CIRCUTA

these words are knives and often leave scars
the fear of falling apart,
truth be told i never was yours

Loorien was swathed in ash, humid, alabaster oaks with strikingly roseate buds dull in the oncoming odor of rain— for with the springtide comes a flurry of showers, scorching sinew laced with sweat and sticky as raw honey, yet tinged with the taste of salt upon the pallet; the chorus of wind trailing fingertips through onyx tresses of mane, wrapping around a damp neck, the softest of drizzles lining rivulets down her scarred apparel, donned with violet eyes, carrying a cyclone of extermination within their midsts, doom, peril, resolute, yet in turmoil, for the deed in which she is about to commit is treason of the highest regard, and yet the mysterious witch of a woman cannot deny the thirst, the hunger, cannot turn away the calescent longings of a Empress bathed in cruor, the passion that transfers to her own veins, the aspirations that dig as talons into limp flesh, ensnaring her heart within a cage of barbarous thorn.

She is the Nightingale, second only to the Jester, sleuth of the secluded realm of Falls, damned, laiden with a curse, venomous Cicuta as her namesake suggests— water hemlock, and she is to slay a Queen and lay ruin to a throne, inflict anarchy, demise, eradication of the highest regard.

Divines, she prays, the imploring tone of a mortal bound with the intent of annihilation upon her tongue, pleading, forsaken. Aid me.
And then she seeks, she cries, beckons as a cawing crow for a lamb to the slaughter, for a Jester; to enwrap lacerations and bruises, to throttle, to choke, to steal oxygen from rightful lungs and swing her perilous scythe, her sister in arms, a Czarina, a Queen, torn, uncertain, a twisted stomach and a icy sludge within her throat, crepuscule, blending among the penumbra of the downcast morn, the crimson hues of a sunrise painting the coppice maroon, amber, gilt and gilded, and the malleable clay beneath her hooves shifts to the sanguine fluids of her dam, her Mother— squelching, scalding beneath her dainty hooves, a mixture of dread and despair, anxieties that meld and fuse hallucinations of the Labyrinth within her skull together as threads, a echoing, resounding voice within her own mind, collected, demanding, certain and cold.
She is not your mother.

No.
She is not.
(But would she not have fought along her side, but a few mere months before? Had she not sworn fealty to two Goddesses, and not to one? Has she not a burden to the King, to the Czar, to a soft-spoken lad with a phoenix upon his withers? If the tales, the ruins, the sweetened falsehood of good cannot remove the curse placed on her dome, then does the folly of moral acts control her actions, her inquiries, her devilish cravings, her mind? Does it deem which to slay, and which to let live? What defines a metal, electronic monster from a breathing, living being? Does she not take in air, consume, rest, worry and fret as all?)

The Nightingale does not understand, does not have answers to the bumbling chord of tangled rope, to her conscious, for she must have none to seek Thanatos, to seek Death in all his glory, sing lullabies and acrid psalms, there is no time for ardor, for patriotism, and with the terracotta hue of mud beginning to stain her cannons she listlessly reduces her trot among the dryads, her cries, hushes her soul within a cage of ice, of Siberian temperature, splashing into a winding corridor of a creek. The rosy budded nymphs seem to have a trillion eyes, gazing at her with sneers, with prying inquiries, a whispering choir of accusations, of damnation, of knowledge— she is the one, the witch, the infernal, and the thorns dig another inch into the agonized, fright filled bird that frantically beats wings inside her bosom.
It is a clearing, a opening amidst the brush, and with trembling lips and quivering nostrils she rises her dome to the skies, the superheated, electrical scent of lightning as a flash lightens the grounds below, turning the indigo of her gaze pallid, alabaster, cerulean in the wake of its luminescence, surrounded by nothing but earth and grass, dryads and rain, nothing but the chill of her loathsome, fractured heart.

She has promised she will slay a Jester, and that is what she shall do.
(But Lord forgive her, for she knows not what she does).

Nothing, not time, not the fathomable canvas of stars— not the gods, not the realm of Loorien nor pety mortal souls shall last forever, not even that whom can speak to the dead, a Necromancer in a clown's donned armour.
And that is what the same Necromancer shall learn on this eve.

Nothing.