Work Text:
Victoria's journal.
1st Day of the Month of High Wind.
1981 OE.
At some point, a decision was made not to invite me. I wondered when and what their reasoning was.
They've always excluded me, those fools at the Peerless Playhouse. Constance has loathed me since the year I caused her loss in the Miss Purity Contest. We used to be such good friends — partners, even — yet she has been causing my downfall in increasingly loathsome and pathetic ways ever since.
I heard from Cornelius they were having a party. Himself, Constance, Roderick Valdemar, both Dollanganger sisters, and even Gallo Belgrave, the town's gravedigger from Common Grounds. At some point, they must have decided to cast me out; I was sure there must have been a conversation, a discussion, a decision that I would not be invited.
Even when Cornelius let slip of their imminent meeting, he didn't do so to invite me, but rather by accident. A slip of his drink-loosened tongue. It took more swallows than that for him to reveal the details of what the incident would be, and then I bade him a departure that I could deal with my thoughts about the event.
I am the exile; the snake amongst the grass. I am a poison which rots the veins and fabrics of this culture, this town. I sit night after night in my mansion in the swamp and wonder, why have I done what I have done for so little achievement of my goals? What progress have I made in the fields of my research, what grand discoveries, what infamous shows have I put on beyond petty humiliations and weekly embarrassments when I venture into town and deign to peddle potions for such increasingly-dwindling profits?
Perhaps I should travel beyond the Veil, as my naysayers have often demanded I try. They believe there is no world out there, nothing beyond the edges of our dank and musty little world. They think we live in a snowglobe, a message in a bottle on a sea of endless eternity, a blank note written by no one, to be read by no one, shining in the darkness of the void-abyss's endless shadow.
Grace Morgan is proof to the otherwise, of course. There is a world out there. The world of Inglenook, vast and verdant, its researchers fruitful and many and varied. There is a system there, to provide resources and supplies for those as me, if one should just be willing to convert their research into study papers and essays and work with the Ministries to provide a social good; some common benefit for the others in that society.
What use could a potion provide? What good could it have? So I can turn into a snake, and Cornelius a goat, and Edward a cat, and Galen a moth. It would be eliminated from purview, removed from my oversight, altered and twisted into a novelty, a nothing-toy for the temporary and heinous. Why should I?
But what's the point of a potion for only one to drink? Perhaps military applications, for warfare, or a peacetime entertainment on-stage? Perhaps for the sexual, intimate dalliances of the perverted-minded and kink-driven souls beyond the Veil? Surely none here would cater to such a thing. Perhaps the witches under Callista at the Scarlet Showroom, but, ah, a niche even still, a niche for sure...
I am weary, and even in the younger days of my increasing age, I feel old, my mind cast with a thousand images that aren't relevant or useful in the slightest.
Pouring yourself into work you produce in every single creation means your identity becomes dissolved, not distilled, but dissonant, disparate, dumbed-down and disillusioned in many tiny ways, flickering like specks of sparkle in the glittering potion within your blood. They all have bits of me in them, but who will ever remember? Who will ever realize, or know, or track my aspects from one worked bottle to the next? A produced concoction is to be consumed and forgotten, not aged and preserved and remembered; I don't make fine vintage products for the ancient ages, but slop, as cheap and basic as the thin pages of the pulp novels sold at the fair each week, and for the clients who visit the Showroom every night in this world.
My flesh flakes like dried scales and shed snakeskin into my work, my hair greys and thins, and the only progress made is another potion for another night, another cheap thrill of one more night transformed, one more experience as something else and someone with a form different from my own, that I might not look at the mirror and see mine own face looking back but rather the twisted, hideous reflection befitting of the monster all others see when they know my heart as I do; in the same ways, for the same purpose, but exterior, and separate from my soul which would comprehend the ways to justify its blackened edges and suffocating interior roots.
There was one time in my life I believed I knew why I started doing this.
Ingmar caters to my needs, but even he questions its purpose, my goals when the curtains wrap up for the night and the lights are snuffed at last.
Quiet, perhaps, or peace once more.
Why? For what reason? All my friends did not invite me to their meetings this year, and I no longer have reason to produce or perform or exist whatsoever without the withering, molding husk of the mansion that cages my beauty and spirit, my intellect and perfection, my hideous heart and ugly configurations.
I am a recipe for the end. I am the glory of the stars. I am the shadow in my soul.
I am Victoria Craven. I am alone. I am loved.