Ripples of grief

Chapter 30

Hope can lie in threads, torn patches and shreds upon the ground as the tapestry uncoils like the snake that wove it, eyes burning with malice and sinister intent; before it seemed to coil back into a smaller, more shadow-like form that hid among the shadows – if light peered through the veil, perhaps it would reveal how little lay on the ground, how little light there was to leave the cavern of so many piercing teeth. But even among that there was a shred of a smile, a laugh, a melody played that lifted even for a moment all sorrow; she began to hum that song he used to play so often and scoured the ground with that searchlight of so much dread – the anticipation. She heard the viper coil in the shadows. And it seemed to murmur in her ear with the remorse of a sea of crows flowing across a drowned, dark sky. Even they were the reason that the tapestry of gold glowed with a thousand lovers' smiles – that hope was just enough for her to begin to limp forward through the branches turned to dust. Passing that dully glimmering flower, the bright shadows left behind of those paths now turned to ash; that song could've painted their house with clean, unmarked walls, led them down every kind path – but it was just a pipe dream. A possibility burnt to ash that left a mark in what you knew wasn't there. What moved among the shadows. But that path's wound left to fester seemed to grow trails of grief – winding and cruel in their serpentine paradox, just festering wounds that could never heal. And among the dance of time, it seemed to grow. Growing false limbs like those of the undead with sores and buboes; and the malice in that grotesque, trailing death was a shadow of smoke that reached out to choke her among the ruins of what had once been so many possibilities. Now cast to that impenetrable fog. There were so many shadows of smoke that it became a sea, all tendrils that choked her with talons, every breath thinner than the last among the smoke of a match lit, then put out like a life. Then as she gazed upon that rose's petals, age grasping it as it did everything, she watched the branches of blackened flowers wilt and fall. Joy cascading, then vanishing. Joy was what made stars beautiful, tears woebegone or accompanied by a smile. But the thorns underneath that rose were revealed. And perhaps that masquerade had been merciful, like time to the dust on a coffin carried carelessly. Time is merciful, with its choking hand.

The last ticking of a clock. The final crow's wretched wail into the silences before the oppressive fog of forgetfulness descended; and the final breath breathed by a withered, feeble soul. Time would always be the crow, its arrival inevitable. And she supposed its footsteps were constant – that pulse of dread. That every light faded; she had once smiled among the blossoming lights of glaring alarms, flowers that shed petals, glowing blue and tinting the world their deathly hue of despair. But they seemed to have succumbed to its strangling terror, burnt in the heat of a moment that flashed by in but a fleeting silhouette of time – and now before her lay an ashen, wilted petal surrounded by the same dull devastation, no light to guide her forward with footsteps. And the final breath had been breathed. Because she couldn't hear that pulse – it was as if the frail wisps of whispering smoke still lingered, but she was hollow – for there was no pulse. Something had replaced it. Something more monotonous. A dreary, undead kind of melancholy that seemed to regret so much, figures looming; and she caught those webs with her hand. She tasted the woebegone prayers of sorrowful regret in the brush of threads past her skin. That blue-tainted light had perished among that hive mind, leaving webs in the air, embers of breath. Even that stumbling, undead complexion held a lit flame, the dull, dreary end that lay always in sight as you wandered on – a little hope, for that was why the shadows seemed to stretch out so far. Because through the scars emerging from the turmoil of the sea, the crimson battlefield whirling with discontent and rage and fear and terror. Terror. For corpses can't scream. And beneath those twisted familiarities was a face, through the scars, a complexion full of hope. Only left to bleed out and perish, now decaying almost. But embers always remained. She finally stumbled forward, having every moment of dread return in a cruel, disdainful laughter, and felt that spark among even such a devastated place, a spark of hope, perhaps; she wasn't sure of what it was. And as she perched upon a scratched, charred tree trunk, fragmented by the flames that engulfed every path that led to joy, she heard still the whispers, the embers that reignited the memory that was once there. A life.