Reflected sorrows

Chapter 30

She saw the ash begin to tremble and perish – the ash was bone-white, the flames glinting still in the raindrops that landed upon the apparition of what had once been; a life bare but still full of something. No matter whether it was just ink on a page, scrawled in a fever and regretted with intense throbbing anguish after a moment of despair – no matter whether or not the ashes fell only to her. But they saw the mansion – they had never spoke of it but maybe it was that one looming figure, contorting all it saw and remaining a mystery, never once blinking to let its puppets escape its tight grasp that never faltered; they had never said- perhaps it was the ash that was forgotten, a scratch that no one knew was there until the sickness took root. But the ghost of those leaves – it felt hollow, perhaps hollower than the thin scrapings of life had ever appeared as they reached for her, their bark shrivelled and their eyes certain, with a dagger pierced through the centre; it felt hollow, despite the yellow-tinted rain that fell upon its branches. It was but a simple metaphor – they were still there. They trembled at the sight, quailing and fleeing her vile complexion. She gazed into a pool of yellow tainted blood that trickled from the sky, watching the hairs on her head wisp away into the wind, becoming but a memory of fleeting joy – of a time when the ash formed a figure that had a face unblemished by the two marks that could snap a neck in a moment. The rain was perhaps a cyst pooling blood until the crimson was hands with grotesque claws scraping at the walls. It throbbed, scratches appearing on the moon, but the rain did not yet pour. Until a murmur of malady was etched into the sky, whispering a tear in the dark. And the first claw emerged, enveloping the skin, once perfected by the art of bills paid and hands clean, in a haze of anguish, anguish that plagued the poor soul in agony that tormented them through sleepless nights. All from that one single trickle of water. It was a river that trailed through. A path that emerged, lit by dull branches that led the way cruelly but kindly.

She looked ahead, the cyst glowering in the sky with untold menace; a mace looming over a weary soul's head; a moment of dread as the guillotine drops. It had a tear in the seams of its skin, just like the leaves that had once fallen down, down and down until their ashes littered the ground. The tendrils of malady stretched out their withered arms to claim their flesh, so desperate, and yet more peered out from the eternal anguish that lingered within that pustule, ink floating around – it was unsent letters – it was the blood of the innocent used to write an ominous note. They crawled out in a stitched and sewn pace, flickering and imperfect as the tendrils crawled, the rain echoing through her mind, the puss falling in a single drop, mottled with a single drop of ink. It travelled down her arm, her eyes observing it as its corpse began to perish, finally falling to its peril. Her gaze began to see all the corpses falling, their entrails of ink and blood merged with the rat's bite that lingered in infected flesh – and her gaze travelled up, rising as the rain fell down onto the cold, emotionless face of stone – concrete that mocked the dead and perishing eyes, turning to a shattered urn empty of the joy. Lifeless and inert yet glinting with menace; The moon saw it all, its puppet falling and cascading in a pile of limp limbs coated in a haze of deathly dread. She felt its grasp scattered over her skin in leeches that sapped from her the strength she had once had; she gazed upon its withered craters for a while. Something about it looked at her too, saw her. Saw her gaze. A curious stare held by the fervent haze of intermittent life – a flame once so bright now dull and suffocating – it stared back, mournful and merciless. That stare held her gaze for a while, as if the stars were glimmering shards of hope, yet dreams bleakly shattered. They held the mark. The mark of that stare that gleamed with menacing benevolence. It poured upon the world dread and anguish, a looming shadow of hope; and yet here it framed the one thing she dreaded yet despised. That towering mass of bricks, scarlet seeping out from the windows where they'd set free the ink to torment her.

And the path was almost clear to her eyes, through the veil of a candle that choked her with its dull light, lingering too long and relentlessly flickering, leading hope to waver, until it perished. And the soul shattered. It was just a path, and yet that image flashed in her mind, never leaving. That path was simply a trickling river of blood leading to that crimson tinge, the forbidding claws that scrape at the walls until they can flee their eternal prison that breathes- that cackles, and that mocks them. She knew the necklace was a curse – that perhaps it was a gloomy, ill-lit path that had no smiles for her to see as she awoke; but those candles were there, in the windows, surrounded in a frame of rotten, decayed wood, etched into the stone with the crude hand of a child. With childish joy. With childish love. With childish hope, that in the end will always perish and die. And the candle was framed in that ominous moonlight – a bait. She knew it was there to lead her toward the flowers, toward that dirt above her head. But that candle was a promise. A crooked hand seemed to emerge once again from the shadows, scratching at the door until it was tossed aside, seemingly a feather in a world full of lifeless machines. It was a tarot card that warned her, but the wood that ignited the flame that licked the stone with its demonic tongue, devouring the place in flame. The crooked hand tightened around her throat, and she felt the shards dig deep into her flesh, the teeth of a rat as it claims yet another poor soul; she trembled. The door was tossed aside. All she needed to do was enter.