Change was a cruel mistress, a mixture of siren catacombs and coaxing wails, vicious hymns and murmurs, croons embodying the dying art of sylphs and swans, laurels and sweet nothings. She’d been strangled amongst the midst and mist of the forlorn, swindled and pillaged from the gliding arts of tender moralities, affixed and combing the arches of the sinister, the nefarious, for gains, for means, that, years before, would have been licentious creeds her brethren drove into her mind, refused over and over again towards the wind, towards the shambles of her fragments, towards the silent string of muses and spirits. She’d collapsed and faltered into a heap of iniquity, undone in the feverish reverie of calamity and acrimony, pierced, molded, and reshaped into something else; an unknown particle of audacity, selfishness and barbarity, and each touch, each taste, of the bitter, rancorous truth seethed across her tongue. A poisonous, lethal barb of her heinous actions, of her heathen pursuits, of all the potential and composure sullied, ruined, marred by treachery, by duplicity, by the specious antiquity of her heritage and bloodline, a reminder of its existence, deep in the burrs and thorns of her creation, waiting, wallowing, for its next insurrection. Could she return to the sculpted movements, the freedom, the liberation, the deliverance of her motions, her refinements, her sentiments and scriptures, or was she too sundered, too destroyed, too far gone into the crushing, gnashing wreckage, consigned to damnation, doomed to hell and all its dark fingertips, its sinister brushstrokes? Was she another piece of earth, awakened by the sun, finished by the moon, fiendish and deplorable, fallen from heavenly shrouds and pedestals? Given another opportunity, would she deliver the same machinations, calculate upheaval and violence, villainy and unholy raptures for the absconding of children, to take another’s land, home, fortitude and sanctuary away? Would she order Imogen to slay, would she ask herself to maim, sear, rip and tear, would she unwind calamity from her sword, from her shield, twist and turn with her brethren until she was reshaped again, more ruthless and merciless than before? Was there any absolution in the cantankerous, reeling world of Helovia, inching, arching, lofting wickedness like a mighty stone, watching as mere mortals were crushed in the pit and pendulum of its diabolical gallows? Or would she be a constant, unwinding sacrifice for its barbarity, the christened songs and sonnets for a never-ending cycle of villainy, benediction, and atrocity, lost to the framework of haunting, hollowed shells and halls, a chassis, a gilded form of all the broken, shattered things.

The nymph watched the battered steed, pondered if she’d be enough to warrant him blessings, to bestow her immolations and offerings to his ragged frame, beaten against the outcrop of another world, another time, another place; a lilac stare shielding the acrimony of his story, weary, a necessary bid to sacrifice her drained beatitudes and graces. How did he acquire such vicious ailments; had he been shackled and chained to a dance of the macabre, had he paid the price for avaricious activities, had he wandered over empires, kingdoms and sovereignties for the scrap and slivers of something he once beloved? Imogen bounded amongst the shoal, washing clarity against her mind, weaving and lacing tattered ribbons and plaits, attempting to muster the trounced salvation beyond the stars, chirping one word into their shared bond. Familiar - but Lena couldn’t discern what was recognized and what was not: the ailing beast before her, the ruptured moments of bliss, the relentless siege of maddening motives, or the callous weight of the world, and only provided the merest hint of a smile to the ivory vixen. She turned away before she could witness the despondent stare flickering along the kitsune’s face, the bob and sway of blue-tipped tails as they gestured in wild pandemonium, to alleviate the thickening press of dejection and misery from her fairy friend. Her focus remained fixated upon the stag, the orb resting between his legs, the luminescent world promising many things, and she being incapable of gifting them in turn. Would healing him render her worthy again, or forgotten in the abysmal cataclysms of bedlam, stanzas and lyrics forgotten mere moments from now, punctured by future sedition? Her eyes captured the wounds, the lacerations, the injuries, the burns and ravaged sinew, and thereafter, she closed their lids, listened to his plea. Please. Deep within her ravaged essence, she snared, allured, and entranced the canvas of her oeuvre, of her mastery, plucked the coquette strings of harmonious bliss, fostered and founded sanctum across her steady breath, allowed invocations to cross over her lips, dainty, serene arias, light, unfaltering hums. She glowed beneath the might of the sun, drank in its solace, the unwinding, uncurling, unfurling reverie of the whispering waves, chased after the abandoned dreams of her faltered ambitions, granting tranquility through the ardor, the passion, the opulence of her power. Radiant and beatific, gleaming, glittering, flickering, the song pervaded the sultry swing of the ocean, called to the gulls, cried to the heavens, no words, no lyrics, no poems or verses, pieces of laureate lyrics without the ambling, fumbling contortions of her sadness – defiantly heralded until they bloomed and blossomed from her chest, into the ethereal conjectures and sentiments of the salty, summer air. Lena trilled and warbled over the wake of the earth, along the intertwining horizon, until it molded into the stranger’s form, warmed the aches in his body, sewed the slivers and splinters, the shreds and fragments, the ashes of his actions, the barbarity etched and sketched upon his skin, and she wouldn’t cease until he asked her to, until there was nothing left of her nature – lost in the throng, in the euphonious, mellifluous bliss she’d squandered. Through whim, through fancy, through compassion and generosity, perhaps she’d discover the pieces of peace she’d dropped from the stars.


@[Kirottu]