Another ruin, a precarious balance, a tenuous fall, a stirred, shaken crescendo waiting for the moment to drop, bold, unwinding, sinuous edges touching, ghosting, caressing and stroking the chaotic tempo – once a flickering reverie, now a frayed requiem – she held her breath, awaited the heady storm. She pictured a fierce gale rupturing precious sanctums, she imagined cordial hums bleeding into harsh nocturnes, she envisioned rhapsody blinded and blurred, burned into searing, scorching fringes, and thought she was perhaps the bringer, the caster, of the sudden stillness. Instead of enchantment, she’d harbored disappointment, spoiled tranquility, instead of allure and beguiling whirls, twirls, twists and turns, she’d murmured a horrendous spell, binding and tethering them to the decaying strands of the archaic ruins, of blistering memories and worlds once touched, once renowned, gone to devils’ advocates. She’d allowed the harmonious void to slip past her grasp and into corrosion, perishing, deteriorating in rapid, hollowed threads. No seraph, no enchantress, no queen of the valleys or thorns, miserable and contrary as the rest, pursuing smiles instead of ichor, until she couldn’t even avoid the shedding of blood, felt it between her teeth and over her tongue. Her eyes didn’t settle back over his frame, tied to the water’s lapping bounds, too ashamed and despondent to glance along his gilded hide; remaining a forger of grins, then a serenade of rue and remorse. Stars hastened back to their constellations, bright, vibrant essences disappeared, evaporated into pixie dust, and she offered no more, listening to the falls babble behind her, like a mocking beat of suns, moons, darkness, light, anointed, consecrated, hallow spheres sharpened to pick out the hollowed souls. She strayed and stayed within the visible hold of the reflecting pool, casting shades of manifested hearts and silk on steel, tattered and bending, a mirror, a juxtaposition of conquered anomalies, secrets spurned and yearned, rules cracked and webbed again, yesteryear’s chasm opening to play a fiend’s fiddle, a demonic duet.

The nostalgic, yearning, longing, pensive slate of his sigh, of his voice, mustered her courage, following the path of his voice back along his golden figure, trapped by the elegiac fixture and the reel of truth poised from it. Kindred spirits chained in the noxious haze, teetering into the abyss, standing, audacious and emboldened, along the line of destruction or compassion, seasons’ unwinding fibers and heathen fortitude – he missed their icy rime just as much as she, and she felt her breath pulse back into the labyrinth, a circlet of enigmas. But we will return to it soon, I’m sure. Like a brilliant presage, specter regime, blackguard gambles and cavalier tenderness, he formed hope on the segment of words, not teetering into the brink of failure, not poised across a hapless void, but beneficence, aspirations, desires, wishes proclaimed through fog, mist, flowers, and vines. The nymph felt the remnants scatter across her form, mold sienna into honey, fasten whimsy along her limbs, a laugh dance along her lungs, a smile hasten back to her lips. If she’d lost her senses, her ambitions, he coaxed them back to life, a phantom stoking coals and embers until they were a roaring, dancing, harkening flame, and she played the serene, the angelic, the ethereal, the beneficent again. The grin enveloped back into a singular rhapsody, flowing off of the painted walls and the blossom tapestries, sketching over tainted coils and stained particles, a spectacular varnish of carols, trills, and thrills. “I’m sure you’re right.” She winked, nodded, moved in time to the rushing current, as Imogen chirped the same harmonic tune, blended into the symphony. “Soon.”

Chiseled garden walls held no visible match for the mysterious Roland, for no sooner had she bade motions and movements back into fanciful, lithe, limber steps, he joined the segment. She wondered, for the slightest moments, if he spun impulses, urges, to distract her, to court her away from the corruption, the brutality, covering, surrounding, piercing beyond the warren confines. Beneath the fronds, the falls, the lights, he was a siren in his own right, and she was inveigled back into the soiree, seduced into foolishness, into antics, into merriment and jubilation. She dared not slip again, throwing away the gnarled snippets and knotted wires snagging over her sentiments. For what was better: to forget or become mired, dampened, doused, and suffocated under the weight of horrific quandaries and possibilities? Lena waltzed alongside and chose the former, forelegs extending towards the water, strides becoming splashes, smiles becoming loud, harmonic laughter, encompassing, trimming, over their silly, vivacious hold. Once or twice she aimed a cascading shroud of water towards his frame, giggled conspiratorially and swiveled amongst the jungle castle, aloof, exultant, triumphant, reigning fairy and fey over the cracked courtyards and sunken, drenched mirrors. Her vocals, her tunes, captured again in the nestled harpsichord, fanned and pervaded the wallowing, lapping swell. “Wonderful!”

@[Roland]