She folded beneath the lush canopies, the enduring rich void of verdant greenery, painting a picture of apprehension as she imagined ghosts of knotted, rolling vines seeking her nape, lacing and weaving across her throat. A necklace of thorns, a noose of creeping, crawling, gnarled barbs, threatening, unleashing, tormenting as she wished for ice, for glaciers, for slivers of rime and snow. Phantoms murmured horrific, furtive secrets, bandits harpooned acrimonious vestiges, and the shadows licked carnivorous bounties across their paradise, taunting, haunting, a constant masquerade, a molten paradox. The Songbird shivered in the wake of damnation, breathing endless, apprehensive chords down the rankling of her spine, uttering oaths, convictions, pledges, and reveries into silent, sumptuous laments; a dirge climbed through her throat and out into the shade like a trembling ember, never given the appropriate flame. Her thoughts rambled to the images of Arah and her children, captured then tortured, seized, possessed, and lacerated over and over again (did they scream, or did they tolerate, putting up a brave face when their guards merely wanted them to sink into the earth?). Would this happen to her? Was she doomed, sent into pits and pendulums, transfixed to horrors, beguiled into terrors, until she was broken, splintered, and fractured? Was she damned, released into the shrill notes of silence, forced to listen to her brethren fight while she was incapable of fleeing? Was she truly the sacrificial lamb now, the bird immolation, a nightingale trapped in her cage, fluttering and flickering and flittering before they tore her wings (and what about all the things she’d left unsaid, all the things she’d left undone)? Was she the forlorn pixie, nestled and buried and ground into chains, into tethers, into shackles, while the rest of the world clambered on, and she was the forgotten maiden, lost in the woods, with no means of bargaining, no fairy magic to embolden? The largest query surrounded and piled across her cumbersome sight and her weighted ruminations, flooding in a vicious, unwinding cascade: what was she to do? When there was an opportune moment, would she bear arms? Would she grind her teeth and sink into acrimony, into entropy, into violence? Would she run, chase heaven and earth, summits and peaks? Or would she stay, stranded, hoping, waiting, sobbing and crying, a damsel in distress?

The latter notion caused her head to swing upwards in a movement of pure sedition. Her gaze blazed for a few trembling seconds, bright, sparking denizens of injustice, of revolutionary tendencies, then caught the inky form of her captor, and drew back into the hollowed contortions of silence.

He was unlike any other beast she’d seen before, sable, but drenched in swarming droplets, a ceaseless paintbrush, an artist’s rendition of sustained dimensions, gliding and dripping, rippling and unending – she narrowed her stare, flamed some caustic imbalance, but never voiced their regards. She knew naught of him: was he a brooding force of danger and disaster? Was she sent to their cruelest guard? Would he slash her with a stiletto? Would he make her blood a canvas? Her heart thudded wildly in her chest, coiled and curled on her nest of disquiet, consternation, and moss. If he grew any closer, he’d be able to hear the untamed crescendo, the intoxicating fear, the overbearing hold nerves and tension tied over her mind; she wished he’d say something, anything, to be able to explain his decision in rendering her captive – for she had naught to offer. She had songs. She had hope. She had courage. She had love and cherished, adored friends, but none of these were tangible, corporeal regimes, she couldn’t bear him something ornate except the whimsical folly of her arias, and they wouldn’t be coming as she quivered with alarm and foreboding.

The ring of black flowers adorned the world in a flash of shadow and obsidian, and she didn’t know if they were grown by regret or for her impending funeral. Lena raised her eyes back to his, watched the beautiful, Stygian butterfly dance and hover at the tip of her nose: she was immediately torn between crying, screaming, or sustaining the inevitable. Instead, she did none of these things, closing her eyes to the ferns threatening to strangle her, then reopening them at the ends of their fray, iron in her veins even when poignant edges sought to unravel her. Strength, steadfast and persevering, was her only rapture, her only reverie, her only bit of succor. On a calm, composed voice, she spoke into the void, towards the painted beast, towards the veil of specious arts. “Why am I here?”