Reflected sorrows

Chapter 18

Trees danced around her like cultists caught in a trap – stuck doing a ritual that they knew would do nothing but spill blood relentlessly onto the ground; spilling like rivers from their source, winding through the landscape in which she walked, moulding it into a sea of crimson-tainted remorse that fell onto nothing but a tortured soul who had come to escape. The path was bathed in scarlet. Pools of it lay on the ground, her footsteps echoing through their troubled waters like ripples of grief. And among the tendrils – the arms reaching for a smile to bring them out of their melancholy, looming above before crashing down – as above, so below. She was simply controlled by a twisted puppet master as she wandered among the souls who couldn't leave; held now in the bars of a cage that glinted despite being wood, with cracked skin that bled, and trapped by the roots, shackles around her legs dragging her toward the flames that grew up the metal bars, clinging on and never falling like the hopeful trees, following the sun and enduring all that it put in their way; between them and their goal; as above, so below. The moss was the dust on the windowsill – simply something to make their poor tormented prisoner cough and splutter; a prisoner promised escape by a false light that never emerged to greet them. A prisoner who would only perish before the cold, sinister hands of the one the seeked to find and praise; one hung by a rope and gazed upon by the cold stare of the one the trees worshipped, feeling the grip of the rope as their last spluttering breath was choked out, and the light consumed them in such sinister slow steps that they saw it for only a moment – so I suppose they got what they wanted. As above, so below. She grasped the bars, seeing their viridian glares twisted by a lens of hope that hid despair behind clouds of smoke; clouds of smoke that trailed off into the sky and bled into the night in tendrils of bare bones, pale with the incessant cloud that covered the horizon like a foreboding storm, a blanket of warmth – cold warmth.

Her footsteps were simply a rhythm choked out by a metronome as it fell from the mantelpiece, halting as she gazed into the crimson pools gathering beneath her feet, around her like a curse. They knew her every word as she said it; they knew her every thought; their entrails of fog that rolled in were the curse she knew were there, but who blinded her to every word spoken to bring her away from that small light; a true light – one she yearned for yet looked upon with disdain. She had no bars to clutch and no winds to wake her from wretched sleep. Wretched, accursed sleep wracked with nightmares lurking around every lucid corner. She began to pace, her lassitude simply making her beg more and more for the cold, stone-like bed sheets for her to sleep on – the warmth of the eerie dripping of a tap. Drip. Drip. Drip – though incessant. Though a little unrelenting and a little stale and despondent. Drip. Drip. Drip – it was the distant gaze of a loved one as they perished; somehow a little warming to such a woebegone soul, caught amidst towering wooden bars and cackling rainfall, caught amidst all the cruel, whispering winds that called her name and again and again told her that same phrase that they'd spoken every step she'd taken through this place. The same phrase she felt crawling beneath her skin like a viper she knew would bite her, teeth sinking in further and further. As above, so below. As above so below. The chants of malady spoken again by the trees that seeked the sun despite the weeds around them catching her in shackles and the tendrils of vines climbing up their trunks, suffocating the phlegmatic branches and devouring every scrap of wood they held with insatiable hunger – ravenous and unrelenting. They kept her trapped; why did they seem as if they were singed, and as if their vines were falling back such a height that they lay dry and weary at the bottom of the climb they'd spent so much time on?

She took tentative steps toward the gate as she approached it now, trembling as her skin made insufferable contact with the metal, first brushing then holding itself against it. She tossed the gate open, winds blowing like the breaths of a beast as the cavernous mouth opened. They made her shudder – she'd never been sure why. Perhaps she just was shivering; malady was no shame. She could just state she was ill, wracked with fevers and madness, unsure what she was. But these winds spoke. These winds spoke to her in tongues uncanny to her restless mind; one step and there it was again – as above, so below. She heard the beast whimper behind her as the gate closed. She could've sworn that she'd seen a silhouette just like the one in the painting; the hair a crow's nest upon her head with knots like a spider's silk in every strand. Every feature like a half-burnt candle and covered in ink. She looked on. The house. It... It... It... The wind whispered those same words to her once again, for the last time: as above, so below.