HairSnip.com

This work is a collaborative roleplay effort between Behold and Confrazzled. It was intended first and foremost as an enjoyable experience for the two writers involved, trading paragraphs back and forth. As such, it does not read quite like a traditional short story, though we thought that, now that it is completed, some of you might enjoy the fruits of our labour as well . . .

It was a dark and stormy night. Dark drops of rain plummeted on the pommade-slicked coiffure of Count Snipcula as he gazed towards a dark grey horizon. He was feeling a bit peckish, but this was no weather to go out in. Damn Transsylvanian climate. He coughed as he started to descend the long, spiralling stairs of his lookout tower when the lights of a single oil lamp slowly moving along the forest road caught his eye.

Arilianna Von Tressus drew her hood further forward over her brow, though the gesture was rather futile, sopping wet as she was. But the package that she carried, wrapped tightly in brown paper and clutched tightly to her chest with the one hand, her left, that had not left the confines of the cloak. Every crisp fold was still dry. Or so she hoped. An imperative message to carry, to an important personage, but the driving sheets of rain were not in the least inclined to let her pass. In fact, they whipped up thick, dense clouds of mist from the ground, obscuring the dark country road from view, obscuring all but an eerie light in the distance . . .

It was this light that Arilianna worked her way towards, hoping to beg sanctuary for the night. At least, before she lost both her boots in the increasingly mucky mire of the road. She dodged puddles and pebbles, feeling as apt as Dr. Foster to tumble into one and not make her way back out. Such a remote road . . . it seemed almost grown over. Still, once she had mounted the hill and made her way through the imposing gates-this, certainly, was no farmhouse, and she had swung the massive wooden door behind her, with a reverberating thud, Arilianna felt relief for a split end of a moment. And then she wondered what precisely she had come into, she had come out of the rain . . .

"Good evening", Miroslav Snipcula spoke as he slowly descended the wooden stairs of his castle, the sputtering candelabra in his hand casting a dim, orange light on the imposing reception hall of his ancestral castle. "What brings you here, if I may ask?"

Erstwhile, in her grapplings with the door, Arilianna's hood had tumbled backwards, off of her sodden locks. But even so, they gleamed like burnished copper in the light of that candelabra. Her mirror-grey eyes raised to the stairs, down which the strange figure was descending. "I-I am Arilianna Von Tressus," she announced, stuttering a little at first, but this was business, king's business,

Snipcula's eyes seemed to glimmer for a moment. "Von Tressus." he spoke slowly, his velvety baritone savouring every syllable. "Of the Salzburg Von Tressuses? I knew that family well, once upon a time." Sigismund of Tressus had been a cavalrist in the war against the Ottoman hordes. He'd always had a taste for ample-bosomed peasant maidens with long, beautiful hair. A taste that seemed reflected in his offspring. "But in any case, it would be a delight to humbly extend my hospitality to such an obviously aristocratic lady such as yourself. Please, follow me upstairs."

"As a matter of fact, yes," she admitted, a little surprised that he knew of her family, for it had fallen out of favour a few generations ago, when her great-great-grandfather, and great-grandfather after that had expended vast sums tracts of money trying to acquire . . . human hair, of all things. They had been convinced that the pinnacle achievement of alchemy would be in the regrowth of human hair, and not the conversion of lead to gold, or any such. But no more thought to that. Arilianna was more concerned about the growing puddle dripping from her soaked cloak and boots. "Simply allow me to . . ." she swept the wet woollen mess from her shoulders, to reveal a rather practical lady's riding dress, brought into recent fashion and split between the legs though it still billowed out like a voluminous skirt, in a fetching shade of sapphire. The dampening only darkened it, and a flash of silver glinted at the garnet broach at her throat. Though by far the most ostentatious of all her ornamentation was the braided knot of copper hair, large as two man's fists, pinned up at her nape.

Miroslav couldn't believe his eyes. Not in two score years had he stumbled upon such a delicacy in his lonely outings to nearby villages. And now it was delivered to his doorstep. The fact that he'd known her great-great-great-great-grandfather made it seem almost too good to be true. Soundlessly, he preceded her towards his largest guest room, wooden, old, and very cold. It was spotless, though. He couldn't bear the presence of insects and mites in his domicile.

"Let me light the fireplace for you." he said, positioning himself in front of it to obscure the fact that the hearth hadn't seen a fire in decades. "This is an old, large place, and I'm afraid we don't bother to heat all the rooms unless we're expecting guests." The kindling in the metal box on top of the fireplace, seasoned for almost a century, lit instantly from a single red spark of a firesteel. A few oak logs, light and dry as air almost, followed soon after.

Arilianna held her cloak tight to her breast, over her precious package. She did not watch the Count light his fire-and what a strange name for a Count indeed, she had not heard of his name at all, and with such an obviously large holding so central in the kingdom? But her thoughts did not dwell here. They instead lingered on the progression of strange portraits that she had seen in the hallway

Some rectangular-framed, some set in ovals, but all immaculately painted, and all beautiful women in outmoded dress. "Such a bizarre fashion," she mused aloud, a little startled to hear her own voice tumbling from her lips. Though now that they were uttered, she could not help but defend her claim. "You must think me strange. I could not help but notice the portraits lining your hall. It seems to me an odd progression, each beautiful woman with increasingly shorter and shorter hair. Is this a tradition in your family?" she asked politely. Never an avid student of history, had Arilianna been.

Snipcula cocked his head slightly. "I think it was more of a ... habit," he spoke. A habit that was hard to break, indeed. Miroslav idly wondered how the woman before him would be captured in oils on a canvas. "This is a barbarian country, and my people are simple, bound by blood and tradition in a way that, I think, can be incomprehensible to those from the heart of the empire. I, am like my people, the descendant of Barbarians." He pointed upwards, the dull, leaking orange light of the flames revealing a tall, imposing painting in pre-Renaissance style of a man in full body armour, the clothes underneath soaked in the blood of the battlefield, and clutched in his hand, a long black mane of hair attached to a veiled, black-clad figure kneeling besides him.

