#pearls and jewels sewn into her dress with pretty lace and silk

[harrenhals]

Summerhall Solstice: A Song of Ice & Fire + gothic horror

Jeyne Poole & Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber

Based on the story of Bluebeard, The Bloody Chamber tells the story of a teenage girl who marries an older, wealthy man. She soon realizes the full extent of his perverse and murderous tendencies when she discovers the bodies of his previous wives, presented in gruesome ways. In both the original folktale and The Bloody Chamber, keys are a reoccurring motif. In both stories, the girl drops the key to the chamber in a pool of blood which cannot be washed out. 

“So, for the opera, I wore a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts. [...] the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels around her throat, bright as arterial blood.” - The Bloody Chamber

“The bride was shivering too. They had dressed her in white lambswool trimmed with lace. Her sleeves and bodice were sewn with freshwater pearls, and on her feet were white doeskin slippers—pretty, but not warm. Her face was pale, bloodless.” - The Prince of Winterfell, A Dance with Dragons

“Keys of all kinds - huge ancient things of black iron; others slender, delicate, almost baroque; wafer-thin Yale keys for safes and boxes.” - The Bloody Chamber

“Even if he found some secret way out, Theon would not have trusted it. He had not forgotten Kyra and her keys.” - The Turncloak, A Dance with Dragons

“There was a Marquis, once, who used to hunt young girls on the mainland; he hunted them with dogs, as though they were foxes.” - The Bloody Chamber

“Ben Bones, who liked the dogs better than their master, had told Reek they were all named after peasant girls Ramsay had hunted, raped, and killed back when he'd still been a bastard, running with the first Reek. ‘The ones who give him good sport, anywise. The ones who weep and beg and won't run don't get to come back as bitches.’“ - Reek III, A Dance with Dragons