Forgotten martyrs and riddled monuments, sepulchers of the forsaken and renounced – Lena laid flowers at their gravestones and chiseled their legends into lilting requiems and laments. The world coveted thickened doldrums of the inhumane, of the debauched, of the torn and flayed, and she continued stepping through pinnacles of light to embrace, to caress the beneficent essence of crooning courtyards and promised sanctums. Not without stains, not without marred runes, not without imperfections, but stroking vicious holds with a perseverant air – ferociously consumed by the determination, the valor, and the stalwart trumpets of resolution. An invoking of despair, an unraveling of hope, traced the sketch, the outline of her travels, and each petal-soft, dulcet movement composed by her lithe contortions pulsed, pervaded, aimed to divide the darkness, the destruction, from veils and labyrinths. The nymph knew she couldn’t convey enough hallelujahs, reveries and rhapsodies to unite fallen kingdoms, couldn’t destroy the stoked villainy or ignited, licentious chords, but if she managed to reverberate the divinity, the virtue, the morals and finery outside the corridors of corruption, chaos and callousness, then she remained persistent, unwinding symphonies for each parallel monstrosity. Tenacity, born and bred through the lines of her childhood to the bridges and gaps solidified over her tender heart, carved and marked the foil of devilish reaches, seraphs and fiends, blossoming antithesis to catacombs and hymns. Her search at these shaded hours could have been an eternal march, everlasting unholy vows striking against heretic walls and reverent columns, ghostly wraiths springing through phantom parades, clutching, grasping fingers gnarled and clenching over the sinful bounties of their salvaged serenity, but her senses were captured, enticed, beguiled by the overwhelming sense of familiarity blooming from the entrance. The trail billowed travesty and treachery beyond and behind it, looming, maelstrom antiquities, refinement trampled, secrets stolen and snared, lost reigns fumbled and ripped.

Light, radiant and ablaze by the fires and embers of her coiled reverence, of her illuminated adversity, she and Imogen pursued gallows and heaven, intertwining the fixtures of passion and hope with the ambitions of tranquility, solidified composure in the daunting trials ahead. The ivory vixen tracked and she followed, hushed as they combed through the awareness and affinity of the damned ahead of them, for if it were the puzzling, spellbinding temptress of the icicled kingdom, how had she come to such a fate? Psyche had represented strength, viper coils, enticements and allures, the beguiling sense of danger reaching behind corporeal forms, of holes and pitfalls aligned and placed for enemies, of swindling traps and specious laughter. To think that she’d fallen through the murky holds, through the nocturnal, Stygian mockeries, as abandoned, bleak and mauled as the rest, led Lena down the arches and eaves of certainty; everyone was capable of faltering and stumbling. There wasn’t room for paragon pedestals here.

Their arrival upon the fallen’s presence was marked by a sinister hiss tumbling through Imogen’s tiny frame, a feral growl conveyed and exposed from the layers and lacquer they’d had to face days prior (an attacking friend, a returned companion). Only thereafter did Lena’s honeyed gaze, ambrosial and sanguine, fade into dismay. Flesh frayed and clipped, sinew and bone exposed, treachery torn into filaments of roughened hues and destroyed beauty. Like a specter of death, wounds without closure, a skull without its scythe, serpent without its hood, slithering in the opulence of something it couldn’t have; the sylph bowed her head against the image, remembering a time, a place, a season where the siren reigned, did more than slither into augured ruses. A heady breath, a stoking of resolve, and she was obstinate again, emboldened by the memories of opulence and glaciers, stone chiseled to snowflakes and warm wind sauntering throughout valleys, christening one solo crescendo, cadence of the selfless. “Psyche…” It trailed off, reverberated in singsong echoes, a name, a calling, a namesake renowned instead of abandoned to corpses and living poltergeists. Then, she sang. An opus raised in travesty, a symphony conducted in hollowed halls, meant for serenity, meant for salvation, hums and hymns brooding in the haunting dusk, closing her eyes against the chilling ambience, against the ghastly screams, pouring the effervescent glow, the ebullient shards, back upon a marked soul.