"My family came to prominence in the wars against the Ottomans, now many centuries ago." he began, the acrid smell of human blood tickling his nose as the memories came back. "It was a battle of Barbarians against Barbarians. But the barbarism of the followers of Mahomet was the greater kind. Even the prostitutes they had brought along were trained to kill. Fierce, proud creatures who would often take their own life rather than allow themselves to be captured."

"It was a habit of those fighting on our side to collect the hair of these deadly dervishes while they were still alive. A quick slash of the blade to collect their locks, followed by a strike to collect their lives." well, not always. Sigismund and his comrades generally preferred to rape them before killing them. And his own methods of disabling them had been far more direct, making them squirm with pleasure as his sword severed their tresses. And then he'd gone for the throat. His fellow cavalrists thought it was funny, back in those simpler times. His mind worked quickly now, trying to come up with an explanation for the sequence of portraits in the hallway. "Of course, the shearing of tresses became synonymous with surrender and humiliation, so Slavic women preferred to keep their hair long during those terrible times." "Later generations cut their hair increasingly shorter, to distinguish themselves from their ancestors."

He grinned at her baffled expression. "You're thinking that these are not subjects to discuss with a lady of good standing, and you are right. As I told you, I am still a barbarian at heart, like my ancestors. Think no more of it. There will be breakfast in the morning." Well, something would be consumed after midnight, anyway.

"Err, I was thinking that this is a great deal more complex than I had envisioned. I had suspected that the wife of each subsequent generation had been bound to cut her tresses shorter, or some such." Not exactly Arilianna's court training in diplomacy that came to the rescue, but she salvaged enough. Still, the thought of forcefully-sheared hair chilled her very core. Outwardly, she smiled. "Still, I believe I have not thanked you for your hospitality. I greatly appreciate it," the young woman insisted, setting down her cloak at last as she turned to face the count, the contours of her face catching shadowed in the firelight, which seemed to set the rich ambery tones of her hair ablaze.

"Yes, that could be it as well." Snipcula spoke, beating himself up for coming up with such a long and convoluted explanation. "Who can know the minds of those who have been gone for centuries, anyway?" he grinned again, trying to emphasize his accent to play up the Eastern-European charm. The effect was about as disarming as a shark with a fake moustache would be.

He couldn't help admiring the way her red hair seemed to catch fire. Red. The colour of battle. The colour of blood. He'd never shorn a red-haired girl before. Never drank the blood of one. Folk wisdom held that Red-haired women were immune to magic. Old wives' tales from a childhood long, long ago. When red-haired women were rumored to exist in lands far to the west, and Vampires had not been a distant fiction, but an ever-present fact of life. How times had changed.

The thought kept playing in his mind as he walked out of the door.

"Certainly not I. And I fear I shall not have more than a few moments to dwell on it before I fall abed. I bid you sweet dreams." For Arilianna's part, she veritably forgot about the Count after his departure, or as near enough as she could. Her prediction about falling abed was startlingly accurate, though she did have time to hang her cloak to dry over the back of a chair, by the fire, and curl herself about the all-important delivery packet, slipping its bulk into the breast of her dress, before she slipped into slumber.

When she awakened, the air felt chilled, sizzled with the sort of tension that it contained immediately preceding a lightning strike. Still dark, it obviously was not yet morn. It took another moment to recognise that she was no longer in the bed she'd borrowed for the night, nor was she even laying flat. Her hands pressed to her chest . . . the packet was still there, thank heavens. But where . . . where was she?

"You are sound asleep" Snipcula answered her thoughts. He'd found it easiest to use his hypnotic powers as a force behind a powerful but plausible suggestion, rather than making his victims succumb to his base desires. "The things I told you about earlier are raging through your mind, and you find yourself wondering what it was like, back then on the battlefield."

He positioned himself behind the long, reclining chair he had ordered built for this purpose centuries ago, the hole in the headrest large enough to accommodate even Arilianna's bulky mass of hair. Projecting the illusion of the Transylvanian battlefield was easy, almost too easy even. "And the pictures of my ancestors have made you wonder what it would be like, to be brutally liberated of your locks. You are tired of them." he spoke, expecting her to slowly murmur the sentiment in repetition.

"Tired of my locks?" the young woman echoed, half-sleepily, "Brutally liberated? But I am a Von Tressus. We Von Tressuses never tire of our locks." She wriggled a little in the chair, and feeling the leather of it creak under her as she shook her head from side-to-side in a sleepy but emphatic 'no.' Her arms struggled to raise, to rake through them comfortingly, in the accustomed gesture, but she found that she could not raise them, for something bound them to the armrests.

The clanging of metal against metal and metal against flesh in his mind stopped, the images of medieval Wallachia vanishing at the sound of her indignant reply. He would try again, if a certainty hadn't grown in his mind. The old wives' tales about women with red hair had been true. He had no power over her. "Never, hm?" he spoke. This was not what he had planned. He'd expected her to coo in ecstasy, smile beatifically as he chopped off her long locks. Moan as he drank her into nothingness.

He considered letting her go, but at this point, she knew too much already. Letting her go would alert people in high places to his presence. To the presence of a small, Slavic princedom that he'd worked very hard to make people forget about. And it was a good thing he'd thought of restraining her. You don't live for eight-hundred years without learning something about caution.

He would still have her hair. And her blood would taste all the better for the fire and resistance he would drain from her neck.

"Your hair will come off." he said curtly, drawing his long, centuries-old longsword, now polished to a sheen and sharpness that would've been highly unpractical in actual combat. With superhuman precision, he traced its point from her neck to the tip of her left shoulder blade, ripping open the elegant riding dress she was still wearing to expose a pale, white shoulder underneath. "There is no point in resisting me."

