beloved

Unlike most, the damsel does not balk or cower, she does not flee; she approaches. Delighted laughter breaks away from the ivory one as she traipses along the bank, the wind caressing her fine hair and dislodging it like flyaway tethers that carry airborne spiders to a distant destination. The giggles die away into a mutated grimace of a smile, that she is right, again, that her mad mind so quickly reads the pages of this one that flutter and lose their scent into the breeze.

She smells of trees and no one but herself, and her eyes, those perfect, bloody eyes, they are the most sorrowful rubies she has ever seen. The mad one looks into them longingly, almost as if she might feel what touches the beating heart within this porcelain casing before her, so delightfully sculpted in tones that suit the tastes of the dancer so well; she has never felt sorrow, nor has she ever felt alone.

Was she ever truly alone?

The river mockingly laughs no, and she kicks a stone into it, grinning at the plinking sound of its rippling form breaking while her eyes still watch the emotions pulsing with as much noise as the creek across the wanderer’s pretty face.

The first signs of discomfort bleed into the moment as she looks away, looks back into the white, shining eyes of the stream and the stars. That she asks is ridiculous and makes the ivory one inhale sharply, snorting a feminine little harrumph into the air as she herself now looks out into the dark branches.

Mortals are all so stupid.

"I am these things, yes," she says to the branches, as the other snowy queen speaks to the watchful water, "but the water is water." Always laughing, always mocking, never still, not even beneath the guise of glass that it adorned in the frigid months, not even when it seemed to vanish into the earth. Beneath it all it was still alive, after the rains it would again rise to dance and writhe and jest at the sensible Beloved, and there was not a damn thing different about the water over there than any water she had ever met in all her years.

It was everywhere, and it watched. Surely the stranger knew that? The curious tilt of her head arises again in time with the mental inquiry, a breathless and nearly silent chuckle rising from her pointless ruminations.

"Do not stare at it so, loveless," she whispers, having suddenly contorted her face to again watch the woman on the bank from her curious tilt and glazed expression once aimed at the tree line, "it doesn’t like it."


@[Ophelia]

die like God, on the cover of time