Fear was a titan’s cruel mistress, smirking, snickering, mocking and laughing through her rapacious contortions, cutting and slashing against hopes, fortitudes, foundations and livelihoods, sinking and simmering beyond the walls of determination, trickling down spines and withering down the armaments carefully built and sculpted. For some moments, she allowed the briefest culmination of wonder and resolution; hadn’t they seen the worst, breathed down quarters of hellions, breached callous disregard, distorted and destroyed monsters and heathens back into their specious veils? But then darkness uncoiled and unraveled its next set of terror, and the firm, unyielding structure of their absolution, of their deliverance, faltered, stumbled and fell, chinks in armor set, marked and found, horror rekindled. As if they’d never felt the will of strength, as if all the weary shambles of their collected youth, as if everything had been for naught, eyes widened and blood ran cold, confusion crooned and panic struck. A choking wilderness, a smothering ferocity, a rampant discord of the harshest terms, flanking all sides until brutality strangled an ugly knot across hearts, throats and lungs. Lena became witness to the strife all over again, honeyed eyes taking in the equine femme’s wide-eyed glory fading into distress and dismay, swift and abrupt, a shift from deliverance into havoc. In answer to the outcry, to the trepidation, to the fright flickering over glowing stones, suddenly altered to gallows or nooses, the nymph’s smile dropped, ceased to exist. Only composure, only stubbornness, only the thickest valor beset her features, gentled and angelic without the ebullience, without the glory, without the buoyancy, calm and honorable, refined and tender. Unaware and ignorant of the reasons nestled behind the apprehension (for here, in the sunken pits and pendulums, was true serenity and tranquility, safety measured in steep steps and unseen stairs, while the world outside remained unkind and fixated on massacre), she focused on bringing them into refuge, her curiosity incensed and blossomed, but refused to yield the fruit of its yearnings over songbird lips. The maiden was allowed to keep her secrets.

Movements and motions, a harmonic walk brooding and brewing the labors of arias, proffered closer ambience, ethereal existence in the harsh degradation of foreboding, ominous tomes. Nearer, not touching, not scolding, not wishing or dreaming, but bestowing the generosity and charity of her benevolence, reaching towards the seams of unease, hoping to pluck them away from the scars of old and polish them into a new veneer, convince the bounty of nerves to adhere to heartlines and might. “We must.” A careful stream of hums conjured, assuaging and mending, soothing and appeasing, flowed from the tempest of bitter winds, winter vestiges (and suddenly her heart ached for mountains and summits, not holes in the ground), breaths of life scattered into flowers and minuets, Imogen’s chirps and calls effused into distant beacons. “It’s the only place where we remain safe.” Not out in the cruel earth, where the loam beckoned for sanctums and only left pieces of havoc in its place, weak, weary, twisted bones, merciless and unrelenting.

@[Elsiyum] @[Mermaid]