Arilianna's eyes popped open at the advent of that voice, and all traces of sleep drained away. Her hands struggled all the more against the leather straps and buckles that bound them to the chair. Her feet, bound by no such remnants, flailed madly. That is, until the sharp slice of the sword bared her pearly skin. Her tongue faced no such guard by it. "My hair will stay quite firmly where it belongs, thank you," she stated, each word precise, for her tongue was now her only available weapon.

His cold, white fingers pried through the almost Gordian knot of hair pressed against her head. Almost Gordian, for he unlocked it, and three long braids of hair fell downwards, red cable piling up on the cold stone floor of his castle.

"You wanted to know whether the shorter hair of the women in the portraits represented a tradition." he spoke. "Well, they do. A personal tradition. One I indulge only once every thirty years, in the last three centuries at least." he was surprised how easy it was to talk of his life. He had never been one to make megalomaniac speeches to his victims, so why was he pouring his heart out to this particular girl?

"A tribute to past comrades, perhaps, who knows." he mused. "But in any case, I shall take you through all the details of this tradition. Make you feel like you were there, in a sense." He grinned at his own joke. "The first woman I cut was my wife, Ilona. By then, I had been immortal for five centuries, but circumstances had required me to pretend to live the life of a mortal. She was cold and distant, even though her marriage to me brought her greater splendour than she could have ever expected as a woman of low birth.

"Eventually, I began to tire of her, and she only entertained me in my fantasies, where she was dressed as a Turkish whore, indomitable even in the face of death. She wore her hair to here." His last word was punctuated suddenly and harshly, by the sharp sound of metal against stone. Coiled snakes of hair lay dead still on the ground, severed from braids that now dangled freely, just barely scraping the cold cobblestones of the hall.

There was no mistaking that swift slice, that zing . The deadening thud and the accompanying lightening of her head. "Wait, what are . . . ? I demand that you reattach that to my head this instant," Arilianna harrumphed, swivelling her head madly to try to see the damage that he had wreaked, which set her remaining braid swinging wildly, like a hypnotist's pendulum.

"After her untimely death, the locals increasingly distrusted me. Eventually, I had to fake my own death and flee to Vienna. Thirty years later, I returned, presenting myself to the locals as my own nephew. With me was my fiancé, Margaretha of Bohemia, a princess whom I hoped would greatly increase my standing among mortal men. Back in those days, I still lusted for power, you see." He spoke increasingly softly, again, a voice of caution in his calcified immortal brain warning him that his sudden flux de paroles was neither natural nor wise at this point. "She hated my ancestral home, my country, my people. The best thing about her was her soft, golden hair, really. She wore it halfway to her back."

This time he had placed the tip of his long, sharp sword on the ground, using it as a support for a swift, swinging motion that made another 30 centimeters of red braid fall to the floor, the ends starting to uncoil even in mid-air.

Another deadening thump told her that this was not an option. The hair, once shorn, would remain in that horrid graveyard on the cold stone floor. And it seemed that the Count had no intention of halting here. Arilianna wanted to fight back, wanted to flail her feet and whack him with them, for all that they were bare of anything but her stockings. Her tongue, once again, was her only useful weapon. For the moment. And for now, she undulated it to form a fountain of easy laughter. "All with a sword, Count Snipcula? How uncouth," she laughed again. "Really, I would have expected more refinement of you."

"As I told you before, my dear, I am a Barbarian." Snipcula spoke. "But you do have a point. My next wife was a local girl renowned for her long hair. It was incredible, really, it touched the ground when she walked. But it bothered me, it distracted from her regular features. So the first thing I did after asking her father for her hand in marriage was to reduce her hair in length to just past her shoulder blades." a soft, scraping sound was the only indication that Arilianna's hair had indeed been reduced a further ten centimeters in length.

"Sinfe then, I've found that the only thing that intere?ts me about mortals is their hair, really." Snipcula continued, his speech slipping into a slight lisp as he revealed his prominent incisors. With a sudden, unexpected movement, he pulled a hitherto invisible lever, and the chair that was Arilianna's prison began to transform and swivel, invisible gears on another floor turning until she was seated in an upright position before a large, silver mirror. "And truft me, girl, you'll look faabulous onfe we cut off that hair of yours."

Arilianna could not help flinching as her fray-ended, blunt-severed braid unravelled in entirety, flapping to flick her face as the seat lurched upwards and her reflection bobbed into view, like a floppy rag doll. Her reflection, and the chair's-no other was present, even though she knew that the count stood beside her, could feel the sharp tug of his hand winding through her hair. Toying with it, the way a cat toys with a mouse.

He would learn who the true cat was, shortly enough. She smirked, probably the last expression he expected, as well.

"How many girls," she asked, her tone easy, matter of fact, twisting her wrist against the restraint in the accustomed hand gesture, "young women, ladies, peasants, duchesses, spoils of war, whomever," she shrugged. "Just how many have you 'made fabulous?' Shorn in just such a way. Surely it grows dreary." Arilianna trained her eyes on the mirror, in the vacancy where his reflection, by rights, should have been. Not at his hand, where a flash of silver hovered perilously close to her remaining locks.

"Well, letf see, I've had this chair for about two-hundred yearf now, it made thingf soo much easier, you see." Snipcula talked absent-mindedly as he picked up a pig's bladder filled with rose water from a table below the mirror. A comb with long, long teeth made out of whalebone was obtained from a black velvet pouch, and soon its teeth slid through Arilianna's hair as it was sprayed by small clouds of perfumed water.

"And I've been exfperimenting with much shorter stylef for the laft five decadef or so, so no, I haven't grown weary of it yet. What did you have in mind?"

