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The crows are singing for blood.
As sunlight broke through the canopy of branches from the looming bundle of trees, she listened to the still forest outside the cabin window. On a towering tree with branches that looked more like claws reaching out to snatch you from the darkness, the crows waited. Watching, listening, singing. Their beady eyes pierced through skin and bone, flesh and blood, to unravel the fragile tendons holding your feeble body together. Omens of death, they were. And their song echoed in her ears, asking her to listen — begging her to repeat the familiar words that have haunted her for so long.
In dreams, she sings them. Etched into her marrow, burned into her flesh like a memory she couldn't rub off. It was an old song. It was a sad song. Oriana knew the notes to each lyric. She used to hear her own voice rise and fall, echoing in this cacophonous silence that seemed to be nowhere and everywhere all at once.
But it was nothing more than a dream. Because she never sings. She never will anymore. Even in dreams. Even in nightmares that linger like foreboding ghosts.
The crows knew it and they taunted her.
Outside of the window, they lined perfectly and symmetrically on a single row. Their reflections on the pane stretched in a garish manner, horrific caricatures of the truth. Oriana sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor, her eyes narrowed at the window. She clutched something in her hand, rough and ragged as each sharp edge seemed to sink into her skin. The noise knocked together in her head, echoing in a loop that ricocheted from wall to wall. Oriana tightened her grip, whatever was clutched in her hand dug deeper into smooth, porcelain skin.
You're hoping for the walls to cave in.
A chorus of voices hissed it as one. It rang out within the suffocating room, walls made of sand that could crumble at any minute and a foundation built on bare bones. Oriana wanted to stop them — wanted to drown out the noise — and her hand fumbles as she loosens her grip. The pierced point of the dagger she was holding flew, slashing the air and coming down with an abrupt crash that could be heard all over the earth.
And suddenly, the world shatters into the pieces of prism kaleidoscope. Mirror shards glimmering and dancing in crystalline light.
The door bursts open. A thunder of footsteps rattled the floor. Will Solace almost shatters the hinges as he threw it open, his golden hair shining under the piercing glow from behind him. The daylight started to slip into the cabin floor like a thief with wandering hands sinking into a place where it should not be. His eyes frantically searched the room from wall to wall until he finds her — Oriana, a statuesque mannequin on the wooden floor with her creamy legs folded underneath her body and broken glass glimmering like a blanket of stars around her.
