The golden throng of the summer’s hailing did naught to assuage her damning sentiments, consuming and misshaping the fabrications of gilded light, of ambrosial warmth, of songs and merriments, harmony and mellifluous heralds, into unworthy bombardments and undeserving travesties. Coaxing vibrant, vehement memories, disasters and follies, caprices and whims, of gilded light flooding her sights amongst a shallow bed of flowers, waiting to be taken by the threads of darkness, incapable of resolution, inept at turning, swiveling her chances and opportunities into anything but lingering, loitering, listless for a grasp on humanity and morality. Drifting in the swallowing halls and thresholds of massacres, of heathens, of infidels and cretins, brought to the earth in anguish, in torrents, in turbulence, meeting the clamor of dissonance and laments with the dainty smile of flowers, belles and laurels. To be crushed, annihilated, persecuted or neglected, overlooked, tossed aside, tortured and maligned into desolation, the scarred traces of dismal, bleak isolation – led down the primrose path, lined with petals, chimes and echoes of otherworldly, ethereal stanzas, outlined by remnants of blossoms and blooms, glades and copses, only to flounder, stumble and falter again. No revelations sparked against her crown, her tiara, her fey conjectures to offer her peace, repose and proposals, to thwart the wicked, to mold the licentious rhythms from her frame, cast away, to the arms and boughs of faded foibles and iniquitous inclinations. Had each transformation been rendered into nothing? Had she wilted adaptations, from floundering babe, to wandering gypsy, to ebullient, graceful nymph, to this defeated anguish, to this lacquered shell of regret and remorse? Where was her luminescence, her delight, the majestic creation she’d worked so hard to achieve, she so desperately carved and sculpted from the weary statue of her childhood, from the listless, haunting songs of her youth? Could she regain its stumbling steps, its weary discourse, its molten ambiguity, or would the waves take her away? Would they find her nearly as undeserving, and the hands of Poseidon and all his rivulets, all his currents, all his aspiring hands would grab ahold, drag her down into the fathoms, into the depths, and she’d be just as forgotten, just as inept, as the world she’d started within? If she pled in the silence, would she be forgiven for the portentous sins etched over the fine, subtle, airy entanglements of her hide? Or did she have to cry out over the waves, languish and mourn her discarded moralities one by one, watch them drop into the cascades of her dolor?

No words passed over her lips, too ashamed, too humiliated, too broken and beaten from the length of her regal demise, and only the gentle lull of the froth and foam, of the swallowed dunes, the swooning gulls and Imogen’s harmonious chirps filled the horizon. The waves rolled over her limbs and she felt the cool grasp of the ocean swell around their length in an enticing dance, siren and exotic, awaiting for one last, singular breath before she plunged headfirst into its passionate embrace. Silence stretched in a seamless, hazardous, crushing decadence, pressing and smothering, acerbic and trenchant, haunting the bright, raw refinements of sea glass glistening from the shoal and shore, whispering over the final touches of a lost shell rolling across sodden sand, and she waited for a sign, a manifestation, an intimation that she wasn’t truly shattered and splintered. What if nothing came? Lena, songbird of the heavens, nymph and sylph, fey and fairy, without her fluttering wings, without her divine attributes, without her cadence and brilliant glow, strolling in the snapped shadows of her former luminescence. Dismal, bleak pieces of a once radiant puzzle, dimmed and shaded into dangerous pinnacles of dying embers, coals and ash, the piquing nettles of frustration, exasperation and defeat nestled into the riotous din of her brow. Only the strange fixation of a glowing anomaly dragged her sights away from the outlying skyline, Imogen’s chirps becoming wilder, curious, inquisitive, and had Lena not been consumed by the bottomless dregs of her worn heart, she would have journeyed across the current to join her kitsune in avid exploration – but she merely watched, disheartened and fatigued. An orb pressed its enigmatic pulse along the shoreline, and the fox followed with eager abandon, while the muted follies of the healer dragged their dismal shades, faded, dulled, dimmed, to the ivory figurine fumbling for its grandeur.

Hoary, like arcane, primitive cobwebs, withering ghosts, translucent wraiths, he dragged his form along the beach, and the nymph’s heart floundered, witnessing the quiet reticence and acceptance of age, of injuries, of ailments, somehow fumble across the earth with more resolution than she’d ever seemed to manage and maintain. Her companion’s motions ceased when he reached the bright, lustrous object, turning back towards Lena for approval, to reach and coax, to abide and accept, when all the belle wanted to do was break across the ocean. She’d crumble and disintegrate for this beast, another victim of ardent violence, she’d wither and fade for this creature, bent and broken and reeling from some future, pending loss and the gloom of the one before, and she’d sing her last song until she grew hoarse, fettered away into stone, rubble and ruin. Would that be enough to salvage the remnants of her glory, to build one more beloved sacrifice, to burst into requiems and harpsichord melodies, to seethe and smolder into ceaseless raptures until the world was healed from her immolations? The sylph conjured one cry over the waves, proceeded in unrefined steps, towards the juncture of harmed, felled characters and souls, ceasing to reign in her formidable elegance, conspiring to warrant heavenly bouts without the wholesome aria of her precious sanctum - where is my sanctuary now? “Can I help you?” Can you help me?


@[Kirottu]