Arilianna refrained from telling him quite what she had in mind, for all that she held it on the tip of her tongue. 'I would like for your to pick that hair back up from the floor and reattach it to my head, please. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps some women might take pride in their hair, and enjoy its attachment to the head to which it belongs?' But no, so many years of training for court before this imposed but integral courierhood had trained her tongue better than that. "It is not so much a style that I had in mind, for the result of my hair, but a style for YOUR PERFORMANCE," she emphasized gently, trying to settle in under his strokings, and the plumes of mist. "Surely you have grown tired of your 'Turkish ladies-of-the-night,' all the same, all willing, euphoric. Because you have made them so. Wearying," she dismissed.

Something in Snipcula's mind told him not to listen to this Wicked Woman of the West. But part of him was fascinated. What she said made perfect sense, and if a change of his act would make her more willing, wouldn't that be for the best? "Go on." he said, but already, with a single flick of his hand, he commanded her severed braids to reattach themselves to Arilianna's head, the lifeless dead cables moving as if they were held up by strings. It occurred to him that his magic seemed to work pretty well on red hair, if not on red-haired women.

Startlement flickered across her face as she quickly tried to smooth her features, as if she had expected this. Why had she not studied her history more painstakingly, not heeded her tutors? Surely they knew to which realm of folklore this Count belonged, with his too-sleek pompadour, his centuries' long immortality, his lack of a reflection, his elongated incisors, and insatiable lust for blood and women's hair. They culminated in a near-familiarity, and infuriatingly she simply was unable to place her finger upon it. Yet. For now, assured of her coolness of temper, she turned her face towards him. Surely that would unnerve him more than anything she had said yet. "Well, the concept truly is simple. Your first wife presented an understandable enough case. You lay next to the same cold woman for several centuries, and I imagine that you wish to liven her up, even slightly. And for the next, you remember that you enjoyed your taste of the first. So you attempt to recreate it. But dining on the same feast each night?" she asked, unaware of the irony. "Eventually it shall taste of ashes. And now, with the rich dish of each woman set before you, you turn her into the same Turkish Delight. Perhaps you are prepared for another flavour." She shrugged, turning her head away from him, "No matter. You seem set on the same."

"No, please go on, I'm intrigued" Snipcula spoke, as he watched the lifeless braids reattaching themselves, twisting and turning until the braids reformed to be as tight as they had been before.

She smirked broader. Her snare was set. And even more wonderful was the familiar weight tugging at her scalp once more, a true Von Tressus mane. "Same old mirror, same old chair, same old sword, same old belt about the lady's middle, same old arm restraints," she elucidated, "Probably the same introductory speech. And always shorter, never longer. A terribly boring, terribly linear progression, is it not?" Just as all spooks were the same, when one came down to it. They never possessed their power in the broad light of day. So Arilianna needed to transform to Scheherazade, and entertain him through the span of the night. "Why not try something new?"

"Longer, you say, hm?" again, Snipcula made a motion with his hand, and Arilianna's hair seemed to thicken, braids of hair becoming as thick as an arm, a fist, gradually bulking up until her face seemed to be perched atop a massive ball of red hair. "Not seeing where you're going with thif. It doefn't do anything for me."

Arilianna's eyes widened, and she inclined her head this way and that, preening. At least, as much as she could be within the confines of the bestrapping chair. Her eyes sparkled excitedly. Why, this was lovely! If only she could have hair like this all the time! It outshone even the most heralded of the famed Von Tressus locks. Though somehow she suspected . . .

... suspected correctly that the Count was uninclined to leave her to enjoy this privilege for very long. An icy-cold prong of the scissors poked against her warm skin as it was opened wide enough to accommodate one of her now massive braids. The silver slid through slowly, but easily, leaving a limp, brush-like stump to fall back against her neck. "I've never been comfortable with hair longer fan chin-length, really." the Count continued as he subjected her second braid to the same fate. "I have this fing for mortal neckf, you see. I find them irrefiftable when they're exposed."

"Wait, no, that is-" she stammered, trying to whip her head away. How cruelly her dreams were snatched away. Still slightly longer than chin-length, she tried to console herself, for the moment. Though shorter than he'd severed it prior. "Updos serve rather nicely. Perhaps there are several generationsworth of hair fashion that you failed to notice, cloistered within your draughty castle as you have been. You cannot truly fancy yourself a hair connoisseur if you have not attempted such uptwists and piles. But never you mind. You seem perfectly content with your Turkish whores."

"I have noticed. Women's hairstyles are so changeable. When I was in the West, it was the fashion amongst ladies of high birth to try to make their foreheads look larger." scissors pressed tautly against Arilianna's scalp, he followed her hairline, mercilessly pushing it back further as every snip revealed more hitherto unseen freckled skin.

"That must have fallen from fashion," Arilianna retorted, trying fervently to ignore the streamlets of hairstrands slipping down the curves of her cheeks, alongside the slope of her nose, "quite some time ago." Trying to remain calm. Unclench her fists. Relax. More than slightly. "A rather peculiar fashion, and not one that I am fond of. And you would wish me to be fond of it, would you not?

But Snipcula noticed that he was on the winning hand. It seemed the little witch was beginning to lose her power to resist him as he cut off more and more of her hair. Now she was calmly suggesting amendments to please him rather than demanding he'd leave her hair long. "I would, but I've often notifed that women need a bit of coerfion to go fhort." he lisped. "I have a feeling you'll be much more amenable to my plans when you fee just you nice you look with fhort hair." With those words, he grabbed one of her braid stumps, and dug his scissors in at the very base.

The bait. He'd taken her slyly offered bait. At a cost-the cost of several more inches of hair, but then, he always had been planning to steal those, hadn't he? "There are other ways to ensure my amenability," she implicated, raising an eyebrow archly. Then flexed her wrists against the restraints. "That would be the greatest challenge of all, would it not? Obtaining my willing enjoyment. It's a prize you have not had . . . ever, I should imagine." She paused a moment, let it settle in. Though not before he had snipped off the stub of her other braid, pitiful though it was. Did not allow herself to dwell on it. "And how could I possibly . . . express my pleasure or displeasure with my wrists bound so?"

