Blown away by this. Just landed in Gloucester and Dad presented me with a beautiful bracelet made by Stephanie Piro (in collusion with my editor, Salomé), inspired by Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran.
From right to left, there's the evil eye, the Arg, or Rose Garden Palace, or perhaps the Palace at Sari, the Punjab lasso, a simple mask, a scroll, a scimitar, an elaborate mask, a black heart, a rose, a cat, a coin (daric, perhaps?), a man in a karakul hat (must be the Daroga), the Hand of Fatima, and the shooting star of Shahab. The scroll includes a passage from chapter eight:
I believe I wept as sleep returned to swallow me. I wept for my sad situation, to be born of mountain blood, and a girl at that. I wept for the loss of a mother I barely remembered, and a father more distant than the Russian Empire. I wept for the loss of Shusha and the knowledge he took with him, for all the things I did not understand and had never been taught. I wept for the poems I no longer wrote, and the brothers and sisters I had despised, yet in losing had lost parts of myself.
At one point the song rose to such delicate pathos that I felt as though a cord had been pulled from my privates to the crown of my head. The very fabric of my being burned with flames of grief; the blistering pain of mortality, blissfully contrasting oblivion.
I breathed in the dragon of the dawn, and it ate my soul.
Truly overwhelmed. It's beautiful.
You can check out Stephanie's cartoons online, plus book reviews. If you'd like to see more of her jewelry, she also has a shop on Etsy with a full Phantom's Lair collection.
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