dark when left too long without cleaning and which, even to the eye, possesses a coppery tang.

And imagine—just imagine—liquid being poured into this glass. The liquid is molten silver, partially quick-frozen so that it has a thick, syrupy consistency, but has not yet returned to a solid metal state. Running through the center of it is a streak of something hot, sticky, sweet, and almost certainly very, very, very bad for you, in the same way that a sharp knife is bad for a serial killer or a guitar is bad for a folk singer.

Imagine, if you can, the sound this tincture—this delicious cordial of violence and sex and power and everything bad that is waiting in the shadows of the human soul, patiently as it can, for the chance it knows will inevitably come for it to seize control—the sound, I say, that this elixir of pure, beautiful, perfect sin makes as it slithers past the rim of the glass, hisses over and around and in between the ice cubes, splashes into the bottom, and begins to creep back up the sides. A single drop, precious and dangerous, is lifted free of the satin tidal wave and thrown upward, into the air above the glass, suspended for a fraction of an instant that seems an eternity in space before descending, ever—so—slowly, to merge once more with the drink in the now-full glass, without so much as a ripple.

Those ripples—the ones that aren’t there—are the sound that this voice makes.

Celine Greyjoy is very bad news.

And she is about to happen to Talingarde.

Photo credit synt4x-3rr0r

---

Schedule of Availability:
All times are approximate and in Eastern Standard Time/GMT -4:00

• Monday: 11AM - 1AM
  
• Tuesday: 11AM - 1AM
  
• Wednesday: 11AM - 1AM
  
• Thursday: 11AM - 1AM
  
• Friday: 11AM - 3AM
  
• Saturday: 2PM - 3AM
  
• Sunday: 2PM - 5PM