The dowager countess exhaled a noise like gas releasing into an autumn morning from deep beneath a primordial swamp; covering a millennia worth of sunlight and life. She pulled the curtain shut on her carriage with a snap of her wrist and settled into the carriage seat, resting like a toad.
"I abhor the future" she said. "Every day I awaken to the morning and I feel the degree to which my body has wound down over night. Then, after I reconcile my mind to my corporeal fate, I must face the day and THIS nonsense." She waved a hand, indicating the field through which the carriage trundled. On the horizon there were mounds of tents, around which which naked "aristocrats" were clustered. Closer to the road a man was scratching something into a yew tree, but darted under cover as the carriage came into view.
"It's disgusting Vosanya. It's reprehensible. I do not even know the nature of the things I see. Sometimes I see men, sometimes they seem ants. No doubt they think themselves gods. When I was a child, I went to balls. I attended court. There was a regality to our lives. Now look at me. Reduced to a token appearance at that damnable stone athletic abomination to rubber stamp a shipment. It is a tragedy."
Vosanya, the Russian witch looked across at the dowager countess serenely.
"Time will roll through our lives, intersecting an punctuating, enunciating and shining a light on our own decisions and automations. To age is to grow is to be elucidated my lady."
The witch slid down into her seat, against the window. Languid and lithe, with eyes like a cat, she brushed the curtain aside with the back of her hand.
"Those ones outside in the mud are merely seeking a thing which they do not know. They spend their lives waiting and waiting. They wait for you my lady. They wait for age of light. The future is not to be feared or met with disdain my countess. It is to be controlled and to be embraced" purred the witch.
The countess turned her head to look squarely at the ageless Russian, who had come to her family from the icy steppes so long ago. The countess remembered her arrival when the countess herself was but a girl, yet Vosanya appeared not to have aged a day.
"It is a simple thing to say 'Do not fight the future' when there is no cost to the passage of time, Vosanya. When your own existence takes no toll on your experience, what comes next must be a small thing indeed." The countess hissed the gas sound again as she spoke. "I do not know, and I do not ask what drives your aid to my family, but I put my trust in you to see us through these troubled times."
The witch smiled and purred "All will be well, lady."
She glanced out the window. "We have arrived. Your niece and the monster are there, waiting with the pigs and their painting."
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