Reflected sorrows

Chapter 26

Echoes of sunken ships echoed through the air, their ghosts whispering secrets in the wind that cast trenchant blows to the stalks, who simply recoiled and returned, trembling but smiling as they fell into icy stillness that shook them to their clattering bones; they left the apparitions to float in insidious clouds, gathering in a sense of coldness every time the threads were pulled to drag the unwilling puppets of trees and grass to where they should have been. It began with a wail as the choking voice cried out – the desperate begging for mercy from the stone-cold face that held a dagger before the throat of the child. And the figure was tossed away by the sea, landing briefly onto the leaf, a large expanse of a stale tranquillity that felt odd. Perhaps unnerving; perhaps a little warm to the touch; it tore, shattering and splitting. It sent a rift – a rift never prepared, across the calm, and left the cries to echo into the waves of an unfeeling sea. They were tossed aside, and their limbs flailed with the desperation of a child, still wishing that their teddy weren't now torn like it was nothing, with chants of mocking voices that spilled out into the puddle, ever expanding with the rain that fell; They held no power in their feeble hands, and as they fell they became just another – another droplet – another ash – another moment of love gone cold. And the next spirits were spat from the mouth of the beast, the writhing monster with grotesque, ever shifting features; they fell with scattering of water that fell like tears from the sky and into the ocean; just another tossed from the winds of a writhing sea, with ruins of the perished soldiers littered among entrails. She felt those poor souls land before the skin cracked, leaving a ravine, and wondered why the rain felt as if it were but an apparition; time seemed to be a moment and just that, a moment, and yet every droplet was as cruelly slow and agonising as the last; Tick; Tock; Tick; Tock. They cascaded from the winds, a writhing mass of entrails, and dropped onto her scalp, tangled with a mess of vipers that crept around her neck.

The leaves hung like the accused man, head held low in respect and shame, and submitting to the death that loomed ahead no matter what they said to the sun that smiled acrimoniously to their false remorse, mocking them as the guillotine sliced the head off the poor, worthless prisoner among the cruel world, that didn't care about anything but the glint of metal and the glimmer of malice; the leaves held secrets, lashed by the sun and the wind, that mocked the stance of the accused innocent man, leeching out secrets as the leaves withered day by day; day by day as she walked they became more and more furled and cocooned from the world, hiding from the smiles of kindness. Their viridian stems had once stretched out, but the lashes left scars that could not be fixed by a needle and thread, could not clot in the rain, where the scars festered and began to smell stale – like the stench of blood on a poppy field that was etched in stone; you couldn't make them stand as if the world lay below them, they held a grey, violet tinted flame of a flower that seemed sorrowful as it walked to the blade. The sun hit again, biting with sharp, jagged teeth that were held in a jawline that had scattered teeth; a jawline with teeth that pierced the air and the sky. Scabs appeared – they were droplets of water like puppets tossed away, clear and trembling with apprehension as more and more gathered, they were no longer them – simply part of a group – a group and glared at them with an eye cruel and unrelenting; and the blood fell from the leaves, but never dried. It cascaded in a constant stream of crimson; deep crimson with a tint of scarlet screams. That stream began as just that – a line through the landscape, wandering and winding, wavering in its direction as if nothing felt right; not the churning air, not the blinking sun, not the waves that sent sails of perished boats out onto shore in the wind.

She wandered alongside it, watching it be torn and its seams ripped by that same, gloved hand, then seeing as its path glinted in ominous gazes of the moonlight as it corrected its path and headed into the dense, thick mass of entrail-like roots. And she watched as it, like a child, was nurtured. As it leapt with ease over the roots, veering away and cutting itself paths through the dangerous ground. Paths littered with temptations; temptations left ignored and unnoticed. For something lay ahead as the heartbeat of a lover quickened and the river widened, her footsteps a hand guiding it through the forest of flowers that wilted ominously and bloomed in the reflections; they held the small, feeble hand as the fingers wrapped around her thumb as it slowly widened into a lake, lit by the dull light of the shadows. It glinted in the corners of her vision then. She saw it. She saw it. She saw it. She saw its teeth. She saw its eyes. She saw its hair. She saw it. It was a vision of melancholy etched by the puppeteer as if it were simply a puppet recoiling as instructed. But this felt like a dull sense of life. A stale sense of life that should not be; a sense of undead grace.

