Between Wolves & Doves

Chapter 54 Soirée part VII

(Punk here) I just want to start this chapter off by saying; though I may have had some serious writers block there can be no doubting. This story has never left my mind. Not once. So for that reason. There is no question of our not continuing it! Please do enjoy. And watch this space for more. Cause we are so not finished yet. Not by half. Love from <3 P&S

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Across the gardens, removed far from the crowds and the noisy gaiety of the games, Draegan walked alone through the bursting spread of the flower beds, choking with roses in bloom.

A sea of tongue pink and bullseye red petals. The neat trees behind the deep sunk beds cut into blunt squares, ones that line along the path he walks.

The tranquility of a garden always pleased him. He's able to push his mind into the lushness of green growing things, and leave it there awhile. Appreciate a rare bloom. Feel life and nectar tangling, twining, blooming all around him.

It's ironic; the one thing that makes him feel less like the looming reaper, is flushed with such an influx of growth; of life. Irony much.

He listens to the breeze muddle the trees. Hiss and spit of the leaves. Feels the warm soothe of sun eat into the strands of hair flowing straight like frozen ice down his back. Tickle the back of his neck. A golden ghost of it tracing his jawbone - like the way a lover would.

It took him so many years to get used to such a light again. Overawed by it's angry acidic heat. It's ungovernable power. The warmth of the heavens he once clung too. He'd been cast out to rot in the cloying darkness. Black shadows sliced by flames.

Maybe his love of sunlight echoed back to the being he once was.

Before the fall; before the gruesome lashing scars that annihilated his back. Cleaved him to the bone. Flayed out and peeled away skin to black-red sticky viscera, and the meat of his once pious flesh.

If there was any God in him left, some pure pearl of goodness, pushed far, far, back. Concealed in a corner within. Maybe that is what makes him eternally doomed to tread this earth, with his eyes turned skyward. Appreciative of the rapacious sunlight.

He turns his head and glimpses along the roses. The breeze tugs on his hair and throws the sickle scent of the flowers tumbling in his direction. The allium bulbs that burst open like suspended fireworks in an incredible purple. How they swayed under his gaze. The delicate tendrils of sweet peas climbing twisting up ornamental obelisks. Sweet perfume of summer and innocent new life.

He drinks it all in. It makes him recall his home. The way he misses aspects of it in his absence.

The ungovernable heat. The way it warmed his old dreadful bones. The sheer engulf of salty blue. The sea melded to the sky fused as one. Scattered blanket of jagged sapphires of the waves under golden light. The ancient warped lemon trees lined up in their groves. The twist of citrus on that same salt kissed sea air.

He misses the sun baked tile of ivory white under bare foot on his veranda. No company - a glass of wine and the brilliant night sky alive with winking stars, was all he needed.