Had there been peace, true, vital sanctuary, glorious hallelujahs trumpeting from reposed columns or serene, assuaging hope, Lena would have enjoyed searching with her companions, painting the skies with information, wild, ebullient contemplations, christened, anointed bestowals of wisdom and sages. She would have commented on the Doctor’s daughter, growing Nao, suitably finding a poisonous flower and bending it to her will, seemingly immune to the effects of venom and decay. She would have brandished earnest smiles and whimsical accompaniments to Tangere’s fondness for ingesting their discoveries, would have been enamored by the opulence, the grandeur, the wonder set before them, arching and reaching for the next covenant, the next grail, to send them scattering in spirit and buoyancy. But all she felt were the furtive, restless edges of Imogen, apprehensive and tense, and it simmered along her body until she too was an embroiled, unsettled enigma along the meadow, waiting for the daunting fringe of shadows to hasten them into oblivion, to chase them away from Elysium, to be pulled into the embrace of anarchy. The nurse longed for none of these sentiments brewing in her veins, boiling in her heart, searing her flesh until each sliver of movement, each rub of fronds, each incandescent melody of birds rustling her untamed soul into tyranny. They’d known of horror, of terror, of sinister, nefarious requiems, of laments bursting across the horizon and bestowed upon their mortal souls (and was it wrong to wish it away, again and again), they’d fought, they’d survived, they’d conquered one more slash of the scythe – but this unseen, vile contortions bending into invisible lines, threatening to strangle, to suffocate, to unwind and persevere in the mutinous, hollowed world, left her flickering and bobbing in the unknown.

The threat layered back into her enamel again as alarm spiked through Imogen’s svelte frame; locked on a single silhouette webbed into the autumn wake, frozen, focused, and Lena swung her head towards the source – and had one brief moment of elation. Kahlua’s painted form, another friend saved and preserved through the inky, decadent sheen and veil of mysteries, of callous labyrinths, of roses pricking and plucking, kindled a brilliant, luminescent smile across her features, resonant, bright, and subsequently severed by reality. The deep growls of the kitsune, the painted Glazier’s vocals lacking any melody, lacking any dance, lacking any warmth, stole the grin away from her face, seized her frame into the whirlwind of fortitude and confusion. Delusions chased away, tenderness ebbed, and only sedition remained upon the recognized face, distorted and warped. A hastened spring bubbling over its brook border, its chiseled embankment, it’s fathomed well, postured one mellifluous question barbed from her lips. “Kahlua?” What happened? What made this once wondrous, beautiful, kind, generous being into a crawling monster, a behemoth, a seeker of shadows instead of their woebegone light, their stolen halos? What was she now? How could she strive to repair and mend the broken, brittle pieces of scorpion entrails and sizzling, slinking debauchery? Where did Kahlua begin and end? Where had she been possessed, stolen, and could she repair her? Lena, help me. What has happened to me?; haunting chords stoked and fired from the archaic, atavistic rebellions, prickling a note of fear along the sienna’s spine, yearning for the quiet gestures of repose, of strength and futility, of all the valor and courage she’d concocted in ages past, in seasons spread beneath darkened moons and forgotten suns, of monsters she’d faced before, gestured one warning to her brethren, to her kin in a bellowing strain. “Run!”

Lena backed away, slow, methodical, diligent steps, and as the beast advanced (her heart hurt more, to hasten such a dreadful moniker to a beloved friend), she prayed, she sang, she strung melodies through shaking deliberation, ditties and arias strained into taut harmonies, closing her eyes to the heartless nightmares washing over their grandeur, their solace. Could she be healed? Hums and hymns, invocations for the devoured, for the corrupt, for the swallowed, wishing to be revered and serenaded again, for demons to be vanguished. It’s always darkest before the dawn.

“What a waste, to forget your love.
Your strength,
Your conviction and will.”

Her eyes opened to view the stranger before her, foe after friend, the swing of the tail postured for her cheek, and the stark, pale body of Imogen leaping into the fray, a selfless, desperate, brave and enraged fox feeling the prickle of barbs across her lithe figure. Her ears listened to the murmurs brooding and weaving, laced into the air, and the ghostly tremors of the vixen’s growls, the stoked flames given life in the afternoon haze. Morphed into transient mist, fogged over and intoxicated, like dissonant serenity, an odd combination of hellfire and song, bestowed and proffered across the swaying grasses – Imogen’s burst of embers and infernos sent towards Kahlua, the poignant effusion of mellifluous heartache conjured into singsong malevolence.


[Lena sings in effort to heal/mend/restore Kahlua. Imogen leaps and takes the hit from Kahlua’s tail, sends fire towards Kahlua.]