Snipcula grinned at her ploy. Obviously, she was trying to justify her increasing pliability to herself as an escape attempt. Why not support her illusions a little? "Not yet," he spoke. "But soon, my dahling, we will danfe togefer in the moonlight." And they might. The back of Arilianna's head was beginning to look increasingly bare. A sudden thought occurred to him, and the scissors in his hand were exchanged for the bony comb he'd used earlier. He began to slick her hair back with pommade, working it into the trademark Snipcula hairstyle. Dark red slick curls contrasted nicely with the sparse pink tufts on the back of her head. "We'd be a matching couple."

"Couple," the maiden replied dryly, "Are you not running a few fathoms ahead of yourself there, Count? Really, it is simply my arms. You have quite the sturdy strappings about my middle yet. And I could be so . . . expressive."

"Not yet, my dear, not yet" the Count continued manically, certain that the woman was increasingly overwhelmed by his hypnotism. Now, the only thing that had to be satisfied was his perfectionism, as he began to taper the hair on the sides of her head.

Somehow she managed to contain her sigh, as she watched-and felt-the prickles of more shreds of her once-voluminous hair slide down her neck, to dust her bared shoulder and accumulate in her neckline. Trickling down her back . . . now THIS was an unpleasant sensation, though the clacking rhythm of the blades was surprisingly soothing. At least, Arilianna tried to convince herself that it was.

Again, her wrists writhed against the leather, as she tried to turn her sigh into a halfways-contented noise. "Mmm."

"Yes, yeees, soon, my dear, soon." Snipcula spoke, noticing her heaving chest. He might not control her entirely, yet, but his powers were strong enough to break through her shell of resistance at this point. The shorn sides were rough and uneven, but passable. He wanted her to run her hands over it, coo with ecstasy as she felt her fingers against her own scalp. In a soundless instant, he was standing in front of the chair, bending over her restraints as he cut her wrists loose with his elegant silver shears.

She flexed her fingers first, curling them forwards about the knobbled ends of the chair's arms in a manner reminiscent of a cat lazily arching its back. Then she stretched them forwards, extending her stiff elbows out the whole way-almost brushing the Count himself with her fingertips-before withdrawing them, setting them in her lap. "Mmm, far more enjoyable," she replied with a half-lidded expression, the cat who had gotten into the cream. She pressed her shoulder blades back as well, arching them into the chair, but frowned a little as she encountered resistance from the restraint about her middle.

His attention returned to her hair, and he went about the task of snipping away at the sides of her head when he noticed the Elisabethan High brow he cut for her earlier seemed too round, too gentle. There was only one way to transform it into a proper widow's peak. Gently, he slid his scissors through the hair atop her head, opening them about a slicked red curl.

"Mmm," she cooed again, flexing her fingers once more. Experimentally. "I think perhaps I am not overfond of that style, nor it of me," she suggested. "Perhaps you should try something a little more . . ."

The Count wrinkled his nose at her gentle suggestion. She should be cooing with delight at this point. Apparently, her hair continued to support her resistance. "... something a little more short, perhapf?" he suggested ironically. Hand contorted to a claw like shape, he forcefully seized some long red curls atop Arilianna's head, and snipped them off at a gnarly fingernail's length.

'Had he? Had he really just? Calm,' she urged herself.

"Mm. MmmmmMMmm!" she hummed as her shoulders shuddered with shivers and Arilianna forced her muscles to laxen, as if she would have melted to a puddle on the chair were the straps about her middle not propping her erect. Her eyelids lowered, half-lidded, as she forced her eyes not to dart to his face, not to betray her intent . . .

"Yeees, eexfellent!" Snipcula chimed. He wondered if all her resistance to magic might have been concentrated in that single lock of hair. The way she suddenly turned to goo under his hands... delicious. "Tell me you want to even it out on top."

One step. Two steps. Arilianna watched through fluttering lashes as his velvet-shod feet shuffled closer towards her, as his hand slipped lower, his elbow slackened . . . she saw her chance, and seized at it.

Jolted upright, ribs pressing cruelly against the merciless bindings. But still, she snaked out a hand and snatched the scissors right from his well-kept fingernails. Paused a moment to slip one of the blades into her waist bindings and grapple with them as she sliced through the leather strappings. Half an instant more and she had darted out of the chair, one of Snipcula's own locks, the very peak of his pompadour, between the crux of the scissors' hungry blades. She snapped them mercilessly together, as the black hank tumbled before the vampire's eyes, sliding along the slope of his nose to ski-jump to the floor. Had no other time to react as she strove to make her escape. At the moment, just where she intended to escape to . . . well that was secondary.

"The magic shears!" Snipcula thought, still baffled by the sight of his own greasy locks tumbling down his nose. "She's stolen my magic shears." None of his victims had ever put up a fight like this. None of them had ever been able to conceive of deceiving him like this. He must've been wrong about her ability to resist him being proportional to the length of her hair. As long as a single red lock remained on her head, she was completely free of his influence.

No rush. She was headed to the Trophy room; she wouldn't get far. He stared in the mirror, looking at his own non-reflection. How did he look? Did he have a bald patch? Did he still look faaabulous? He'd never know.

Arilianna raced through the castle, sparing little care for the sapphire dress that hampered her legs, and slipped to expose even more of her pearly-pale shoulder, nearly to her breasts, nor for the severely shortened, ragged flag of hair that streamed out behind her as she darted up the staircase and then along an almost obscenely long corridor. Was it not Chopin who was afraid of such long corridors? A snippet of irrelevant history drifted to mind as she flung open a few doors in her confusion, selecting one, somewhat towards the middle, at random. No, this one seemed to be filled with blue-etched china. Whoops-her toe caught on the corner of a case and toppled it as she raced on. Probably . . . probably her best bet would be whatever lay at the end of that hallway. Smack after pounding smack of her footsteps sounded on the flagstone, but she could hear nothing above her own ragged breathing, pounding heart, and that steady slapping. No indication of what followed behind her, and she dared not risk a glance.

