I got this magnificent piece of Auspicia from  kerneldecoy a whiiile back, but just now felt the urge to write and so decided to accompany this with a little blurb!

Enjoy~


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People flaked in and out of her life like seconds to the mortal man. Sometimes, she wondered just where they went, where they ended up, when they were no longer in sight.

It was only by description of her job that her connections were so fleeting. Running a shop always meant that men and women enter, do their business, and leave again. Auspicia cared little for the idea of friends, but she had time in such excess that she could not help the nagging insistence that they were still... nearby. Even if only after a fashion.

Sable vulpine fingers twirled delicately, ushering her wine glass to nestle between them. A sip, and she was no longer in a library of curios and potions, but another world, a small world, of her imagining.

An angular brown cliff formed the landscape of this realm under her own. The woodwork of her very stool stretched for miles upon miles—indeed, so many that the grains themselves were as long and narrow as river passes. The faintest, most delicate weaknesses in the earth that she otherwise would never have noticed were crevasses several people wide, a hazard to pilgrims who dared this unorthodox path. Splinters invisible to the naked eye rose like mountain blades, creating unsteady inclines.

Swallowing the horizon was something that humbled even the most seasoned adventurer: a great continent of leather challenged the known verticality of the realm, whose worldly surface stretched into an ink-black infinity, whose supple grooves formed great ravines... and whose owner decided on a whim to scrunch her toes ever so slightly, creating a heavenly thunder of divine implication.

And yet, the fibrous jungle further below was wandered by a greater number. The dangers would be greater by Auspicia's reckoning, particularly if she were to ever walk from one end of the room to the other, but in numbers, there was safety. The smallest sections of spiraling twine were bridges, mountains, and a canopy all at once; those who traveled them were strong of limb and stout of courage, for it took nothing less to survive at the feet of a goddess—at times, perhaps literally.

It was spoken softly amid those tenuous gathering places beneath her desk, places of relative safety when she was away and there were no towering, playful digits to smother and flex against the earth, that their state was no accident. That they all had one thing in common, and it was Auspicia. In accordance with their tales, to them she was once someone who sold them a potion, or a bauble, or some other magical item of minor import. Now, she was a nameless deity and a natural disaster in countless forms; the avalanche of settling paws, the seismic upset of her bored strolling about her room, the gale-force winds that formed at the back of every one of her steps and the idle swishing of her tail.

Few remembered what came before, but many cited her whispering words of vengeful arcane intent before their awakening in this humbling, magnified realm they now called home. More still left out their slights against the fox that would prompt such a response in their grandiose tales, muddled to obscurity with time.

At these haunting rumors, some would call her a witch. Auspicia set down her glass, this time with just her hand--funny, she thought. They would be more right than they knew.