Circuta

From crepuscule comes the call of warfare and hostilities; ominous and forewarning ricocheting between haunted corridors and alabaster lined harks— a song of damnation and extinction against the presipisses of wilting harks and aching domes, shrill pangs of strain and fever burning along the caverns of a dehydrated cranium, snarls and cries of hunger twisting and chaining a writhing stomach backwards within her swaying frame (the illness that dizzies her as soon as the bellowing wail reaches her willowy bodice does not aid in the beast that attempts to devour her from the inside of her own flesh and blood). Nausea rises as bile from within the swan's throat and lays down camp at the very back of a shivering maw and enlarged pupils (malaise and periorbital puffiness seem to latch unto her as the bodies of leeches) and the Nightingale can swear that as inflamed muscles grind into gear and she stumbles forth towards the resounding cries with a exceptional and surprising lack of finesse she can see bloodless milky whites and gleaming fangs twinkle at her from the obsidian cloaks that shadow her every step (is this what hallucinating feels like?)

Before trembling ligaments that tingle and scald her with a numbness she will (has) grown well accustomed to in the tide of a rolling loss of kin and brothers alike she has (never) seen in such numbers before; never expected to fall upon her shoulders. There is a exhaustion that plagues, stalks, preys after her as a feline with a helpless rodent in it's sights— a squinting of widened violet as daylight clashes agonizingly with headache tortured purple, a gaping hole shadowing momentarily the forms of two individuals— a behemoth and a arabian, one that smells of disease and rot and the second of life and existence, colliding forces that awaken each and every on edge nerve within her taut bodice (she is too tense, too tense) and startling blurry visuals into crystal keen focus with a dizzying quickness that disorients the Nightingale if but a second in time.
What the Nightingale sees turns her sinew to stone.

From the collapsing world above gloats the harbinger of Thanatos with sickening ease (you are bringing destruction to your own kind) and her breath is taken as if He is a thief in the night; for He is cloaked in a frame of hardened mahogany and decomposing ashen, lacking of tendrils of (what appear to have once been) but a few strands of onyx mane and sporting a missing cape to trek behind Him. The Nightingale cannot get a completely clear view of the man's dome; but it seems the flesh around His maw has decomposed into bone and ivory and chills run down a shuddering spine at the swords that adorn Him; at the skeletal and raven wings that sprout from His sides (not natural, not natural) and she shudders at the monster in of itself.
He is a servant of Thanatos.

And she is the accursed servant of anarchy.

Within a dome that scurries and tosses thoughts around with the carelessness of a starving canine and the order of a scattered herd of bison she is damned to the imageries of another; for is this what her fellows have fallen before? Conjured forth from the depths of a Machiavellian mind rush in as the evening waves of the sea (and oh, how she misses the brine)— the flash of a royal tinted obsidian woman streaked with the storms of the deserts and gifted pearls of the ocean (no no no no no NO)
attempting to shield the golden son of Apollo with ringed crown, ivories of once calm depths glinting in a half-lit corner (leave her alone leave her alone leave her alone) as a hideous beast crawls forwards from the deep (it's slobbering maw twisted into a murderous grin) and the sound that catches in her throat as it leaps from the muddied Earth towards Leto is a scream that never makes it to the surface.

There is the beheaded bodice of the wingless angel, the medic, the healer, there is the (racing) bodice of her Jester as she attempts to escape that which haunts her from the forests (please don't stop, don't stop) and the twisted little girl whom she has nicknamed (with affection) the songbird of her people. There is death. There is the overwhelming stench of blood and rot and the Apocalypse has come upon them.
Half-awake dreams meld with realities and then the pallid frame of the ivory stallion becomes Him— the pearlescent froth of a long-forgotten by most general and a choked sob is strangled forth from tightening throat (she feels as if a rock has slid down against her windpipe) and salty liquid emerges from grief-stricken violet and suddenly the Earth is moving and her hindquarters have bunched— and then she is throwing herself at the monster with a poisonous dome lowered towards his broad bosom; ire and passion and resentment and sorrow and regret and guilt rising up from within a tumbling, writhing core of endless turmoil (she is drowning within her own bodice).

It is then that the scream rips away from burning lungs, a pitiful, painful keening of a sound and it rises into the air as a siren.
It is one word.

One unfinished sentence.
And it holds all of the tumbling emotions she has been subjected to the past few (what feel like) millenia.
"NO!"