Why was this hallway so damn long? Maybe Chopin had the right idea.

She selected instead a door at random, and swung it shut behind her, hoping that he would not be able to find her. Pressed her back firmly against the solid, nigh-on-ancient wood and found herself confronted with-

A wall of hair. Specifically, three walls of hair, and a ceiling besides, and several shelves. All strung with hooks and stocked with hair. It was as if someone had taken the heads of hair belonging to all of her famous Von Tressus ancestors and hacked them off, then decided to paper a room with them. And liked it so much that they decided make all the furniture out of the same material. Braids and plaits of all varieties, fishboned, roped, and conventional, as well as some mere free-flowing horse-tails, along with some forlorn-looking nests, of loped-off buns, or matted, snarled hanks of it, or even loose bits, bits that had been snipped off lock by painstaking lock. A few jars stocked a shelving unit, filled with shortened strands, as if someone had minced the hairs the way a chef chops walnuts for a cake. Curls, waves, and crisply straight, in every imaginable shade.

Save red. There was not a hank of robin's breasted hair to be seen. Until hers, Arilianna lamented, rapidly burrowing into a pile of blonde hairs that filled a corner, much resembling a haystack in size and conformation. Burrowed in deep, so that only her well-veiled eyes peered out from a little window.

Snipcula stood pensively before the door to his trophy room, wrought-iron scissors in his right hand. This used to be his sanctuary, the place where he stored all that he'd ever wished to remember his past wives, lovers and victims by. Perfect, ever-lasting, immortal hair. Now, his unnaturally sensitive ears could hear Arilianna's foul, damp mortal breathing even through the door.

Within an instant, he stood on the other side of it, key in hand to lock the only way out behind him. Slowly, he strolled across the room, walking towards the single sputtering oil lamp while carefully inspecting each and every pelt for a sign that the crimson-haired vixen might be hiding behind it.

"Thif is where I'll hang your hair" he teased, trying to remind her that most of her locks were forever parted from her head. "Do you like it?" If he could get her to respond, he'd make short work of the rest of her hair as well.

'I should like it far better reaffixed to my head,' surged a thought, though Arilianna remained quite firmly hidden in her hairstack. She merely needed to await the dawn, she assured herself. And when the light streamed in, the spook would be banished. Like all spooks. Dawn could not be that far off, could it?

Then a cold, harsh realization, painful as finding one's tongue frozen to a metal pole. There were no windows. Not in this room, this 'trophy room.'

And Snipcula's single, undead breath extinguished the sputtering oil lamp that had cast a dull, orange light on the pelt-covered walls of the trophy room. Giving them a slightly golden gleam. Gone now, replaced by an ink-black universe of rustling, regular breathing, and the menacing sound of ancient, tarnished scissors opening.

Within moments, he stood before the wall, shears buried into a mass of blonde hair that seemed suspiciously lumpy. Agonizingly slowly, he worked through them, falling locks revealing... a void, and cold stone wall.

Arilianna had narrowly-so narrowly slipped out from beside him and now bolted down the hall as fast as her legs would pump. 'Never run with scissors,' he nursemaid's old admonishment ran through her mind, though running with the blades seemed to be a rather moot point in regards to safety, at this point. She selected another door at random, finding . . . maze of mirrors, of all things. Big mirrors, little mirrors, oval and rectangular, framed and free, all lined, stacked, back to back, against each other in a jumbled labyrinth the size of a ballroom?

'Perhaps this had once been a ballroom?' naggled a thought as she thrust her eyes towards the floor a moment, taking in the parquet tile. If it were, there would certainly be entrances to other rooms jutting off, she only needed to find them.

No time to choose anew. She dashed into the maze, praying that her myriad reflections would confuse her rabid-slavering, hair-hungry pursuer.

Snipcula sped after the sound of footsteps, gathering speed until he almost rushed past the opened door in the hallway. She had fled into the main hall, as he still thought of it, even though one of his wives had it redecorated as a ballroom in the late renaissance. It hadn't been lit for centuries, but enough pale, white moonlight passed through high, narrow windows to be caught in the many, many mirrors he had setup there. He'd always loved dancing with his victims, watching their limp, ecstatic bodies float across the room, seemingly by themselves as the mirrors chose not to reflect his firm arms holding them up.

He knew this room very well. The red-haired witch had made a mistake coming here.

Her heart pounded like a seagull thrashing against her ribcage, battering its wings wildly in an attempt to escape. Still, she hurried down the narrow rows, twisting a mirror here and there, occasionally picking on up and placing it in the path behind her, to create a new pattern and path to the maze. At every turn, she was confronted with yet another reflection of her bedraggled self, her half-shorn hair, her peerless sapphire gown, sliced and streaming still-clinging strands of blonde hair. As se turned around, having pivoted yet another mirror into the path behind her, she found herself trapped on all sides, confronted by her own reflection, in an oblong cubicle. Which way to run?

Certainly not in the direction Snipcula was approaching her from, footsteps softer even than the dull pounding of Arilianna's heart. Unseen, unheard, no indication of his presence other than an occasional fleeting shadow on a grey floor.

He stood behind her now, the shears in his hand cutting through rays of moonlight that struck the turbulent cloud of dust around her. Swiftly now, he jabbed his scissors at the lock above her pink, shell-like left ear...

And halted, tapping loudly against the pane of glass. The blackened iron heron's beak of the shears darted forward, once, again, as if to prove that it was not the true Arilianna behind the pane. And the mirror lurched forwards, crashing to the ground, shattering into a myriad of shards.

Arilianna gasped, a sound that echoed, reverberating off the remaining glass-faced monoliths, but caught her bearings swift enough. The count stood there, exposed in the waning moonlinght. And this, this was no reflection . . .