Hallowed sectors were left to rot, wither, fumble and ferment, stumbling ferocities and calamitous caprice unfolded into reckless abandon, into potent lyrics and undying valor, hollowed remnants of hell come to greet the divine, chiseling away at paragon pedestals. Revolving fixations, transfixing and spellbinding, pervaded through nature’s divine covenant, plucked rose harmonies from the flood of her vocals and damned the relentless chords of her reaching rapture. From Tangere’s escape, heeding her demand, fleeing, dashing, ensnaring warnings and coasting into silver abyss, Nao ignoring them altogether, searing and scorching, Imogen pierced but still fighting amongst the zealous tirades, embellishing power through smoke, fire and infernal gallantry, to her wayward song as it sought to abolish abominations through the animal, carnivore coil. There was nearly no time for regrets, for laments to polish ambitious dirges, to puncture the rhapsody of her singsong deliverance, to wonder if the burning machinations of Imogen’s unrelenting might scalded a hole in Kahlua’s heart, to see if Lena’s would be buried under its rubble too, to wonder if the world would shift and finally swallow them whole in its overwhelming, all-consuming nightmare. She only felt her kitsune’s fury, a vixen’s tumultuous wrath varnishing her veins, and the pull, the weight, the tangle of her power ripple through the surface of her pelt, glowing, luminescent, consuming the intertwining coat of ash, soot and decay through the Glazier’s screams, through the horror, the terror, the tyranny of the strange fates they faced. It wrapped the world, the clinging antipathy, the rasping, gasping, grueling, searing blades of acrimony into warm divisions of thread and strands, weaved a brilliant bough across the rapier tongue of Kahlua’s pincers, fought along the walls of its burdensome nettles and pried away the nefarious decadence, left dreams reeling and peeling. Only when she’d finished the brief, unwavering spell, and the smoke cleared, could her clear, composed eyes obtain the pictures they’d chased.

What had the glass-molder faced in the grasp of malice and menace? What anguish had she faced, what heartbreak had she rendered, what chasms had she brooded and bade until everything unholy had made her come undone? What choked the spirit, the effusion, the essence of all her kindness, all her benedictions, into unyielding strife, into suffocating maelstroms? How could the songbird retrieve all the goodness, all the moralities, all the tenderness and generosity from the tangled, knotted barbs of stoked, instigated menace? She shook, she shuddered, she quaked, a leaf on the wind, chased away by the rendered monstrosities of another being trapped in her frame, and the sienna belle reached forward, extended her cranium to wrap around the painted femme’s nape, offer protection, refuge, a haven across her broad shoulders, a petaled Elysium. Another reverie crooned from the decibels of her lips, soft and sweet, mellifluous and fluid, hoping to chase away the sins, the scars, the singed flesh and the portals of madness sunk back into its well. Through the beats of rhapsody, she sang away travesty, she brandished her unseen sword into the sinew of the nefarious, lacquered and stitched seams of glory back into their glossy surface. As Imogen tended to her own wounds, licking and plucking away at the thorns she’d gained from courageous acts, Lena composed dreams and sonnets, breathing assuaging hymns over the beat of Kahlua’s frantic, frenetic frame. “You are forgiven. All will be well again.” Meticulous threads of sanguine whispers, gallant and wise, extensions of sage selflessness, a harmonic veil slinking and sliding across sinned apertures, kept phantoms and wraiths at bay for another day. “It wasn’t you.” Across the plain, she raised her gaze to the worried Nao, a child born from poison and strength, diligence and survival, winking to assure her of no further threats. A monster had been consumed, devoured, its armor spurned away from the beloved creature it’d possessed, and they needed to do the same for so many more.

Mercy and reprieves, away from the clattering havoc, away from the smoldering wreckage, made up a core of the sylph’s foundation, and she used its might, its shield, its sword, to chisel away the clarity of vehemence and brutality. She embraced, loved, and cherished, swept away chaos with an offered hand, with a chorus of soothing bells and filled up the wishes of her dream jar with absolution and deliverance, hoped, prayed and salvaged innocence from travesties. Through devotion, through friendship, through guidance and renewal, she’d known the pieces of wonder, the shapes of hearts, the lines that crossed and merged together to mold and sculpt reveries, and in the collapse, in the wake, in the vestige of bedlam, she remembered – amidst her warmth, she tried to lend those precious notions to Kahlua. The kind, the earnest, the willing and innocent were always the first to fall, and the Glazier hadn’t deserved it; the undisclosed whims and caprice of wicked merchants and scarred sinners, hadn’t merited the rampage of its rancor, hadn’t meant to stumble into the closets and shadows of its rapacious hold. Of all the creatures in the world, perhaps her heart had been the lightest, untainted, glowing and gilded, a pedestal of virtues set upon its paragon vows, and Lena, already sullied, refused to see another one falter into brambles and thorns. The sobs, the weeping, the tears stained down in a rivulet across her withers, and determination, passions, reignited, charity and beneficence renewed through a surge of perseverance and might, clarity pervading in the angelic tones of her mellifluous words, the vibrant hums and hymns gathered into ears and nesting across assuaged brows. When they subsided, Lena and Imogen listened, strung together in silence, in regard for a friend who didn’t need to pursue any further avenues, to grant them something in return, because that had been the mender’s purpose, her lot in life, sacrifice and rites, absolution and sanctuary, tumbling over footfalls and perilous hazards in order to reach those incapable of mending themselves. To provide sanctum to a companion was never a treacherous motion, and for each stitched seam, she was granted resurgence in her motivations. A trill flowed and echoed over the paradise, over the grounds, a brilliant smile enlightened and reasserted, as if it had merely flickered away in threads of darkness, pulled back together by the call of heavens and ambrosia. “There’s no need, Kahlua.” Her maw, soft and cordial, lent itself towards the mare’s frame, along her shoulder, a guarantee in bond, solidified through strife. A wink, a laugh, attempting to hasten beauty in the rubble. “No debts, no obligations.” She tilted her head, honeyed eyes tenderly shielding, guarding the tempestuous storm of the Glazier’s doubts and misgivings. “Simply remain safe.”