Reflected sorrows

Chapter 35

All at once cold breaths swept through the forest, her lungs pierced by the daggers of ice and her tongue bleeding from the blow as soon as she stepped foot toward a distance that held nothing but that single wall, accompanied by stitches and rhymes carried in the breaths of satiated malice; want for more lingered in the wind, and yet the thorns were hollow, fleeing from that cruel, oppressive eye. But they saw her, and she was alien, no longer held by that gaze; her soul wandered and yet just behind she saw the trace of a string of a puppet tossed aside by the child as they take the hand of their parent, leaving their world to shatter into fragmented pieces of feigned hope – and once again the door closed, the breaths of ragged silk clutching her chest and coughing and spluttering alongside her, yet pushing her farther into its deep confines was the forest, recoiling at every thorn dragged through her delicate, pale skin as fragmented and wispy as the innocence of a child once so joyous, now solemn, downcast, and gazing in through a window as their toys were trodden on by the ghosts; that was her skin, merely a costume worn by an actor like a smile as cruel whispers blow down the play, satiated now by grief. And satiated by that one drop, it tore down with cold winds made of choking silk the plaything it had cherished; for that was nothing but a fickle, useless figment of a puppet's imagination, seams simply needles fixing the gaping tears in sanity – they tried to halt the trees from falling but that innocent blood had still been spilt, cruelly pouring simply as roses tossed onto the stage, laced with thorns piercing and sinister as they fell lightly, treading delicately and gracefully as feathers one step at a time. They trod lightly yet it was blood that fell, not rivers of praise and thriving kindness, crows picked at their feathers turning them to the beaks of crows tearing limb from limb, and leaving the blood to pour relentlessly, praise laced with venom and cruelty. The curtains shifted, tendrils of shadow stirring like a beast with the pure white gaze of a child, turning to the ground. Turning to her. Turning to her gaze, constantly downcast and ashen, as if an urn shattered upon her complexion had spread decay.

They were simply the seams and the flaws in a flawless painting, thunder crashing down in the distance with sinister gazes cast towards her as the wind blew further, etchings of a flame emerging from the sudden applause of a phantom crowd. The crow's feathers began to fall upon an empty stage, hollow apparitions bowing their heads as they reached for something more as the audience lay unquestioning, never once blinking to see that the branches bowed to something that was not there, a sinister force that lay insidious eyes upon all. What the daggers fled from. They seemed to now not hear it. Not feel its loving whisper. But the devil's tongue searched, and it found; a heat began to echo from the chasms of the labyrinthine forest, not the mist that obscured the door in white veils; it left a taste of kindness in her mouth, a fatal curiosity that echoes into the dark. Those flames were but a feather of a raven, fallen from the sky among the doves' petals that were stained red with the blood of the innocent and the good. They were invisible among the black veil, not deterred by the thorns that laced that praise for the fallen stage; but the veils began to shred, reaching for her as they turned their heads in desperation to that which had once disgusted them. That which had once made them squirm in disdain now, in this blinding light, made a smile emerge from the murky fog of smoke; those embers were cradled in every strike of thunder upon the ground – a force of evil undeterred by petals with a stem of thorns, for the devil's tongue holds a shadow, one so small in the eyes of the child, yet why one so looming in the eyes of the desperate shadow of once-blooming life? Among the fallen stage lay petals of angels' skin that fed the ravenous beast, insatiable beasts roaring within as the flames brushed through the forest; they had grown, fed by the blood of the good that dripped from the fangs of those tendrils that reached out, desperation in the glint of ashes choked up into the sky. Yet more blood to satiate that beast that tore at the set with rabid and wild eyes, phantoms of life flashing for moments in the whirling storm of fury.