Fienne's Caress

She moves like water finding its level - Fienne she's called, though I suspect that name dances differently on her tongue. The corridors here bend strangely; her footsteps arrive three heartbeats before she does, a percussion of bare feet on stone that pulses red-warm beneath the moss.

“You carry your mother’s grief,” she says without preamble, those inky pupils drinking in more than eyes were meant to hold. “It sits between your shoulder blades as a weight you’ve forgotten you’re carrying.” An enchanting voice, an accent that resonates in harmonies.

The balm she uses is astonishing. It moves with purpose across her palms, warming to a temperature that seems to match some internal compass I’d never known I possessed. When she works it into skin, the sensation travels inward, as if she’s massaging not muscle but the soul itself.

“There - ” Her fingers find the exact spot where tension crystallizes into something sharper. “You were seven when you decided you weren’t allowed to cry, to be strong for her”

How does she...? But the question dissolves before it forms. The balm carries whispers of forest floors after rain, of twilight filtered through leaves older than cities. Under her touch, the boundaries between self and other grow delightfully unclear.

Her face catches the crimson light strangely. Those freckles scatter across her cheekbones like constellations in an unfamiliar sky, and when she leans close, her breath carries the green scent of growing things. There’s something almost wild in the way she tilts her head when listening, as if she hears frequencies beyond human perception.

“The balm knows,” she explains, though I hadn’t asked. “It remembers what skin is supposed to feel like before we teach it to armor itself.” Her laugh is wind chimes of silver bells. “Bodies hold such honest stories.”

The massage transcends the physical realm entirely. Her hands work in patterns that seem to follow ley lines of emotion rather than anatomy. Each touch loosens not just knots in muscle but tangles in thought, releasing memories I’d buried beneath years of careful numbness.

“You’re afraid of becoming your father,” she observes, fingers tracing the curve of my spine. “But souls don’t inherit cruelty - only choices do.”

The balm glimmers faintly as she works, leaving trails of warmth that linger long after her hands move elsewhere. Time becomes elastic; minutes stretch into hours or compress into heartbeats. The myst that perpetually fills these chambers seems to part around her, as if even the air recognizes her authority.

When the session ends (has it been minutes? hours? days?), she helps me sit up with infinite gentleness. Her touch lingers a moment longer than necessary - or perhaps necessity operates by different rules here.

“You’ll sleep better now,” she says with certainty that admits no argument. “The dreams will come, but they will be kinder.”

As I dress, she busies herself with arranging bottles and cloth with the same liquid grace she brings to everything. In the mirror behind her, I catch a glimpse of something that makes me blink hard - elongated ears, perhaps, or the suggestion of antlers casting shadows where none should fall. But when I look directly, there’s only Fienne, beautiful and strange and somehow more than the sum of her visible parts.

- Extract from a Hollow patron's journal
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Later, much later, when the corridors have emptied and the myst subsides, Fienne sits alone in her chamber deep within the Hollow’s heart. The walls here pulse with that familiar crimson warmth, but softer now.

She has shed the day’s careful performance of human-adjacent service. In solitude, her movements flow with natural grace - fingers dancing through air with purpose that transcends mere gesture.

The balm sits in its crystal vessel on her nightstand, still faintly luminous. She regards it with something approaching fondness, the way one might look upon a faithful companion. Tomorrow it will carry her touch to new skin, new stories, new wounds that must be turned to strength.

But now, in this pocket of quiet suspended between one healing and the next, Fienne raises her delicate hands and begins to trace patterns in the still air. Lines of soft light follow her fingertips - gold threading through crimson shadow, weaving shapes that suggest meaning just beyond comprehension, whispers of a world unseen.

The light lingers, hanging in space like captured starlight, painting her freckled face in hues that have no earthly names. For a moment, the illusion of humanity falls away entirely, revealing something far older and infinitely more beautiful than mere flesh and bone.

She draws until the air around her shimmers with captured radiance, until her small chamber blooms with constellations - maps of all the souls she’s touched, all the griefs she’s gentled, all the armor she’s helped lay down.

Then, with a soft exhale that sounds like wind through branches of old growth, she closes her eyes and lets the light fade into dream, one of memories and places close but never seen.​​​​​​​​