Lady Amberdine's Pendulum

3ww prompt: Cryptic, Flash, MalignPendulums in Bombay NY by marisol diaz

"I have all the time in the world...just because this is problematic now doesn't mean it will be later," said the mouse in a most serious and unabashed manner.

"Maybe when that body that houses your spirit is mature enough to reciprocate, you will come around and see me for the first time as what I really am."

Young Lady Amberdine looked off into the distance, blithely ignoring the mouse. Mice seemed to be everywhere around the kitchen these days, especially around the hearth. Maybe its getting too cold outside. Her eyes only trailed back to the little mouse because she noticed his cryptic little hand gestures. Amberdine excused the distracting little mouse and his peculiar movements for some sort of self-cleaning ritual and deliberately returned to her daily preoccupations. In her reverie she thought, 'Maybe my animal is a whiptail lizard- a whole civilization of females that reproduce by cloning themselves and no males are necessary or existent?'

Early that morning, Amberdine came face to face with her toad-of-a-bully cousin, a boy for whom the words 'insolent' and 'crude' must have been invented for. He and his snake-eyed mother, Amberdine's aunt Evol, were visiting for the weekend. In what seemed like the only dose of energy this boy had all morning, he wickedly pulled at Amberdine's hair undoing the complex arrangement her ladies had just spent hours on. Whipping across the table he also stole her precious locket. The locket had been sitting on the table where Amberdine had toiled cutting small images to place inside.

However, the locket had been returned to her bedside. How was a mystery to Amberdine since she had purposefully locked her bedroom door after the fiend had attacked her. She tied the key around a ribbon that she hung under her dress, around her waist. The last time she checked it was still there.

Of Course, Amberdine would have no way of knowing it had been the little mouse who had rescued the locket. The little mouse saw the boy-toad running out to the field with the locket where he attempted to burn and bury it. Amberdine also had no way of knowing that her salacious cousin was deathly afraid of mice. As the boy-toad bent down to the ground to dig up a hole of dirt, the little mouse came storming towards the boy's reptilian nose with the sheer bravery of a nobleman and he bore his teeth down onto a wad of the boy's flesh.

All young Lady Amberdine knew was that someone had entered her locked room to return the locket. She deduced that her boy-toad cousin was simply too stupid to figure out how to enter her locked room. Instead, she was convinced it must have been her Aunt Evol. This aunt had such a malign ghastly look of sour death to her contorted features that it took Amberdine some courage to face her about the locket.
Sure enough Aunt Evol was shocked and aghast with the accusations about her innocently demure, weak and wounded son. In a flash, she threatened to banish Amberdine from the family inheritance, but not before she turned her into the ANIMAL she truly was. This of course is how we get to why Amberdine was day-dreaming about whiptail lizards and how of course the little mouse (who really wasn't a mouse at all) came to be a mouse with a collection of pendulums.

You see, not really being a mouse, the tiny critter was deeply in love with Amberdine. He knew that his 10th pendulum would break Aunt Evol's spell on his unfortunate life. And if you didn't already know, pendulum's became a symbol of the time he had to wait to profess his love to Amberdine, only four more to go.