Before her the flowers recoiled, mouths and teeth quivering in the wind as their tongues searched for the smile they had once held in their cluttered array of anatomy, seeing nothing and weeping, their tears falling on the ground as rain; they seemed to have chains of salty tears forming on their stems, now hunched in shame for something they had not done – something they could see themselves doing. Their tormented soul was held in cupped, begging eyes, their purple-tinted skin growing paler and paler as their tears fell. Failure after failure. Failure after failure. The judge's hammer was simply the moon as it sank, slowly ringing out in the ears of the leaves and the petals. They knew that they had only that; as above, so below. As above, so below. Somehow the phrase rang out in her head, warning her of a looming, ominous danger that held strings over fate, weaving it and etching its truths into the fabric of a world that wouldn't accept them. Those wilted leaves held a dull flame of life, watching the moon fall slowly, their hands cupped with a glint of life that remained in them as the petals withered, begging her in the creases and ravines that stretched out across vast, arid deserts of islands that held the bones of merriment and joy, clattering into graves that fell like the judge's hammer, forgotten; it begged her in the fabric of its once vibrant surface, scratched and bloodied as if guilt had spilled its crimson blood over their hands, the sunrise looming like the ominous call of death. Those stems knew well the glinting cold of metal cradling its skin, creasing it and cackling in the light. Those stems knew the deathly cold that came with the anguish, and the foreboding calls of the judge's hammer as a bell rang out. They begged her with the rain, starting to echo into the abyss of the distance; it wavered but she saw it, the house, scorched but standing. The flowers now saw that a hand plucked from their gaze the life that held them, protecting them from the threat of peace and tranquillity that they did not deserve. And the judge's hammer fell, ash beginning to trickle down into the lakes of crimson gathered on the ground.

A figure loomed in the distance; eyes dull and glimmering with a sense of false life – a smouldering candle that held just enough but nothing more – just a glint of a blade that was held within the flowers, their teeth bared as more ash fell to the floor. The glint of a life filled with anguish and torment, still so dull and yet not quite a blank slate. Those eyes showed her what she had left; it was simply a house, but it was charred at the side. As if the moon, in its lacklustre, merciless hand, had swallowed the homely sense it had once had, devoured it in a fit of insatiable, cold rage, putting out the flame and revealing simply a hollow, lifeless building of four walls. Four walls that were somewhat too small. Somewhat too towering. Somewhat too looming, and yet somewhat too short, and not fit for someone to wander around, weeping and smiling, laughing and gazing at a wedding ring they couldn't remove. It was a hollow subject to a leader that held out a blood-covered dove from a hat, entrails strung out over the rim but still living, barely breathing; it was the smoke that trails endlessly, gathering in a cloud above the forlorn walls that stood, phlegmatic and yet cascading from a height; So weak and yet so imperturbable. The candle lay ahead, devoured by a relentless fog that travelled in tendrils, packs of wolves trying to disguise the tangled mess of life and death, graves torn aside by monsters, rabid and seething, that roamed an earth that despised their flesh; that smiled upon them and yet evaded their kind hand with a sense that the creature before them was grotesque, something to be looked upon in shame. Those graves were surrounded by scattered flowers. They had decayed but almost been preserved, cowering from the ash that fell from their limbs as more graves were cast aside by brutes and more of them were crushed, tossed aside and regrown only to glimmer with life for a moment, before perishing, enveloped with despair.

They framed the foreboding doorway, somewhat welcoming and yet cold, like the face of a human that lay still in the fog, silhouetted as simply a question never answered, a dream never pursued. It creaked, tilted by the jaws of the petals that ached and wailed in agony as their colour began to be sapped – slowly but surely. It dwindled and thrived, the door slamming as the colours became too vivid, and smiling, welcoming her weary, rain-soaked corpse into the strangely empty cavern that she had once called home. Warily, she approached the door, soaked with the crimson tears of the condemned who were truly innocent, angels with no defence. Her clothes were stained, and she cursed the rain, yet felt for it an uncanny sense of sorrow; she despised the tendrils of metal chains around her, with their ashen lilac stems that tilted in the whispers of the wind. And yet something about them had drawn her close as she was walking back through the woods. Something about their guilt was odd. As if she were them and they were her, and she felt their anguish. But she remembered nothing of it; she could recall only the briefest moment of compassion. The briefest moment of colour.

With her eyes set on the creaking door, never once straying no matter the pull of the strings that mocked her limp, inert corpse, she stared into the abyssal shadows that lurked within the hollow bones of a house. This was home, no matter how stale the feeling felt. Home. Home. Home.