Funeral of Ice and Violence

Rime crackled in his clutches.

Days of blessed yore, a baby paddling, floating on his youthful hand— a sister was born, to thaw a once-thought-eternal winter.

Lightning tingled on his tongue.

She smiled as snaggle-toothed as a dogfish and swam as certainly. The water parted at her foamy passing; the glittering fish schooled in her wake. She swam, when the storm saw them to foreign shores, but didn’t quite make it.

Thunderheads gathered in his throat.

Forever would she swim, unfettered by the frigid depths. And he’d rend these foreign shores to sinking, so they would not interrupt her passage.

A God Made of Regrets

Small stripes of blood criss-crossed her veil, and a wail crackled up dryly through her chest. Frenzied, she wrote her husband’s pain-warped countenance there, upon the altar, and all the grief-struck tears she cried upon his dying face, and what he whispered to her, begging for a reason. The empty space her son looked to, expecting his father.

And in the blood-run channels, she saw spiny meridians, spatters of destiny. She prayed not to bear such grim witness, to blind herself to the face of her deeds. But wickedly there, in the briar-shrouded roads of her past, she saw god.

Swallowing

She screamed in silence; the words died in her chest. An abyss swallowed her, and with psychic tendrils pulled her every ghost into a primordial and everlasting black. She scrambled for the fading glow; when her fingers found naught to clutch, they instead scratched at her eyes, so that she may see some color by the pressure.

Like slime it gathered in the clutches of her khi, like e but empty. An antimeridious pit, from which she cried out for benediction.

But no desperate anything escaped that all-consuming hole. In its supernothing she drowned; her voice unspoken, her ghosts uncreated.

Adoration

Sweetly, he slumbered, cradled in her arms, peacefully silent even still amidst the birthing blood. Struggle had not yet worried his soft cheeks, loss had not yet concepted in his mind; yet, he wasted in her clutches, bruises pooling in his never-opened eyes.

Tears splashed on him.

From out her veil her eyes blazed with a pleading sort of rage; helplessness burned in her chest. The doctor’s sunken gaze fell sympathetically from a sad and boyish face. Revenge clutched her heart like thorns, and her hands— though still blessed by her baby’s soft skin— cried for justice, agonizing and slow.

The End of Night

He hunched on his greatsword like a walking cane; mountain air fresh on his face. While his frail old legs still held him, he would stand daily at the precipice; distant in his cataracted gaze, the broken siaion still stood. Akashically it echoed, a faded dawnmade remnant; still, in every mankind memory, its stones remained— a curse, perhaps, or a want for a sunrise.

Achingly, he yearned, with a future in his stare. His time was fading, to see again with blinding eyes the uranium filigree upon the ghosts of the siaion stone. And believe, for himself, the beauteous dawn.

Saevexia

A rowboat creaked, adrift on deepest sunset-flecked seas, and to its planks she was bound. Her skin flayed from days of harsh salted air; in spots her niqab fell crimson. Eyes mad with sufferance burned from within her veil; when she had no more tears to loose upon her saif, blood fell instead.

Her wrists blistered against her binds, and her stomach grew thirsty and ill, but she refused hopelessness, and begged the waves for deliverance to be answered with silence. For while she hoped, she never fell numb, and finally, all her mercy dissolved into the ocean of torment.