Reflected sorrows

Chapter 39

The letter held a power only spirits could conjure, tossing over her bones that rattled with ancient malady a string, mauled by hellhounds that ruled by fire and flames, matches that lit then fell among the pages – it was weak and yet daunting when it danced before her, the crows ravenously staring into the abyssal gaze of the contorting limbs – they brushed her skin and the fingers, simply entrails from a wound, moulded over the keys and left more crows to shiver and flee under swift wings. They made the beginnings of an incessant melody that could stay or leave, and yet always lingered at the end of each day; it was the monotonous dance of those who suffer anguish and despair yet still live – the tongue that seemed a dance of ash and bones. The tongue of the devil who seeks the flames for friends and acquaintances, and yet never quite burns the candle out. That shadow of a string was cruelly slow, a phantom of suffering with those footsteps that linger in your mind, forever pacing frantically despite the typing of keys; a dull rhythm where the uncontrollable dread would forever lie, simply a vile melody that dies away, then pulses beneath the skin of the crow, for the devil's tongue would never run a candle dry with all its burning rage; those words weren't hers but the crows had devoured every scrap of control the strings held, and all she could do was roll forward the boulder that would fall upon her; just watch the time tick away in a vile melody. No more of that smile, no more despair as the letters piled up – for the phantom drifted still on through the dark and the silence, always desperately clutching her skin for clues of the truth. For the silence stole it away – the raven's wing could toss a feather over the silk and the string would simply mock its desperation; it could waver as much as it liked, rocking her in the cradle as if she were a sinner who could not flee the tongue of that insatiable beast. And yet still her hands were contorted, rolling onto their back and twisting into false shapes of life from above, grotesque silhouettes of life from above; and yet still the darkness wavered in her mind like that veil of grief, inconstant and sinister. It flickered with the wing of the crow as it headed toward the carcasses deep in the ground. That pulse beat beneath the skin, a vile rhythm of insatiable malice.

The flame begins more to waver, intermittently glowering insidiously into the dark and then blowing out, but the embers relight, and all falls silent – silent as the night can be dreary when hope is merely choked out of the air and the streams of anguish that lie buried. Her typing slowed and she gazed for the first time upon the keys. They had no letters. Or perhaps she was seeing things through the eyes of an insomniac that lay only in her mind, with joy in every sound. Hope in every whisper. The darkness tired – it slowed until the mere flame pulsed rapidly in the sky, and it seemed to glow and writhe, arms from the graves spotted and speckled with pores and welts that created a vile painting of terror – though the great veil held silence, perhaps the sunrise brought a cascading dagger through the disdain for smiles of human life. And perhaps the crow watched, its feathers glinting with the malice-ridden calls of a dove as it reaches out a heavenly, pure hand toward you. She found her hands trembling, and stumbled back, hearing the intermittent glass shatter and the tendrils of shadow chaining her to the noose fall to the ground in ashes toward the ceiling; she stood up still for a moment, but the world was but a moment, was it not? Every second was but an accessory on a dagger, a smile lasting for a blink before the crow's wing fell and rose and the book was closed – closed before the smile flashed before the shattered ashes over the ground. But within that was a scream as they landed, the darkness leaving no light to hold out its gracious hand and pull out of the ocean of crimson a single thread of hope in the tapestry of intricate feathers. It was the closing of a great book, the feather caught within the pages simply a mark, a trace of how life once lingered as a smile, but now only as a feather in a graveyard – the flame had once only laboured to further pulse, no longer just beneath the skin of a single wing; but a flame only smoulders for so long, doesn't it? Even the flame of the devil, with its hellhound tongue lapping up carcasses of good souls, husks to dry out in the sun as it burned, could not halt the growling as the beast was struck, and the darkness descended over the oppressive light. Ink lay invisible, swirling in a mass of writhing tendrils that formed no tangible word; she felt the broken glass of the dam as it was placed before the water, and the raven halted to rest, the wing placed down for the last time.