Yesterday marked the beginging of Color Week (every prompt will have something to do with a color). Here's the one I missed:
Prompt: The man in amaranth robes.
Source: None. Amaranth (found through Google):
Response: The boy sat quivering on the edge of the mattress, wracked by the chills and shivers of illness. But he shied away from the man in the corner, the man dressed all in red - looming over the room in his beaked mask. Lalith brushed the hair back from the boy's forehead, off of the edge of his blank white mask.
Lalith tried to hold her hand still as she touched his shoulder soothingly, tried not to look at the mask - the awful blankness of the mask, the wrongness of its blankness. She found her breathing hitching as she tried not to look at the boy, and tried not to look at the man in the amaranth robes. There was no where she could look safely.
She had never been in the presence of a Plague Master, but she realised that though who had had not been exaggerating. Their presence was like a deep black shadow in the room - the reminder of death, of mortality.
The man stepped closer. "He will be fine. You should go."
The voice raised the hair at the back of Lalith's neck - it was quiet, but powerful, and the full-facial mask distorted the very sound of his voice. The mask made him sound alien, frightening.
Lalith stood abruptly, the unfamiliar fabric of the chiffon sent shivers through her as it brushed against her legs. Though unwilling to leave her charge alone in his trembling condition, she wanted to get away from him. And, she justified, he knew more about medicine than she ever would.
Lalith touched the boy's shoulder. "I have to go check on Ducal."
She wanted to say something like "you will be all right", but her throat closed as she tried. She straightened her ill-fitting mask and turned, again noting the disconcerting sensation of chiffon against her skin where before there had only been brocades and silks.
The Plague Master came forward out of the corner as Lalith passed. His very aura seemed to reach out to her - brush past her, grasp at her. Lalith could not hold back a shudder as the door closed.
Notes: I mentioned on the blog that I wanted to start doing some themed weeks and months and I decided to just kind of jump in right away. This week all the prompts are going to be about colors - whether they be just the color (like "purple") or something a bit more complicated (like "Write about an oddly colored pet chicken"). I will always include a sample of the color. As usual, there are no requirements for word count, genre or format - let the colors flow! (Wow, that was cheesy . . . )
Also, in case you couldn't tell, this is another piece from The Plauge Master (http://www.webook.com/project/The-Plague-Master).
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