Petals Behind Glass | Taegi

7- What Happens When the Last Petal Falls?

Yoongi's neck was wrapped in gold.

His mother's heavy arms were draped around his shoulders, her shiny body hanging from them like a morbid medal as he held her, standing in front of the mirror.

Their portrait was gruesome; colorless eyes darkening with life, refusing to spare a glance at the lifeless figure glinting with color.

Instead, the empty orbs absorbed only their own pitiful reflection, the faint moon lighting his static features.

The Yoongi in the glass was broken, and his cheek fractured like porcelain under his own cowardly and fixated stare before the fog faded him away, the Yoongi left closing his eyes in relief.

He let the waterfall's oozing stream soothe his worries, stepping in with a deep breath.

This was home.

The tunnel was opened, and the flower in the lantern was gone.

He strode into a room the color of a cerulean, arctic sky with at its center a tile bathtub atop a large, square podium.

With a swelling heart, he took it all in.

Her final resting place.

His body tremored at the ice-crispy air as he carried his mother to the bathtub through the mist he created with every exhale.

The crystal pale water numbed his fingers with its frigid cold while he placed his mother in, immediately warming them in his shirt.

Ears red and piercing, he admired how his mother tainted the clear liquid with flecks of her golden coated skin.

She was beautiful.

A rumble drowned out his clattering teeth as a smaller version of the podium descended from the ceiling, trapping his mother in her glacial tomb forever.

It sounded like closure.

He smiled, turning away when the back wall slid open onto what must have been a real life painting.

The sky was carelessly daubed with heavy, dried-out pigments of magenta and coral varnished over a tuscan colored sunset. All the trees and bushes before it were jet black and flat, surrounding a long dinner table where a dozen women were patiently seated.

The frost chilling his toes overpowered his social anxiety, and he paced into the heated outdoors.

None of the women moved or looked his way. Yoongi would have thought them lifelike wax figures had it not been for the steady rise and fall of their chest.

There were two vacant seats at the dinner table. He sat at the end of it, knowing his place wasn't at its head.

Everyone had a plate before them covered by a steel cloche. Nothing else was on the table. He was about to ask the woman beside him why no one was eating when they all ran out of their seats in screams towards an approaching entity.

From afar, Yoongi could see the entity was a man standing on a chariot drawn by two panthers. The hysterical women's shrieks only intensified as they circled around him, pushing each other in their wild attempts to touch him.

The man in question had hair as black as the panthers' fur swirling all the way down to his waist, his head adorned by a crown of ivy. The troop of women near the front grabbed hold of his large himation cloak, eager to bring him down, and Yoongi noticed they all had a tattoo in their forearms.

In his hand, the man held a pine cone tipped staff and with a single thump of it on the chariot all the women ceased their mad frenzy and the panthers came to a stop.