She lunged forwards, her own shears of gleaming, taking advantage of his shock and surprise, the opened blades only snapping their hungry harpy's jaws about one of the spooks' own hanks of hair, rough-jerked and close to the scalp, somewhere over his left ear. Leaving the remaining scraggly tuft to stand erect, and hint at the tracts of pale scalp beneath.

Pain. He hadn't felt pain in six-hundred years. The sharp, cold sensation made him gasp for air, a reflex that had been useless for centuries longer, even. Her second lunge didn't manage to surprise him as he managed to jump aside, turning while seizing her right arm into a vice-like grip behind his back.

Slowly, almost teasingly slowly, he slid his shear-wielding left hand through her hair, the path of freckled, shorn pale scalp behind it lengthening every second that she wasn't able to break free of his grip. A predatory grin snuck up upon his features as he laughed at her fiercely resistant gaze.

A grin that quickly left his face as a fist slammed into it with great force. Once, then another time, and a third, this time the full momentum of the hundred-pound girl behind it. Something cracked. As his grip upon the fierce fiery maiden's arm slackened, he realised it was one of his fangs.

Arilianna winced as she tried to ignore the fall of hair as it sliced from her head, sliding over her body like ruby red ribbons. Tried to ignore, too, the dusty breath rasping against her neck, desert-dry as the rush of air sweeping out of a long-dormant tomb as she struggled her shoulders against him, tried to wiggle her way free.

Now, knuckled smacking of a rawer but more healthful pain, she had little time to reflect as she lunged for him again, grasping a lock, snapping at it, grasping another. Again and again. Shearing about a quarter of his once-pompadour, the right side now, to rough-mown thatches.

Despite her frantic frenzy, she halfways noticed that each lock, once severed and raining down, formed a perfectly visible black rosepetal in the mirror, and turned to dusty ashes at the barest touch of the parquet. While the hair of his maidens may have been immortal, Snipcula's, apparently, did not share their fate.

Snipcula was baffled. He'd expected the damsel to run, search for an escape, or wooden stakes, holy water, garlic, that sort of thing. No one had ever tried to cut his hair. Ever. For a fleeting moment, he considered yielding to her, just to experience what he'd inflicted on others for centuries. Then he touched his broken tooth with his tongue. A tooth that would never grow back, just like his hair wouldn't.

Swiftly, his black shears flashed, its edge catching the edge of the silver ones in Arilianna's hand. For a moment, the expression on her half-shorn head was one of surprise. But even Snipcula could see she had the reflexes and the stance of a fencer. This was going to be more difficult than he had anticipated.

Those mirror-grey eyes flashed quick, back to the blades, as she pressed all of her strength forward into her arm. How was it that she could match strength with a demon of the night? When she'd grappled with him before, she could not nearly match his strength, but now-

The only difference lay in his hair, the hair that every instinct of her had screamed at her to slice away. Arilianna grunted the grunt of a sow rolling over in her mired pen, and forced, for a moment, all of her weight into her weapon of choice. Then just as startlingly darted away, backwards, like a hummingbird, which toppled another mirror as her bustled rump bumped it. But this did not give her pause, not even as her near-bare feet trod upon its shards and she feinted to one side and then the other, slicing through his sleeve with one gleaming, naked blade. But this, this would hardly bee effective. Fencing would only prove to pare away at the hours before dawn, and certainly she could not maintain such a fevered pace.

Neither could Snipcula, whose years of experience with fleeing for sunlight had led him to develop a very accurate internal clock. But an idea occurred to him while he served his sparring partner another riposte.

He made a feint. A bad one. An obviously bad one. And she took advantage of his mistake, catching his iron blade with hers, managing to twist it out of his hand and send it flying into a nearby wooden support beam.

And she struck. Quickly, and with her full body weight behind it, she stabbed him right in the heart.

He noticed that she was unable to look up at him, still staring in disbelief at her clenched hand. But when she did, her disbelief was replaced with horror as she realized that she'd drawn no blood, no life force, and that Snipcula was still very much alive.

Brusquely, he seized her arm and twisted it behind her back, the pain causing her to double over limply. Not relaxing his grip, he picked up the silver shears that had tumbled to the ground. "I have had enough of this" he said, oblivious to the fact that the loss of one of his fangs had noticeably reduced his lisp. Shears in hand, he tore lock after lock from Arilianna's head, until nothing but a patchy field of red stubble remained. Not satisfied with that, he scraped the ghostly-thin edge over her scalp, tiny red hairs accumulating on the enchanted silver with every pass.

Not a hair was left on her head, which gleamed with a smoothness equal to one of the many mirrors standing in the ballroom. She couldn't possibly resist him anymore.

Slivers of red rained before her eyes, shimmering cinnamon-ruby in the moon's waning light. But was that-was that a trick of the eyes, or could Arilianna see further, deeper into the blackest cornices of the room than she had before? Not that she could see much. Or pay much attention. Her eyes were riveted to one of her many tiers of reflections, and the gleaming silver shears, those trusted-turned-traitorous blades, that seemed to hover in the air above her, greedily snapping off lock after luscious lock. And then the tufts, and finally, razoring away the grainy sand-granules that remained. She was bald. Bald as an egg. A baby's bottom. Perhaps, balder than a fresh-plucked peach.

Bald. The pinnacle, the last portrait that could possibly satisfy Snipicula's wall. The final jar-bursting trophy for his cases. Fitting, that he should achieve this aim the night that he also tumbled to his downfall. Arilianna could feel has complacency, rather than see the cat-in-the-cream expression that surely decorated his face, could feel it in the laxening of his arm as he surely regarded her expression with speculation. With a violent wrench of her shoulders, and a wild grab at the implement that had done her so much harm, Arilianna pivoted to face him, face flushing red as her hair had once been with anger. "I am no Turkish Whore."

