fiarene
He stepped into the gloom, the brightness of the glade behind a spark over his vision. He flexed his sight, adjusted to the subfusc shadows of the forest, and took a deep, shuddering breath. He knew that if he tried to leave, he'd only be turned about again by the will of the forest's ghosts.
The air seemed to creak like cracking ice. The screams died out, faded, leaving his ears pricking and his eyes staring. The fog gave way to stillness, a glassy lake no longer rippling, a trembling night no long breathing.
Darkness was my fate it seemed, a life forlorn and bereft of the light that once had sustained me. Am I weak for what I did? Perhaps. But sometimes weakness is all you have.
Heart beats, muffled thuds that seem to echo, to preach of miracle. They are somehow hollow to me, somehow harrowing. Frightening - a foreboding assertion. Alive. I'm alive. And it's not a miracle at all.
He felt like the years of matt darkness were finally being buried. Life had a smell, now, a taste, a texture; there was more to it than breathe in, breathe out. Though, he mused, the sky was still an endless grey sheet pressing down on him, and she was a part of it still.
The trees echoed with the darkly stirring laughter of the lost darlings. I could hear them through my walls as I tried to sleep at night. They cried in the forest, they played their ghostly games and made my dreams itch and writhe.
She watched him go, a small, smug sensation growing in her chest. He was taking a piece of her with him yes; but it would be a potent piece, a loud piece. A piece that screamed in his ear as he tried to sleep, that whispered in his nightmares. No, he was not her salvation. Yes, she was left bereft. But she knew, at least, that she would be one memory he'd sleep with forever after.
There was now a chink in the metal, a frailness that had slipped beneath my awareness; a girl who thought too much, who knew too much. She frightened the rest of them, and put me in a very difficult position. A chain with a missing link rattled beneath my fingers, slowly falling apart.
She looked at him sidelong, one single tear dampening her eye; he'd not stop her. She didn't care. The bulge of her belly held more life within it than any cold embrace of his. It was finally over, one way or another.
His care was half-hearted. He told himself to close the ajar door on those memories, to allow the pain to dissolve into cleansed, cremated ashes. She was not the same, this was not history repeating. He closed his eyes and sighed. The girl's games were fairy-fancy and nothing more; the rumours of his lowers could not trouble his sleep.