Glósóli

I couldn't help but stare as the robe slid down her arms and puddled at her feet. Her skin, where it was not touched by sun, was even paler than the rest of her - parchment-pale, almost transparent, particularly where the lamplight gave it a ghostly illumination.
I held back, even took a step away form her, intimidated by the porcelain shimmer of her flesh. How could I think of touching her, when it seemed she would break if I even looked too hard? She smiled, reading my thoughts from the stricken look on my face.
"I am not so very fragile," she whispered, walking softly over to me. She put her hands on my shoulders and pushed. Surprised by her strength I stumbled backwards and tripped - without hesitating her hand snapped out, snagging the front of my shirt and hauling me back onto my feet. I turned my gaze away quickly, disturbed by the fluid grace of her naked limbs. I had seen girls unclothed before, in my home village before I began my apprenticeship and then in the city when my master's status took us frequently into society. Those girls had been different, though. They had been more rounded than she was, and though the colour of their skin had ranged from dark to light none had had such a pallor as hers...
"Do you want to know my secret?" She asked, standing so close to me that I could smell her hair. Peaches and apples, and cinnamon. That, and the warmth of her, made me hungry in a way I hadn't felt before, not with any of the other girls. "It is why you're here, after all."
I nodded, trying to appear unaffected by her proximity.
"Watch," she commanded, not that I could keep my eyes away from her. I was afraid and excited at the same time when she moved, because with skin so frail, how did her bones not slice right through? She led me to a low table where a white cloth was spread. It was not as white as her skin.
"Don't say anything," she warned, as she took the comb from her hair, and unfolded its edges into a knife. I watched in a kind of horror as she drew the blade across her fingertips, and as some kind of black liquid that was not blood welled up from the wounds. Silently she dragged her fingers along the cloth, leaving long, black smears. After a moment the liquid quivered, and when I leaned closer I realised that it had formed into shapes.
"... 'fearfully, we have lingered in the valley'..." I read, translating roughly from a language so old that I had not seen it anywhere outside of my master's library. She looked at me with a shrewd interest, as I concentrated on the second and third lines. "... 'when rain clouds threatened a flood' ... 'because we knew nowhere else to go'..."
"I am glad I chose you," she said finally. "I was wondering what I was writing. It's hard to tell sometimes but I believe I have been writing in that language for some weeks now."
I frowned.
"You wrote something you could not read?" That seemed to be what she was telling me, even though it could not be possible. I forgot that she was naked, and beautiful, and bleeding ink, because all that I could focus on was the extraordinary, the impossible truth. "This language has not been spoken aloud in centuries, outside of scholars' rooms at least. I am one of only four people alive who can read it, and two who can speak it with any fluency."
"Perhaps it would be more correct to say that - the words were written through me, rather than by me," she amended, squeezing her fingertips so that three drops of ink-blood splattered onto the cloth - after a moment's shivering they, too, were words.
" - and nothing else to be besides ourselves."
"How poetic," she smiled, "don't you like it?"
"I don't understand."
She shrugged.
"What is there to understand?" She leaned toward me, whispered in a conspiratorial way: "It's magic."
I looked again at her paper-thin skin, and, now that I knew what to expect, the too-dark web of her veins. Yes, I could believe in magic.