There is love in your body but you can't hold it in,
It pours from your eyes and spills from your skin,
Tenderest touch leaves the darkest of marks,
And the kindest of kisses break the hardest of hearts



Heartstrings swerved towards a tangible pull, the force of her insecurities melted, corroded, into an elegiac twinge of melancholy and frustration. There were many things she didn’t crave, hunger for in the midnight toil or the morning dew, and yet, one continued to surface again and again along the brink of her youthful mind. When the pulse of ferocity swung into her chest, beating a dreadful din, a haunting, savage decree, she’d fought it, but also embraced it. Instead of chasing away the predator amore, the carnivore reverie, the wolfish, rapacious, ravenous pleasure, she’d taken it into her possession, lacquered the ferocious threads to her plaited soul, allowed the chains of bestial shades to corrupt and devour her compassionate, tender veil. She’d spent all of her short life avoiding the condemnation of her lineage, where mad kings cherished terror, where heedless, merciless adversaries combed the earth for their next sacrilege, where the eaves loomed to paralyze ignorant dwellers, and now, she’d invited it into her being. She’d allowed the ruthless benedictions, irreverent invocations, and barbarous calculations to enter her soul, let them consume, thrive, and swallow the bountiful edges of her once whimsical hide, eat at her divine core until it too was stained and unholy. Was she as iniquitous as they, massacring, bludgeoning, destroying what was once precious? Was she as licentious as they, brutal, bloody and ravaging demons, sullying the earth with their derisive, impertinent blades? Was she to be as wicked and vile as her father? Was she to be as haunted and unhinged as her mother? How many times had she told herself that strength did not come from the trappings of her lineage, those inhumane, sadistic and vicious conjectures, but from the course of her own stalwart, valiant efforts? Her own version of potency, reverberating kindness, tranquil opulence, quiet, ardent optimism, glowing confidence, created in the hollow, hallowed woods where she’d escaped danger and cheated death - had she so readily forgotten it? Had she truly been lost on the fields of battle, incapable and blinded by the violence, that she’d had to trap and unleash it herself? Had it really been so easy for her to fall? How close had she actually been to grace, and was it too late to return?

Disgusted, her eyes failed to leave the tracings of the icicled wall. The nymph’s gaze, cold and aloof, reflected and bounded off the sharpened edge of her horn as it rested against the chilled surface, rigid stare fixated on any stained emblem it’d managed to ensnare from the battlefield. When she noticed nothing, she allowed her countenance to drift elsewhere, focusing on the cold, how it brushed against her coat, savage, threatening, and she allowed the briefest shudder to overwhelm her form. She’d been still too long, caught in the web of frustration and insecurity, and she likely would have conjured another form of self-loathing if the icy sovereign had not made his approach. Lena heard the flap of his owl’s wings first, and gave herself just enough time to scramble on the icy floor, not elegant, not graceful, but foolish, trembling and weary, sinking against the waves of her scorn. Of all the creatures to stumble upon her darkened, mangled soul, he was the last she would have wanted. Who longed to remind their leader of their fragility? Of their weakness, of their failings? Of how, despite always striving to become something useful, they still fell and sunk to perils and tribulations? This was not how she yearned him to see her, scorched and delicate, fragile and feeble, incapable of handling a side of herself she didn’t like. As he came towards her, concern etched in his voice, in his touch, she struggled again to rise from the dank, frigid ground, coercing her form against the wall, appearing capable of motion and movement. The sylph painted a forced smile across her lips, hoped to render it as one of good cheer, of a fanciful edge she used to possess. “Mauja." Even her tones proffered daunting, specious lies, painfully dipped into silken threads that warbled and crooned, but contained no previous, precious luster. “I’m fine.” Terse and brief, they spilled over the cavern walls, echoed in rough shambles, and she poised her eyes elsewhere, anywhere, off the floor and across the crowded parlor, resting upon his own burnt, scarred hide. He was worried, anxious, for her, when his own wellbeing was in crisis. If Lena could have hated herself anymore, it would have been in this agonizing moment, where she didn’t deserve kindness or affection. Perhaps, she was truly wretched. Her words flailed again, old patches of tenderness and benevolence searing through the worn, duplicitous enamel. “How are you? Your wounds?” She tried to carefully maneuver her lithe body around the ailing monarch, twisting away to give him more space, offering something besides her morose guard, her tangled, frail deceptions.

There is love in your body but you can't hold it in,
It pours from your eyes and spills from your skin,
Tenderest touch leaves the darkest of marks,
And the kindest of kisses break the hardest of hearts



Sin meets sorrow, and sorrow meets sanctity. The forest is dark, quiet, aloof and detached, but she chooses its hallowed grounds over the enlightened hills and plains, where sin is illuminated, awash, aglow, proud and vibrant. She dances, twirls and spins amongst the enigmatic boughs and limbs of maple, oak and pine, along the needled pathways, across the shadowed doldrums, because otherwise she would dissolve into hate, loathing and contempt. She waltzes in the moonlight’s candor and pirouettes in the sun’s warmth, because without the elements she has nothing, is nothing. She sways in the breeze and sings warbling hums, because without the serenity of her heart, she is like them, beast and monster, callous, malicious and deceitful.

