Briar of Ashes

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Briar of Ashes

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Life is a maddening, inescapable cycle.

      Creatures who gained intelligence far beyond what is crippling are animated to walk, to live, to breathe; they fall, they break, they shatter. They are too complicated to function correctly, and they wish to become something simplistic, unconcerned. Animals, beasts they are, "gifted" with intelligence and wisdom, wish to return to effortless nothing.

      Emptiness. Nonexistence. Death.

      The call of death was constant to some, others, yet a faint tingling in the mind never addressed. It drowned Etheli, the life dragon. For Eta was dead, and with it, Etheli's will to continue.

       He no longer felt the common goal to survive, to live on. He felt nothing. Numb. Yet a chasm struck and carved into him like nothing before had, each bit chipped away, slowly yet steadily.

        Life was dead.

        Roses, dark and burnt as if left to an inferno, wrapped gingerly around the skull white as snow. A snout green as leaves was drenched in blood red as wine touched the bone, overwhelmed with the grief one felt after losing someone. What pain it was. For something to be inevitable, yet so painstaking- everyone died, eventually. Everyone. So why did it hurt so much to witness something that happened over and over again?

   Why?

       It was a question difficult to answer. Impossible, even. The solution was buried so far inside our psyche, within our very nature and beings, that to reveal it would likely break our fragile minds further.

       But Etheli felt he had already withered to his lowest state. He would be wrong. Down he went, falling further into the abyss one might call madness. Another would refer to it as simple grief. Etheli didn't refer to it.

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       Many would question why he dragged that skull around with him. He would say nothing, instead flying away, skull hung precariously on the tip of his tail.

       Others would point out the wildly desaturated appearance of his scales, the once soft underbelly of the dragon now gaunt. His ribs showed through his chest. The most noticeable change, however, was the black vines that had crept from the skull onto his tail. The scales beneath had bled into an ashy grey, skin falling away to reveal a briar of black roses.

        Etheli was too absorbed in his thoughts to ever notice. It seemed he was always daydreaming- dazed, dragged into the recesses of dark places he would never imagine going prior. Nightmares crawling into sunlight in to drag him away.

        Visions of ghosts and spirits.

         Etheli was then known as he who communed with death. Voices tormented him, poltergeists swarming him to taunt him with what he could never have. They picked at his skin and ate at his soul, slowly carving their little imprints upon him. Eta was the ringleader, always asking why Etheli let him pass away. Why didn't he preserve him? Didn't he care? Didn't he?

        Etheli often awoke feeling dark and dull. The days no longer held meaning, time now a broken monotony that carried him through hell on a daily basis. It seemed to have crawled to a stop, sometimes, leaving him to wallow for what seemed like hours but was really only seconds.