An Invite For Tea and more
Annette kept fidgeting with her silken dress, shifting her weight from one foot onto another, as she looked upon the door behind which Cornelia was supposed to be expecting her.
Her eyes once again glanced around herself, observing and taking in the environment while she was waiting...It seemed that just as the appearance of the mage herself, everything that was surrounded her was just as opulent and gorgeous. And it wasn't surprising, really, Annette figured. A woman of her status and her importance, of course, would always settle for the best. She deserved it, after all, for her service to the Kingdom of Faerghus, and her efforts in thwarting the plague.
And yet...something still troubled Annette, and she couldn't truly say why. There was a feeling in the very core of her chest, some unexplainable sensation that made her oddly unsettled and alert. And she couldn't pin the exact reason for being like that either. After all, Cornelia's invitation was nothing but a gesture of kindness. She wanted Annette to come and discuss magic with her, and, perhaps, if the latter would be lucky, she could even learn something from the more experienced woman. What was the harm in that...? Could there even be anything wrong with drinking tea to begin with? It seemed like a very innocent activity.
"One moment, I am coming..." Cornelia's regal voice echoed from behind the door, and in a matter of brief seconds the mage herself appeared in the doorway. Pampered and noble-looking as she always was, gracing Annette with a barely noticeable smile. Or, perhaps, it was an arrogant smirk...? Annette couldn't truly tell, so instead she simply nodded to the mage respectfully.
"Good day," she tried to do her best and keep her nervousness from showing. "I hope I didn't arrive too early?"
Cornelia shook her head.
"Not at all, you are quite punctual, in fact. Please, come in...We have some matters to discuss with, and I wouldn't want to make you wait any longer."
With these words the mage turned around, gesturing for Annette to follow. And soon enough, after passing through a long twisted corridor, the two of them finally arrived in a small, but luxurious room.
"Sit down." Cornelia nodded in the direction of a couch, somehow managing to word her offer as a mix of a polite request and an order. "The tea will be ready very soon. I did my best to prepare it myself."
"Thank you very much," her guest nodded, overwhelmed by the woman's generosity. "There is no need to hurry, I can wait."
Cornelia didn't reply. And, as she turned around to mess with a miniature porcelain kettle, Annette was left to her own devices.
The quietness made her realize that the uneasy feeling that kept bothering Annette since the very moment she came to the woman's residence still persisted. Even now, while she was simply listening to the mage talk. It spread down her spine as a billion goose bumps and made the hair on her arms stand up. And yet, there was still nothing to be alert about the situation, was it? Cornelia was polite and hospitable. And right now, while Annette kept riling herself up without any obvious reason, the mage was busy trying to accommodate her while serving her tea.
For a moment she opened her mouth, and almost wanted to ask what their meeting was going to be about. But just as she was going to do so, Cornelia began speaking to herself. As if she somehow could read her guest's thoughts.
"There you go...I trust you made yourself comfortable? Nothing is bothering you?"
With these words she looked right into Annette's eyes, as if prodding her for some sort of secret. And that immediately made another set of shivers run down her spine.
"N-not at all, no. Everything is alright, thank you very much."
She took a sip of her tea, as if to demonstrate that everything was perfect. To hide her blasted anxiety behind it and to show that she wasn't a mess. What was wrong with her to begin with?! She simply wasn't herself today, and, on top of that, she risked disgracing herself with bad manners in front of Cornelia. She had to finally collect herself and calm down, as she planned to do a long time ago.
To her surprise the tea tasted absolutely fantastic. Not that she expected anything bad from the brew made by Cornelia, of course, but the taste was...almost dream-like, magical like the woman herself. As if it was almost too potent to be true.
It was a mix of strange herbs that Annette couldn't recognize for the life of her, some flowers that she could still see floating on the top of the cup, and something else...Something sharp and obviously noticeable, yet she couldn't pinpoint it at all. A spice of some sort? A pinch of pepper? She simply couldn't know, and asking Cornelia would be straightly embarrassing.
"So, there were things...that I wanted to discuss," the older woman began, gracefully settling herself on the couch right in front of Annette and looking at her with the eyes of a lioness.
Annette couldn't even say why exactly the mage gave her an impression like that. But there was something...mysterious, almost hungry in Cornelia's eyes. Something that once again brought the familiar gnawing feeling of danger into her chest and made her head heavy. Except this time, when Annette tried to shake the heaviness off, it refused to go away.
Instead, her head began feeling oddly dizzy. And the feeling intensified with every passing second, reaching the point when she couldn't even understand what Cornelia was saying anymore.
She knew that the words were coming out of the mage's mouth, she saw her lips parting as she spoke, and she even heard..noises. Not a series of words but simply muffled noises that echoed across the room and for some reason refused to register in her head.
