Ripples of grief

Chapter 14

Wind was a constant, ceaseless breath through the glass, oddly perfect despite the walls being cracked with age. With a breath came a voice, and every step brought her closer to hearing those doleful words spoken through the veils of thorns that pierced the night with potent disdain and mocking as the sorrow-wracked voice cried out, and the vines began to unleash their vile anguish upon the world. A murmur. A whisper, then a chant. A breath. A sigh of lamenting grief; before she watched the room unfurl before her, contemplation of doleful voices – those cracks in the walls; perhaps they were thorns of roses, scars from a smile, or a dagger to the heart as it breaks; as a fern unfurls itself, stories revealed bit by bit. A word – stored forever on a scratch in the wall. A wilted memory of that smile shed upon the world among turmoil; all these memories seemed forgotten – the dark revealed nothing but shadows and dusk, the furniture scattered sparsely across the ground like seeds unwatered. These memories unfurled and died before her as the moonlight was shed, revealing futile shadows – she felt no dread at the sight. Only that dull ache. Those murmurs held cruel reminders that these were echoes of a memory – just as the thunder was echoes of gunshots – they held waters in the clutches of that disease. Hopelessness. It had a sword piercing its flesh with a dull thrumming pulse of a blade – a roof to turn away the innocence of that leaf furling into a wilted shadow. A blade to shield the walls from tearing seams of hopeless rambling, memories rotting without a figure to place in the hands of the weeping child a button-eyes symbol of innocence. Hopelessness spoke to those shadows despite everything, vile rasping and a river of emotion drained to sand. In a way hopelessness is a kind of numbness of shadows that could be monsters, yet never struck out. Easily influence by those strings of terror. Those tendrils of dim, intermittent moonlight that tempted out the shadows of ink – there lay weeping soldiers, and the ripple across the water, twisted. They put before the vipers a pulsing heart and whispered the dark's name in hushed, insidious tones. Sinister rasps of secrets. And all it did was tempt out the thorns. Until they tightened their clutches, letting joy bleed, scales daggers.

Shudders engulfed the horizon in a bolt of agony, the sky ablaze with passionate fury and terror – a menacing echo ripples across the bleak landscape full of branches that led to nowhere. It was simply a smile flashed across, a light among all those shadows – it illuminated the forest with a foreboding glimmer of malice – like a fang or a tooth protruding from scarlet gums; a smile could hold an anchor by which the blade is stuck within your mind, never to be plucked from there because it holds that dagger that sheds its glow across the whole forest, intermittent ripples of the pulse of that beating heart, throbbing and pulsating in a writhing, muffled scream before the vipers that now emerged from the newly formed shadows. The grotesque image made the crows of shadowed feathers flee at the sudden screech in the nights, like that of a raven as it perishes. Crows vanished from rotted memories, then should've returned. If the battle is a flame, fiercely rising then falling dormant like a phoenix that writhes in agony – then perhaps the ink is but the smoke as the embers begin to wither then stir. Breaths of wind filling it with rage. Before the flame perishes, wilts. But it always comes back. That smoke can be so comforting; to know that it's always there no matter what. To know that its incessant presence brings something other than numb melancholy. Something about that is a comfort – until that jolt, that shudder echoes. And the cracks spread. Now hollow, ravenous for a story. Something. The vipers gave chase, their serpentine figures watching feathers flicker and knowing that the crows have fled to that ember once more – the stem of a rose has thorns, and yet the cloud lamenting as it lingered, gathering in a decaying veil above the corpses of memories. Crows fled and they chased – perhaps to flee memory. If they never were there to form that bond of thorns for scales and decaying petals, they could hide beneath the flames, feeling the flames burn their flesh away to but a single ash, complexions vanished to reveal a throbbing heart offered to the vipers. She fled to the outside, wishing that the serpents beneath the rose were revealed, instead of the false solace of darkness. Horrors lay within those hollow crevices despite the crows being gone to flee the serpents of a gathering, dreary storm.