With near preternatural speed she grasped him in a headlock and tore at his own hair in vengeance, splinters of black falling like last-night's rain, cleared up now, to the pearly moonlight. But that was fading too, giving way to the grey wash of the predawn. Shi-schnic-shick-schick. Scything at, harvesting away every hank of the inky jet, before she, too, set a single sweeping blade to the task of clearing it away.

Impossible. Such white-hot anger. Was this the same bumbling, innocent young girl he'd lead to his guest room a few hours earlier? Surely she had been no different from the countless ones he'd shorn before? Hundreds of years, dozens of girls, peasant girls, city girls, and occasionally, girls of fine noble birth. All of them had yielded to his witchcraft, had cooed ecstatically as he had shorn them of their beautiful tresses. Why had he never encountered one exhibiting only a little resistance?

Enough was enough. He had to kill her now, drink the red blood from her neck before she managed to get away. He seized her wrists with his cold hands, ready to break her grip and slice open her carotid artery with his remaining fang. But he found her to be preternaturally strong, her grip as unyielding and strong as the iron of the scissors he had wielded just earlier.

But she wasn't strong, it occurred to him, as his knees gave in and he sunk to the ground, falling over but for her hands holding him up. The first, red light of the aurora reflected on her skull, was caught in her grey eyes where its spark seemed to ignite a blazing, golden glow. Once again, he was reminded of the stories from his childhood. With her teeth bared by a snarl that curled her upper lip, she looked like a demonic creature herself. A Vila from the underworld, come to take revenge for centuries of evil. Finally, for the first time, he realised that she would take more than his hair. In the end, there's always a bigger monster. And she was one almost entirely of his own making.

She towered over him smugly, or what was left of him, surging with joie-de-vivre and the ambrosia of merely having LIVED to daybreak coursed through her veins. The ashy residue, already starting to swirl and splay across the parquet resembled nothing more than crumbling cat's litter. But her victory was short-lived, near-squelched as the young noblewoman's lingering her eyes caught on a glittering shard of mirror, traced along its trail and slid up the surface of another pane, a whole pane.

And gasped.

The countenance that she found reflected in the gold of dawn's full light was not the one that had peered out from her own looking glass, day in and day out, surrounded by cascades of opulent cooled-fire tresses. The that confronted her seemed almost gremlin, alien, with those eerie mirror-grey eyes now devoid of all their smoky mystery, seeming large, almost elfin portals. Though her bald pate . . . it made her neck seem so spindly, as if her head were about to topple from its pillar. She looked like . . . an unfledged duckling. The lily-pale hands dropped the cargo of the silver shears, which clattered to the floor, among the broken glass. Slowly they raised towards her temples, running backwards, backwards, tentatively exploring the smooth expanses beyond. Skin that had not been bared since Arilianna had been a babe, bouncing on her nursemaid's knee. Skin that was exquisitely sensitive to the touch . . .

She swirled her fingertips, her delicately manicured nails over the top of the pate, relishing, somewhat perversely, in the sensation. Pressed the flat of her palms, massaged the pads of her fingers firmly into the skin. A bald Von Tressus . . . such a thing was unheard of. Arilianna would be a pioneer . . .

She bent low to pick up the glinting, magical shears, and tucked them into her sash. A battle trophy. One to display among the heads of stags, wild boars, and other great beasts hunted by her ancestors, as well as the swords of their noble enemies, fallen in battle. These twinned blades should receive no less honour. Though there was another trophy that she needed to collect as well . . .

After plucking up her lengths of red braid from where they had fallen, Arilianna retraced her steps as best as she could, eventually managing to find her way out of the mirrored maze, to the central hallways, and into the guest chamber where she collected her pack and hearth-dried cloak. Though as she passed through the hall, chin arched proud, her eyes caught on a flash. Another mirror, another reflection. That same eerie noggin, surely belonging to some goblin's spawn, peered back at her.

Really, this was not a befitting look for a lady, she reflected, leaning her pack against the wall. Ahh, well; the Princess Mariska would just have to wait a few days longer, she decided, lips setting to a firm line as one of Arilianna's own hands plunged into her bodice, withdrawing the slightly-rumpled, brown paper package, and set to stripping its wrappings away. Revealing the little decanter which had nestled at its heart all along, and been clutched to her breast through the entire duration of the journey. She popped the little silver clasp, toasted her reflection jokingly, and then swilled the entire crushed leaf-green-amber liquid, the viscosity sliding down her throat.

The elixir, the one striven for by so many painstaking generations of Von Tressus ancestors, began its work immediately, a fiery frosting immediately sprouting from her head, stretching upwards, outwards, until the bristling crop of it could no longer support its own weight, and gravity tugged it downwards, directing its streaming waves in a new river's course that gradually picked up speed, past her ears, her shoulders, beyond her scapulae to surpass even her waist, her hips . . . overtaking even her knees this time, before it halted, the familiar, coiling ends whapping welcomingly against her calves in the greeting of an old friend. Drawing a hairpin from her pack, Arilianna clenched it between her teeth before her fingers began to deftly braid the silken lengths with the flying ease of familiarity, then set it with the pin to its accustomed knot at her nape.

Yes, the princess would definitely need to wait. And perhaps her father would need a few more thalers, to afford the cure for her rather unfortunate condition. Yes, that would be rather fitting.

The puddles were already drying beneath the benevolent sun's beaming tutelage when Arilianna set to the road once more. This time, in the direction from which she had come, towards the sprawling estates of the Von Tressus family. It really was shaping up to be a lovely day for travel. The clouds were sparse, though the few that remained swelled with unshed rain. The castle Snipcula didn't look nearly as ominous in broad daylight as it had the night before. It sort of reminded her of the old, dilapidated ruins near the edge of her family's estate, where she used to play as a kid. A very curious place, with a cemetery filled with big, stone coffins. The villagers in the nearby town made the most wonderful garlic-flavoured dried sausage. Perhaps she should visit again, sometime.

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