Reflected sorrows

Chapter 20

Lucille returned in fear after gazing into the sky, wondering about Celeste and hoping that, deep down, her beliefs may rescue her beloved fried from the jaws of her deathly grief – she leapt back with a racing heart. It was a drum contorting her limbs as she ran after the shadows that dragged Celeste away; her footsteps were the dreary thumping of breaths out of a dying friend; it was a bittersweet rhythm of unrelenting hope. One tick of a clock and the shadows were further from her aching bones, suddenly coated in a layer of oily, slick rain that sealed her fate. She tried to run. She called her friend's name. Her footsteps tormented her – her own footsteps haunted every time Celeste's limp corpse brushed against the ground. They lurked around the corner of each agonising scrape of metal against metal. Ash against ash. Metal against metal. She heard it at intermittent calls. The herald of the doom that was ahead, mocking her frail efforts to just dragged her legs out of the slick concrete mask that the rain placed her inside as she writhed against her chains – but she was as helpless as the disciple himself – stumbling like the mind of a madman as he rambled on with simply white walls surrounding him – stumbling only to be brought up by a rough hand; she could barely see their figures as they fled further into the fog. This hand... She didn't know the brush of its skin against hers; it was like the rope of the poor prisoner, unable to escape the rough strings of a cruel puppeteer. She didn't know what that was meant to show her. But the strings willed her to push on – it was a cold voice. A voice of a stern and monotonous eye. One having seen her and barely looked upon her terrified face before glaring and taking out a dagger. It was a stale voice – one once kind. One once so warm and yet now as icy and trenchant as the dagger of ice plunged into the heart of an innocent soul, now fallen on the battlefield with its entrails simply the shadows under the trees, or the bark on the branches. Or perhaps that was still-warm blood. That voice was rasping. It pulled her forward – Celeste was obscured by the veil, and she simply had to... To chase it like a prisoner the cold bars or a tortured hound the voice of its owner.

Cracks appeared. One. By... One. They inched closer. They etched horrors into her mind and filled her mind with the steel bars of sacrifice that were only rewarded with torment that rang out through the woods and yet was never heard. The bone of her skull was bathed in anguish. She heard the silent screams of all the souls within the labyrinthine steel keys of leafless pines that stretched out like the hands of prayer to a sun that wasn't listening. They echoed in her mind. They cured and yet left some forsaken with guilt. And like the entrails of the soldier, with the dagger plunged into his heart, they cracks spread over her vision, the frayed rope tangled around her feet as she tried to calm herself and catch her breath – but the figures were shadows in the darkness. Lights among a sea of flames. Lanterns among false kindness. Their skeletons were cruelly far away from her – they were nothing but a child's drawing on a piece of paper that had been long forgotten, and her feet had the shackles of a murderer chaining them down; she could stumble no more, but the weight of a forest lay upon her back as she trembled and wept rain from her hands as it dripped like an incessant tap. It was nothing but a lantern in her hand. Nothing but a candle in the cold fires of the underworld. Celeste was dragged away into an oblivion that she could not hope to leave if she entered. And what could she have done – a magician had simply played a cruel hand and cackled. The dove was back in the hat, and she could do nothing but pour over the thoughts that flooded hope from her mind. She had failed. The shadows were nothing but a spot on the horizon. She remembered with a heartrending ache in her chest the necklace that Celeste had placed over her neck. It somehow felt as if that hadn't been her – no one could work. They had all perished under the same hand. Everyone. The cackling of souls was wicked but deafening – she supposed it had drowned out the screams. Celeste had been there. She could tell herself again and again, but something felt off.

Scrambling to her senses, Celeste heard the gate among the relentless calls of the magician's hand, the threads of fate woven in golden silk between his cruel fingers as the sun rose crimson in the sky. They trembled as the hand of the doll would, its silk-sewn buttons straining to etch into the mind of stitched wool an image of what it had once been, as the doll reached for the child who picked it up and tossed it carelessly onto the ground. The anguish was a melody that the stitches knew well – it was an unrelenting lullaby of cruel love. Hot and cold. The scolding before the lukewarm hug. And the hand would eventually flail and die, but now it was a blanket over the crooked twigs that wove the fates, it contorted their view and yet the fingers had control. A single thread drifted away in the wind; the single thread tossed away like the trembling doll, carelessly loved. Menacingly adored. She turned now to the gate, behind her as she walked toward the swing once again; It swung with a melody she did not know, and a rhythm she could not keep up with and yet could easily chase. It somehow unnerved her; the rhythmic movement: the rocking of a baby's crib, with tears cried in the dark hushed by nothing, relentlessly wailing into the night as the lullaby played softly in the wind. The baby fell. The pin dropped. It clattered to the ground like the bones of memories long forgotten and many times recalled. And the swing suddenly fell silent.