Beneath the Snow
Only one lesson remained barred from the curriculum at Burnell Academy: death cannot be conquered.
Whether such an impudent claim held true remained the students' task to uncover.
And so they tried.
Amidst labs and lectures, hypotheses and experiments, students tinkered. Some reveled in the triumph of discovery. Others writhed beneath the weight of their own hamartia, bound and twisted up in webs of demise. All sought glory, to be a name permanently stamped onto the dusty pages of forgotten history texts—forever masquerading behind the false pretense of enlightenment.
But death comes for everyone, much like winter.
Campus grounds, canvassed in freshly fallen snow, remained unmarred by the brush strokes of student footfalls. Early morning quiet clung to the air, accompanied by the tension of a swallowed gasp, yet no sound pierced the heavy silence.
Not the sweet melodies of birds pulling forth the dawn with their lover's song. Not the frigid wind shearing branches from a winter-bare tree. Not even the young man, sprawled atop a stone bench, slowly disappearing beneath the delicate flurries.
His chest did not rise with breath, for he had none. His wounds, which would have painted the snow crimson if not for the lack of blood in his veins, were stitched in random places, their haphazard care abandoned altogether. Fallen snow kissed his frozen skin, turning nightmare into daydream for as long as he remained hidden beneath the illusion.
It would be some time before anyone noticed the man—before the groundskeeper set out to clear the paths in the lightless morning and saw white flakes accumulating on his unnaturally still form. The groundskeeper would approach the body, shovel in hand—gloves crinkling as he gripped his fingers tight around the handle. His shoe prints would mar the snow and he would reach one hand forward to brush the icy powder from the young man's face.
The groundskeeper would swallow his gasp and stare in silent horror at what lay before him. If he could, he would have remarked on the unnatural sight of such beautiful gray eyes fixed lifelessly upon the winter gray sky, like mirrors of one another—each reflecting back an endless eternity, each forever trapped in one another's gaze, no longer bound by the shackles of time. But the groundskeeper couldn't make such remarks, for the man lying there, disappearing beneath the snow, had no eyes to speak of.
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An Elegy For The Soul
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