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

He is made of quiet moroseness, this wayfaring stranger, filled with a silent sensation of melancholy, intertwined with vacant, hollow desolation. Plaited with cumbersome strings, the Gordian knot of ethereal despair, the expressionless, emotionless tides of his face have no ebb, no flow, tied, sown into that boundless weight of existence and turmoil. He suffers with a hushed, inaudible cord, pulled across in lacquered layers of his mottled hide, pride, twisted into the limbs of a shambled, indistinct, hallowed caress. The taciturn, soundless chords muffled into the dried, intrepid lands, his intimacies a cherished, furtive blend of secrets and assurances from the eyes of glades and newfound, idle companions. What does he want here? What does he search for? What does he run from? What does he hide? Her mind turned with these burning queries, but never voiced their recognition, their tumultuous credence, their thirsty bane. She too was made from enigmas, quandaries and paradoxes, and had no bearing to ruin another’s carefully woven obscurity. But from her position, head tipped, dipped, into his keen vision, he watched her, sullen and farouche, bristled against her words, a challenge hastened from one of his many swords. He’s driven his posture away from her charming figure, like a ghost harkening to his fellow spirits, to take his corpse away from the bright, complex frame gazing into his rigid stare. Her first thought is to laugh at him, this silly, gallant beast – but she doesn’t. Instead, her smile broadens, movements and motions like a warrior’s grace, poets and sonnets molded from a laureate’s mouth and pen, voice a calm, soothing dulcet tone, ignited at his provocation. “Grime is easily washed away. Fortitude is not.” The grin, corporeal and vast, doesn’t lose hold or sight of his bearings, even as an eye is lowered towards hers, disputing, questioning. Her answer, honeyed from her parted lips, is as valiant as the former, direct, brazen. “I see strength in your eyes.” The smile’s prominence doesn’t dim upon his adherence of her request – she and the other are allowed to see his risen head, the noble brow, or his own version of a grin, thin, wanting, bereft of emotion, but the cool appearance, awakening, is enough.

Following suit, her regal tiara is lifted, ears tilted towards the other, colorful individual amongst the gathered throng. His voice, clamoring, is enriched and infused with hued words as bright as his coat, mane and tail – a soft giggle is poised from her lips at his response, succeeded by a wink from her radiant gaze. She doesn’t know what he’s made from, or where he comes from either, but he was a curious thing, wrapped in veils and shrouds of metallic canvas. But then, before her inquisitiveness continued, another din shattered the remnants of a boisterous peace, a tumultuous uproar, shrieking, vulture voices that could entomb weaker flora and fauna. Her stare is immediately regarded upon him, this emaciated, skeletal creature, with a meticulous study, attempting to register whether this is idle prattle, confusion, or the sickly-sweet clawing of madness. Flushed, varnished, with the sugared, saccharine, infusion of one’s own mind content to destroy, scatter, splintering and fracturing the wholeness of reality, the tangible manifestations, until it dims. Then the stabbing, lacerating, plunging convulsions implode upon themselves, and they are left with naught but the addled scenes their membrane contorts. She wondered what battle contorted his siege with the hot, smothering air, if in the humid, flagrant heat he lost sight of his realm, delirious with the stroke of the Sun God’s rays. But she, like the others, hardened just the same at his crashing approach, his sinuous sibilating, the feverish coil of his wanton hysteria. Her composure, still enlightened, still elegant, became ever more rigid, defined, postured muscle of lithe lines inclined forward too, step by step with the melancholy beast. The nymph’s brilliant strength, conviction, heart, poured from the assemblage of sylph sinew, rhapsody in the cherished moments of perilous foreboding. She took another movement onward, one slight, precise motion ahead of the argent stallion, crown aloft, proud, but still, not threatening. Her words remained sweet, genial, cordial, but never wavering, never hesitant, never withering. A quiet trill, a soothing, assuaging tone embossed from affable lips. ”Are you all right?”