beloved

The wind whispers, and holds her.

Tall Wood, she knows it as, the trees so old that their tops are obscured in the darkness of night, when it reigned. For now, the Sun burns overhead, the very lash which had driven the demon into this realm of beginnings; not that she avoids it, this place, rather that she doesn’t intentionally seek it. When she does, however…

Well, she doesn’t like to leave with nothing.

Peering through the boughs of the sentinel pines, her ears twitch, and pivot, while her lips titter, tutter about the coos and warbles of one who has forsaken rational for power, the expressionless pallor of her mask occasionally warped by the presence of a twisted smile, and a smattering of peculiar giggles staining the otherwise silent air. All that moves about her is the foliage, and the little beasts which scurry and scamper away from the presence of the serpent.

Until her, that is.

Beloved narrows her eyes, legs stilling their ethereal sway, heart fluttering in her breast at the mark of the rune on the breast of the bleak stranger. Many are the realms she has witnessed the burning of, and many are the titles of that inevitable Finality, master of War, and Famine, father to Suffering: Death, Mortis, Yr, the angel knows it by all its names, and dances in the arcing sway of its curved blade. To see her, so soon upon the death of the Reaper, his name emblazoned on a foreign breast, does the white witch well to behold, as if a sign from the beyond that Death does not Die. Does she, too, dance among the fire which scalds all but the worthy, this stranger with the shadow entwined in her flesh, with moony tendrils interwoven among the perfection of pitch? Or is she culled, toppled, severed by that scythe’s sweeping reach, as the rest of them, the rabbits, the weak?

"Behold, stranger," sweetly croons the wicked one from the shadow of the Tall Wood, her ivory figure arriving from brambles and hidden places beyond the trail to lay eyes upon the wandering one more fully, "the realms of Helovia in spring."

Tilting her crown, a peculiar forty five degree angle given to her neck, her silvery eye shudders, as a deep breath of the woman’s perfume is drawn in through pale, milky nostrils.

"Beloved does not often walk here," speaks the demoness of truths, righting her awkwardly angled head and giggling, "but she always walks well, you see. You seek refuge, yes? They all do, here."

die like God, on the cover of time