(This story is about my house knight Charlemont (Julien), who resides at @house-mercaiges. For the ease of organization for @sea-wolf-coast-to-coast, however, I will be posting this here to my main blog and simply reblogging it to Char’s, where it belongs.)
There is nothing to forgive, she whispered, petal-pale lips brushing ghostly and chill over my warm skin. Oh, if only it were true. Such a thing, such a lie, if there were only a sliver of truth inside it I would lose myself, cling to the shard of hope that somehow, some way, perhaps I was not guilty.
Lightning flashed outside, silent and blinding. For half a heartbeat the room went white and frozen. A sulfur and tin still life snapshot. Flowers wilted, dust gathered, and my voice died on my lips.
You could not have known, she insisted, and the world sank back into saturnine darkness. The lift of the light come crumbling into ash. I did know, you see, long had I overheard the secrets of the woods, hummed along to the warning hymn I knew from childhood.
Thunder bubbled up from malms away, low and hungry, and swelled into a devouring, starving thing. Yes, devour me, I thought, me and all around me. This house, its very foundation, the woods themselves. As if I could invoke such power. As if thunder had such strength. It is in silence, rather, the gentle quietude of the star-dark and glowing beams of the sun, that power lies. In the whisper of her voice.
I love you, Julien.
Oh, that voice. Reader, know that even in death, even in phantasm, her voice was honeyed wine, sweet and quickening to my very soul. It haunted and inflamed me; the ache in my bones, the ache in my blood, the ache in my heart and between my legs drew me all at once in a rush back to her face. Diaphanous and pale. Spectral. Beautiful.
No, I would not be forgiven for not saving her. Not in this life. Only in the bittersweet falling asleep.
(This story is about my house knight Charlemont (Julien), who resides at @house-mercaiges. For the ease of organization for @sea-wolf-coast-to-coast, however, I will be posting this here to my main blog and simply reblogging it to Char’s, where it belongs. Featuring @stab-sister with permission and overseeing.)
Julien moved through the slumbering forest with deliberate, gentle steps. Underfoot, twig and branch alike creaked and snapped; leaves crackled and shifted, dusting his bare feet with detritus and caking them with mud. The hem of his simple white nightgown appeared to bleed earth, the cotton fabric pulling the moisture upward in slow, hemorrhaging streaks. He’d trodden through shallow ponds and gullies rumbly with pebbles and thorns to find the voice that called him. Scratches on his hands and cheeks, dirt gathered under his nails, and the errant leaf snagged by his hair told the tale, and yet Julien traveled with a solemn sort of mysticism. He seemed to notice nothing more than that tree.
The single white birch that shot through the midnight wood and drew him closer seemed to sing, seemed to glow with a low, eerie thrum of energy that he could not ignore. Julien saw it in his dreams and searched for it during the day, but it was only at night that it appeared to him. In summer, at first, and throughout the fall. Now willingly, he left his warm, eiderdown pillows and quilts to venture into the icy Shroud, his hot, panting breath threading small cumulus clouds into the air.
I will tell you stories and secrets. Come listen, little one. You will be the only one to know.
(This story is about my house knight Charlemont (Julien), who resides at @house-mercaiges. For the ease of organization for @sea-wolf-coast-to-coast, however, I will be posting this here to my main blog and simply reblogging it to Char’s, where it belongs.)
i cover mirrors with stolen linen and bedsheets dresses peeled from your birch-white bones left smouldering in the ash of our childhood
drape them heavy hang them thick
ghosts hum songs our mother used to sing at midnight tattooing notes along heart strings plucked dry like feathers for quills
