HALCYON [Minamoto Teru]

33

Time had slipped through her fingers like the trinkling specks and grains of sand washed up upon a lone shore, in which the hourglass shattered, discontinuing each re-lapse of time.

A witch, desolate and all, picked up the shard, allowing herself to cut the tips of her fingers, staring back at the pooling reflective liquid at her very feet, dragging along the train of her kimono behind, allowing it to lead like a trail of murder.

A sense of breathlessness enticed the air with a forlorn score of broken melodies humming and swaying with the wind. The sound of each shattered shard picked itself up, piece by piece, slowly reassembling itself on an alignment of a golden platter, a soul in which had already been sold to the dead.

Desperately, the witch craved and yearned for a lifetime in which she was the one who no longer had to fix things, but rather be the one who was fixed.

Countless times, too fearful to live, yet not ready to fall into the bore of death.

The stray wore the halo of an angel around her neck like the collar of a house pet, yet no place to return to not quite like home.

"I miss her."

The words fell out of her cherry lips like a slow mutter of a child whom had come to realize the truths of life were not as beautiful as she had expected, and slowly the figures around her twitched and contorted into everything she'd ever been told, scorching the dreams out of her mind and into the dust of ash.

".. Was that your wish, Nora? To see your mother again?"

"Yes." No.

Nora lied, cracking a smile as she tossed her yen into the well.

Dwelling from the manifestations of the night, created by the hatred of her own conscious, Nora stood up, dusting non existent air off of the fabric of her clothes, allowing herself to sigh.

Akane raised a brow and looked at his upperclassman.

Now the woman was but a distant memory etched into Nora's former days of living. A sire to her own bruised heart left to rot away and trudge, rolling down into a spiraling abyss in which the void swallowed whole without an ounce of remorse left to spare, for in the end, it swallowed itself along with it.

And now the loving of a human heart was just another to be added on her list of sins.

"Senpai? Don't tell me you found something.."

Nora held herself steady for a moment before shaking her head. "No. Just .. thinking. You've grown more caring of me. How odd. It reminds me of when you had gotten hypnotized by that magic love tree. What an awful day."