Bleeding heartlines, crawling entities, snatching, scathing, searing wraiths and omniscient specters crossed over her thoughts, her eyes, bent and broken, searching and probing, asking for her soul and essence, threatening, beckoning, devouring. Threatening boughs, unkind, bewitched snares, trenchant, mordant croons and murmurs bubbling, bursting, from the sardonic entrails of a sorcerer’s potion, brought to a simmering boil as they sought to kindle one more light into their elixir of damnation; houses of Usher rising and falling to the beat of sedition. They proceeded through festering, decaying omens, portended figments of delusion, hallucination, chimeras slinking along corridors, past hallways of heretics and irreverence – she breathed through a cloud of foreshadowed gloom, wished it would bloom soft, petals and flowers instead of regrets, rue and remorse. The brief fluttering of wings made her honeyed depths rise towards the sky, coveting the sound instead of the darkening, haunting canopy, drowning them in the dregs, the fathoms, the rancor of bitter affluence and antiquity, immersed enchantments choked, strangled and smothered into the desecration, the oblivion, of forgotten arias and strained ditties. Only when the voice came after, soothing, assuaging, coating her hums with further meaning, hallelujahs she could savor and relish, taste and revel, drink until the ambrosia ceased, did she notice the being conjuring and composing the lyrics. Inquiry and sage alms buried and echoed across its beautiful, wide eyes, immediately enamoring nymph and kitsune, too mired, too morassed, to be coaxed and beguiled by anything other than the dulcet clamor, the stringed harpsichord nature of the wise owl. Lena wished she be a reflection of its strength, softness enduring the clarity, the awakening, the declaration of ominous beacons, instead of falling to their violent, vehement pathways again and again, intoxicated and poised into the allure of perilous motives, menacing goals. Her answer arrived throughout the lilting silence, sketching songs to match the bird’s querying melody. “A gain of strength and fortitude.” Honesty delved and toiled, with no reason to deceive an all-seeing, ethereal figure, a spirit of the forest. Her speculation crossed over moments later, a sylph’s curious reign, virtue’s fallen paragon lifting her chains to the presence of the earth, the rocks, the trees, the skies. “What do you seek here, owl of repose?”

[Thank you NPC! :D]