"Is something wrong...?" The one clear sentence of the mage woman finally broke through the mist in Annette's head. And, to her surprise, instead of seeing a concerned expression, she noticed a smile stretching on her hostess's face.
"I-I...I..." Annette began feeling how her words were tangling onto one another in a mess of sounds that she knew she had to say but simply couldn't. "I feel--I--"
As if the fog in her head wasn't bad enough, soon enough Annette began to feel that her body began growing weaker. It was an overwhelming sensation that overpowered her and left her absolutely unable to resist. She struggled and struggled, tried to keep her back straight and tried to stop her head from spinning, but soon enough even she realized that the attempts were in vain.
Annette felt how one of her hands, the one that was holding Cornelia's tea suddenly grew incredibly weak. How her fingers refused to hold it and how it fell down, spilling the golden liquid all over her dress.
"I feel--h--help!" were the only words the younger woman managed to utter, before finally sliding down over the couch, limp and nearly breathless in her weakened state.
The tea! It had to be the tea, Annette's drained mind reminded her. Cornelia put something in it! Something to make her weak and drug her. But for what...?
Her questions weren't answered. Instead she saw how the mage rose to her feet and stepped closer to her victim. The smirk on her face was now wider, more obvious and more prominent. Cornelia was definitely up to no good, but Annette couldn't do anything about it.
With every passing second her mind and her body weakened further and further, leaving her in a state where she had to fight for simply staying awake. She felt drowsy, disoriented, weak...And she was absolutely unable to resist whatever the other woman was planning for her at that moment.
Somewhere in the corner of her mind she saw how Cornelia raised her hands in a manner of preparing a spell, and soon enough both of them were coated in powerful magical energy and glowing with blinding purple light.
Then the mage took a step in Annette's direction. Then another one.
For some unknown reason Cornelia moved in an oddly slow pace, as if she was savoring every moment of what was happening. As if she was basking in what she was about to do. And Annette hated every single bit of this idea.
Her ministrations, of course, didn't end there.
She rose her hands even higher up in the air, and then she placed them right onto Annette's head, filling her mind with the very same purple light that her hands were now coated in, and driving it further into the darkness of complete oblivion.
For a moment, out of pure instinct, Annette thought that Cornelia's touch had to hurt. That whatever she was about to perform to her had to be painful and bring her misery.
But it didn't happen.
Instead, she felt how the feeling of lightness and ease was spreading all over her body. She felt how she was floating in the air, weightless, and unrestrained by anything in the world. She felt as if the magical purple light began draining her very thoughts out of her. The essence of her being herself, her plans, her memories, even her deep loyalty to her Kingdom. All of it was now gone, leaving her empty and unfilled like a blank piece of paper. And then there were words, many of them, pouring into her like a river of fresh water and settling deep in her consciousness as if it was the only place they could belong
Annette couldn't understand their meaning, like she couldn't understand what Cornelia was saying to her earlier after she drank the tea. But somehow she still knew that they would imprint into her, twist her mind into something she couldn't even expect. And the longer Cornelia continued her incantation, the longer she spoke, the less empty Annette's mind began to feel.
She was still in a state of a daze, unable to understand what was happening and now feeling oddly heavy out of a sudden.
So she let her mind rest, forced into the deep darkness that the mage's ministrations were chasing her to. She closed her eyes and let the words of Cornelia turn into a sweet lullaby that led her into sweet peaceful slumber.
Nothing mattered anymore, nothing...She couldn't even remember why she came here, so what else could have a meaning in the world?
***
Annette opened her eyes wide with a loud gasp, sitting up on the couch within a matter of seconds and gazing around herself with a calm and calculating look.
The first thing she noticed was that the sun behind the window of Cornelia's room was beginning to set, coloring the rest of the place in shades of gold and orange, and reminding her that her mission couldn't be put on a break.
She had a task, after all. An important task. In fact, now it was the one and only thought in her mind. The only thing that mattered to her in the whole world.
She was a faithful servant of Those Who Slither in the Dark. One of their most important servants, even, considering her mission. Or so she recalled from the depths of her mind, letting it concentrate on the only thing that was now there in her head: the thoughts that Cornelia put there.
And her task was simple, even if it could not face any objections: Annette had to corrupt the women of the Kingdom. The women of the Church...the women of the Alliance. And any other woman who would dare to stand in her way or be an obstacle. She would make the influence of Those Who Slither spread. And nothing and no one would ever be able to stop her.
To Annette it seemed that she was always this way. There was nothing else she could ever think of. So she got up and went to fulfill her calling, now far more confident than before.