Lena was not a creature to spill secrets across pages, ink mottled and stained against fine scrolls. Instead, she locked rancorous pathways, shut creaking gates behind her, lacquered layers of harsh, unrelenting treachery behind an aching heart, became something anew, polished, gilded. She traced the grounds of bestial, raptorial predilection and never looked back, never thought to glance upon her primrose path, never sought the rigor of brutality, the clamor of savagery. Walls and palisades steeled the grounds of her bountiful beneficence, where clarity of kindness surfaced in rapturous candor, and the remorseless blood kindling in her soul never brimmed, never fostered, never kindled amongst the fumbling haze of neutrality, divinity, and villainy. So often she lingered in the threshold of the sanctified, the blessed, the seraphic, bright, luminescent, plucking whimsy from fanciful fingers, striking harpsichord melodies from smiling lips. Pleasant, wholesome, genuine, frolicking in the brittle, fragile, delicate artifice of wonder, compassion and sacrifice, the elegance of her nymph being. Now, was it all a farce? A deception? A specious design carved from vicious, inhumane ancestors – did claws prick against the surface of her enlightened, holy vessel, did talons snag against her angelical tapestry, did pincers rip, ensnare and shroud her frame in the licentious ecstasy of power, make her yearn for more? Where innocence was worn and frayed, had it been replaced by the unholy desire for bloodshed, for anarchy? Had she become so twisted, so distorted, so disgusting and despicable, that she couldn’t return from the barbaric, sadistic mantles of her brethren, accepting an existence she’d long since denied? Where had her grace gone, vanquished and vanished in the heat of battle? When had her ethereal contentment faded, the serenity of her entity chiseled away? Had she offered herself to devils and let them take her soul? Had she crumbled? Had she fallen?

She’s alone, martyred and sacrificed to the world of shadows and mist, but prefers the isolation to the distinct debauchery breathing down her neck. She stumbles and falls in the unwavering darkness, but cherishes its rough, blunt knife to the blades that would capture and embroil her flesh, plait her into the other fiends and devils. Only here could she become something new, precious, tinted with roses and laced with thorns. She’s an elemental soloist, uniting with the glade, the abyss, instead of the eternal iniquity’s clamor bursting in her ear drums.

She was too ashamed to look upon Mauja, too worthless, teemed and swarmed with the overwhelming bout of remorse and disgrace, clattering from her paragon pedestal. What would he think of her now, the innocence removed from her vessel, the scarred remnants of another time, another place, apparent, renewed and reconstructed, barbs of the flesh puncturing against the soul. Would he despise her, as she did of herself now? Would he find her weak, decrepit, disgusting and pathetic? Would he chase her away, this creature that claimed kindness but reverted to a cruel, disgusting heathen amongst the bitter halls of the battlefield? Would he feed her to the waters, lay her pockets full of stones, watch her descend into the mania of her distorted entity? Would she be alone again, when she’d tried so hard to immerse herself into the love and affection of a herd? Was she truly as ruined as she felt? Her eyes scorched the scenery of the cavern walls, the precious luster of their honeyed hue dimming to a forlorn, dejected stance, hollow and empty, contorted into the miserable sanctions of her restless emotions. She struggled with the despondency, with the concealments, with the tasteless and arcane labyrinth of her reigning fortitude. Should she further shatter here, in this cave, with only her monarch to pay witness, to rid her of this fiendish, abominable state? Lena remained standing, listening, trying desperately to not entangle her inner wounds with his blue gaze, let him see the cruel bindings of what she’d brought upon herself. Her head hung, low and dejected, worthless and inferior, and she thought to chase him away, to render one more lie across her tongue (because what was one more in all of the ones she’d swallowed and captured, fed to the world), but some hope remained kindled in her heart, incensed and outraged by the morose melancholies, refusing to be broken. And then, would I be selfish again, to seek his counsel, to need, to want his support, when he probably needs it just as badly? So, all at once, her lips parted, and the sound of her sufferings rattled against the floor, fumbling, reaching, grasping for something to hang onto. “Have you ever hated what you were becoming?”

She stays there, haunted and graced, as they move against the land, a streamline of savagery, a cloud of behemoths. There is nowhere else to go in her young mind, no other world she knows, but oh, she doesn’t have to foster their motions, their movements. She doesn’t have to belong to their hostile, acrimonious convictions. Where they snarl, she bows. Where they slash, she prays. Where they linger, she hides. Where they crave, she dreams. And she vows, amongst the sliding, beckoning, twilight, that she would never be like them.