Reflected sorrows

Chapter 34

They were hollow moons staring into a stake, unlit with ominous darkness, ancient and lurking within the darkness that never halts to consider why; why perhaps that skin is so withered, and the shadows of echoing abyss so thin and nimble; the wood crackles with foreboding as the wind blows through, the shadows engulfing her slowly retreating like friends from the accused, their footsteps simply the howling of a thousand wolves as they wait for that hollow moon to engulf their every waking thought – waiting. In those eyes the parched souls quiver with restless paranoia, the darkness speaking in mottled tones of regret. How could such eyes be kind, when the ominous light shed upon them was as sparse a memory as just a candle, out only to leave smoke that trailed across the floor when the ground when the smouldering life was extinguished and perished with a final sigh, thinly spread with life that flourished and died; then lay next to it that flame that burns bright through all the torment and insidious glares – even when those glares sear anguish through their tortured flesh, burnt and ashen like the souls of those piercing shards that were shed now across the figures, as if mocking her. That flesh was ashen yet the life inside was but that flame that is ever wavering – it took steps toward her, the ominous, foreboding cackling cruelly sinister as the light loomed closer, seeming to fly further up, her ropes blackening – but they held in their hand something indistinguishable - a flame only beside the trailing smoke. As if she could not breathe their eyes began to leech out something within her. A memory, a scattering of ash concealed within the relentless, dull light of the moon – simply a moment shattered and buried within the ground, ready to be unearthed like undead sorrows that burn, regret lingering long after the shovel is cast to the ground. Long after the bodies turn to ash before the flailing soldier, and the gunfire relentlessly echoes, crackling within the cursed light they trailed beside them. Slowly emerging toward her cowering soul. Fear was a heartbeat. A loss she now held as a prize. As agonising, piercing dread.

Oh, but that moonlight was shards. They were simply frail strings caught up in that web of eternal torment; those memories of love now held within the flame. They cursed her and tossed embers upon the wood; the gunfire seemed to become a flurry of heartbeats, beating in unison yet with one emerging before recoiling back, a beacon of comparison and mockery – those shards of torn love like paper in the ground, piercing her with the light. But just as the murderer creeps through the shadows, eyes darting as the intensity boils. And churns. And churns and churns and writhes in fierce flame before the knife is cast deep into the corpse; regret lingers; it is a strange day when glitter is anguish, and that light which you now detest once was full of warmth; once was full of those footsteps, a flurry of them, in a benevolent melody; now it is simply full of oppressive grief, that ash scattered, tossed like cares and dreams onto the ceiling and tossed away, the carcass of a great beast devoured like the embers of wood that crackle with that foreboding light. Closer. Closer. That candle burning down; closer. Closer. Closer. Her hand cast onto the light and clinging to it yet trying so desperately to flee; to run from something she herself had brought into being. That wailing as the child is placed so gently onto the ground then so carelessly fled from. It scorched her hand as it was brought closer. It was an offer of such vile solace, such insidious truths that her mind could never see, caught in a world of half-truths and whimsical fantasy. That ember creeping closer to the crackling of the shadows, and they burnt with blue flame, flickering and intermittently wavering; not phlegmatic like the skin that is simply ash and bone ground up and tossed to the devil, returned in form of temporary joy before the hungry flame emerges, placed into her hand like the wax that mockingly flows, freezing like time. That vile solace; a disgrace and a grotesque figure; ugly, putrid and thin. Those footsteps, full of kindness derived from only the purest, yet most cruel source of glimmering shards of moonlight.

Closer. Closer it loomed, closer! Nearer, nearer it drew, nearer! Nearer to her flesh that trembled, a viper alive with graceless malice and rage. They bore the scars of that mournful moon, the rhythmic ticking of the clock as the chariot of life flees across the sky; its footsteps just the crackling of the darkness. That moment as they vanished, leaving the phantom of a flame to burn, her skin burning with the blade of palpable grief. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. The perishing light began to flicker and fade, before the surroundings seemed gloomy but for that solace, that burdened her with peace.