Flights of Fantasy - The Pub Fantasy Smackdowns

Where the Roses Grow - Part 2

The authorities re-opened the Hall after a few days of fruitless enquiry. A caretaker had found Anja a few hours later, had given her a cup of sweet tisane and called the City Guard. She had been questioned, but the caretaker had vouched for her character having seen her painstakingly cleaning the gargoyles and statues in the hall, and she had been released, shaken but free: except from the ghosts of her past. With nothing and no-one else to hold on to, she went back to work.

I wish you were a raven and would fly away, then I should have a little peace.

Thief of my heart, destroyer of my soul

As evil as you are beautiful, we are one, but my blindness has doomed us all.

We are as one until our hearts were turned to stone.

Witness the death of love, the loss of the living gods.

The curving paths of the city outside, the bustle of populace and ever changing skies with their wispy remnants of the gods were irrelevant to her here. The shadows were lengthening again, an organic and ever changing growth changing with the tides of the suns. A collection of words she had worked so hard to uncover lay part in shade and his face hung before her, unchanged, uncaring, and timeless in lithified indifference.

"You saved me. Why? But can you save me? Come on and save me again, from myself and my life of nothingness. Maybe you could save me from the ranks of the freaks, who suspect they could never love anyone, freaks like me.

"Oh gods, I'm talking to a lump of rock." She glanced down from her perch atop the tower scaffold to the marble floor below. There was a faint red stain to the creamy marble the caretaker had been unable to remove, but it was the damage to the flagstones nearby no-one had managed to explain.  A radial pattern of cracks spread from the point of impact, a depression a few fingers deep at its centre.

“This is my last night. I can’t stay with you any more, there’s no time left.” She reached into a pocket of her tunic and pulled out a metal chain and heart matching the one hanging around her neck. “I have no evidence to prove you didn’t save me, so I wanted to say thank you.” Anya reached out and hung the heart pendant around Amyru’s cold stone neck. “It was my sister's. She was all I had left. Now all I have is memory. It’s not enough.”

She shook her head trying to clear it, once again feeling the cold blade as it slid along her skin. Crying softly she hugged her arms around her slender body and rocked back on her heels.

"I don't understand. I'm fed up of being scared and alone. What is happening to me?” she whispered to the stones.

- You can be free child, end it now. There will be no more pain. Just peace.  You have suffered enough little one.  One step.  Just one step.  That's all you have to take. Join us in the silence between worlds... -

Anja closed her eyes, tears seeping from the lids. “No. I need to finish this. I need to understand what is going on here.”

- you are dying little one. That is why you can hear the ghosts of the past echoing around the Hall. Memories trapped in the stone whisper around your frail form, the flesh is weak, only stone remains timeless -

The girl opened her eyes, leaning back in fright from the beautiful face of the Arabesque. The timeless stone face was inches from her own, the eyes blank, the statue crouched forward like a mantis on its plinth. As she watched, the grey stone eyes clarified to an onyx black matching the pendant above her own pounding heart. The Arabesque blinked slowly, like a lizard, the nictitating membrane flicking across the stygian lense.