She was easy to deceive because she was ruled by each pulsing whim filtered through her veins. They came and went, as many as there were frames in his vault. As he carried her, she nestled against him like a creeping vine, arms wound around his neck. Iris smelled like spring rainfall, thin winding blossoms peeking from between fresh, wet earth. There was only a small shift in her, a contained wriggle of excitement, when he had landed on a solution. The promise of purpose was understandably compelling. It was only reasonable that she should be enthused.<br/><br/>That anticipation only grew when he took her into the vault. She felt immediately privileged. This was a space only her master attended; she could understand that much. It was a bit like being given the keys to a very small kingdom. She thought it must mean he had faith her in capacity to do well for him. She was not wrong; she was simply misunderstanding the meaning.<br/><br/>He was flippant with his directive. A simple cleaning job in a precious space. It might as well have reformed her world. She turned on her bare feet, a strange and simple looking creature in this hall of baroque beauties. Iris looked almost pastoral, in Naella’s oversized smock and her sun-gold skin missing the sunlight in this artificial space. A pretty contrast, saints in their sins presiding from ornate frames.<br/><br/>“I’ll do my best, Master.” She was chipper, big black eyes bigger as she absorbed the details of the room. She had not been mindful of his approach.<br/><br/>His fingers in her hair seemed like a kindness, at first. Like he was going to pet the strands and tell her she’d be well suited to caring for his private trove. Instead, the digits glided through and evaded the caress, curling to wind around her chlorophyll-rich tresses so that she was weaponized against herself. A yank that sent little daggers through the tender skin on her scalp. She was a flurry of petals on a nonexistent breeze, flung through the air until she crashed into a chest with more gravity than the weight she seemed to possess. The sound of the chest shattering was a newly familiar music to her ears.<br/><br/>Little cuts collided and kissed her as she fell, as if she should be flecked in honied dew drops when she sprawled for him on the floor. Littered with glittering treasures and sharper fragments, Iris would have been a believable find in a dragon’s hoard. Some magical leftover, waiting for a hero to claim her. It should have been wrong to bloody her that way. She winced up at him.<br/><br/>“Master?” she stuttered, his verdict hammering against her ears without full comprehension. She couldn’t do anything other than exist by his judgement, of course, but it wasn’t as if the Nymph was blind to cause and effect. Her black-pit stare swam with something that seemed, for a brief moment, to consider a sense of betrayal. Was it fair to be mocked when he had thrown her into this disarray? There had been nothing in her to resist it, nor any compulsion in his blood to have her do so.<br/><br/>The confusion was enough to frighten her, so she flinched when he crouched beside her. Eyes squeezed shut, like she was guilty and could not look at him, she shrank into the pile of spilled gilding at his rebuke. A series of faces shifted across her features, changing each time he blinked, like she was searching for a face he might accept over her own. Instead, he was given a brief taste of his many servants and office employees, his family women and boys he’d looked at twice in his youth, all cowering away from his disdain. “I’m sorry, Master. I’m very clumsy,” she gasped, when her face had become her own again. It was Iris speaking, but Manon too; an endearing bid for his favor. He had liked it well, after all, when Manon had performed poorly.<br/><br/>Iris squinted at him with one dark eye. “What can I do to amend?” she asked. As always, the Nymph was self-destructively willing to throw herself toward his whims. Anything to please him.