deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: ‘The Prince speaks only in flowers’ is a rumor with many possible mean
deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: ‘The Prince speaks only in flowers’ is a rumor with many possible meanings. It took meeting him in person to finally understand the truth. Among her suitors, the Prince spoke only in flowers. It was an unnecessarily sentimental language, in her opinion, romance by way of affectation. You could make a language out of anything - mouth noises, hand gestures, reeds pressed into clay - and as lexemes went, flowers were both inefficient and showily pretentious. You could buy books claiming to decode the secret language of flowers, to uncover the meaning that they held - but if the books were so readily available, it wasn’t really all that much of a secret to begin with, was it? And besides, it got more than a little dull, the dozens of largely redundant floral synonyms for “love” and “affection”, and no way at all to discuss things like “careers” or “what would you like for dinner tonight?”—The Viscount, on the other hand, spoke only in rumors, and thus held an air of mystique about him. He could coyly say things like, “The Prince speaks only in flowers,” and she would be rapt pondering the possibilities. Perhaps he had been cursed (blessed?) by a faerie to have flowers spilling from his lips whenever he spoke, unfolding hesitantly to fall beneath his feet, petals littering the ground where he walked. Or perhaps he maintained rows of hothouses where he cultivated the tens of thousands of flowers necessary for conversation, walking between the fragrant, variegated blooms and carefully snipping off the exact flower that conveyed his delicate meaning, marshalling them in bunches and arranging them in bouquets and nosegays with the utmost precision, a ribbon woven between the stems to convey a meaning of its own, so that his every utterance was a meticulously considered work of art. Or perhaps he was simply very small, and very shy, and would only dare say anything after he had safely ensconced himself within the petals of a flower, hidden from the world. That was the fun thing about rumors. The wild speculation. —But most vexing to her was the Duke, who she saw often and in person. He would stare at her impudently, his lips curling up between his fine mustache, and say over and over the most outrageous things such as “I love you,” and hours after he was gone she would still be pacing her room, throwing herself down on her bed in frustration, trying to decipher just what it was he had meant by that. -- source link
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