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Elegiac and wistful, she spent her time mooring amidst the rubble of stones and pebbles, transfixed by the shells and shackles conspiring amongst the low tides. The pair meandered across pieces of shoal and shoreline, making prints until the waves swept them away. Imogen attempted to taunt the writhing torrent, chirping then batting, running, then chasing, but all Lena saw, beyond the surf, beyond the shallows, beyond the nighttime swallows and the twinkling twilight, was the rise of viperous distortions and the sinuous, eruption of her carefully woven cadence and canvas. She’d endured, she’d remained, she’d clawed at disruptions and havoc and wreckage, turning and twisting them into determination, resolution, and conviction. It was a part of her everyday life; she drifted in and out of shadow and light, she played harp to wounded soldiers, she invoked beauty and grandeur in a siege of dissolution and disrepair, she whispered sweet, dulcet arias into crowds of demons. But somewhere, somehow, she’d gotten stuck, dragged and pulled into a rut, into thorns and nettles, felt them clawing, snatching, and grasping. Because no matter what she did, it still wasn’t pious, virtuous, or wholesome. She’d embraced Roland’s existence as a sign of liberation, as a notion, as a hint, of deliverance – that she could fly and be free and capture every elegant essence, every ethereal grace, every silly, whimsical, sultry vow and prosper it into the heavens. He’d watched, amused, she’d thought, as she traipsed across the earth with a song in her heart and dance in her steps, and the sway of the realm laying unbidden at her feet, at her soul, at her beautiful, rapturous melodies. Then he’d left. Lena had asked herself why so many times that the word was now stuck along her teeth and embedded in her head. She must’ve been done something horrible, ferocious, and iniquitous to cause him to leave her behind, to trap her within mirrors where only her mercenary expression filtered and flickered on glass. She’d chased down cretins and demons because they’d threatened livelihoods, because they attempted to ruin her cherished, beloved friends, because she’d thought they were cruel, barbaric infidels trying to ensnare everyone into hell. Then she’d discovered they were Gods, and she’d aided in their destruction, in their terror, in their avaricious, brutal fall. The nymph had ceased, stopped, and watched as they lay ravaged and mutilated by her kin, by her brethren, by fellow citizens and herself; dying as they struggled to protect what had been theirs all along. She hadn’t been a Mender; she’d been a monster. The truth whittled across her tongue and down her throat, scorching and simmering, searing and burning, cloaking her finery in immoral murmurs and cataclysmic derision. Perhaps she didn’t know who she truly was anymore; if there was more treachery to her than song, if there was more heathen than virtue. Her head hung low as they became soaked along the ocean’s breaking squalls, neither enlivened by screeching gulls or winter’s forgiving torrent on the warm climate. No songs passed through her lips, no hallelujahs drifted from her mouth. They were nomadic quandaries, pulsing along an ineffectual beat; soulless and dipped in iniquity, matching so many other souls tethered in purgatory. Lena |
@Roux
