Chapter VII
A gray shape dithered outside Lucilla’s chambers, looming like incense smoke for a baleful ceremony yet to be announced. Dull light from the Lady’s window slunk underneath the door, yet even without the bulwark the daylight was too beleaguered to shine any charm. For imminent storm benighted the sky, and the mood inside the Duskmont manor was lusterless without their patron’s song to assure beauty & order.
“Thank you for coming doctor. We would have – should have – sought your presence earlier, but the Lady spoke no accord. These last few, we truly have become her keepers. I pray this curse does not last.” Tidwell teetered around, pricking his thumbs, and shyly peeking toward the threshold. “She peaks nil and has slept even less.”
“Hence your request for a sleeping agent?” Doctor Halloway studied his caller with eyes as gray as the light remaining to the prime sphere’s reign. “The woes of the mind are as fascinating to me as finding balms for the terrors of the body. I only pray her ailment responds to curative means.”
“Our lady will not eat. She refuses to attend even the shortest services or even amble through the courtyard. Confined herself to the bed, she has. Fettered by an evil malaise. Some spell.”
Valdred’s furled brow rolled new creases atop his temple. “A depressive spell? Is it kinder company she requires then, I wonder, to have her woes heard. If a spiritual agent is upon her, or we have dallied overlong and true malignance is there, mayhap a priest would be better to call for. If it is of the mind, well, we can try. But the owner of a mind must reach out to receive help from within its dimension, broker a pact from within. Her will must lie in the desire to weave the heart together.”
“Yes, yes, that is all well and fine. Alas, tis the peace of sleep which should restore her pith.” Tidwell poured his supplications to divinity & the power of passions for his patroness into his palm, cupping a half-prayer from his plinth while muttering enlightened reasons for her despair. “Tis these recent happenings that fray her heart. What with whispers of war and, of course, her formerly betrothed…”
“I read what became of Vincent. Yet I believe your Lady’s heart is stronger than a premature plunge following one suitor’s stay in hell.” Valdred poked his aquiline nose against the door and asked permission with a sign from his hand. “I must hear from Lady Duskmont herself.”
“You can knock but she will not answer.” Huffed Tidwell, stepping astride the doctor to unbar the chamber with a swift key.
Lucilla lay curled on an odd angle of the bed, gripping her skin as though a blanket. She clumped herself in poise of an unborn in the womb; a piteous sight for a grown woman who had no right to be in such spiritual health (by the purview of her caste). Halloway peeled the curtains bare and peered long at her stupefied and pestered response. His silvery stare lingered on her, peering awhile as if expecting her to burst aflame with boils or some pox. But her eyes only turned form the tortured sun, being so recently unaccustomed to it. She found the cover of clouds not bleak enough to block the most adamant rays of the darling star, seeking quiet of color to match her mood.
“My lady,” Valdred tipped his hat and let flow his frost tipped locks in a gallant bow, “your friends have asked for insight on what keeps your ridden. If you would permit me the indiscretion of applying my vocation?”
Lucilla’s blue spheres ignited with tides that broke her sea, lulled by grieving sirens, by the thunder of discontent. A faint lark fluttered through her lips. “Your habit as an alienist, Mister Hallo, or an alchemist-physic? If the latter, I beg you to have brought mercury. That should work a wonder. Or perhaps formaldehyde is suitable for the ignoble pose you find me? The wrappings of my bed should suffice for the gauze of my sarcophagus. Only, free my ‘friends’ from their service first so that they may elope from my burial.”
The doctor chuckled woefully as he leaned to appraise her pulse. The cadence of her primal chamber seemed slowed only by despondency. Tilting his ear to study her rhythm, Dr Halloway glanced toward the aperture in anticipation. But it was far too early, and no symptoms of his worry blared from heaven’s trumpets. “& if I do come as the former, Lady? For a matter of the mind?”
“You may find all suspicions thrust upon my womanly nature by worldly men – our hysterics, our brooding, our insatiable appetites for mysticism – confirmed by your bias. Your enlightened wisdom should seek me as a victim to my wilding lure, the curse of our mother Eve.” Lucilla was at least spirited enough to whittle her tongue to sardonic appeal. “Only, prithee, do not fetter me to the fool who tried to bind my hand. Bury me far from his asylum.”
Valdred smiled, knowing her vibrant scathing as a portend of lucidity which would’ve been pilfered by any great plague, and the one he most feared. “Fair spirit, do not disserve your nature by casting it in the mold designed by dead men and their heirs. You are more than any mania or sanguine melancholy.” He retreated from his observation of Lucilla to pull a vial & tongue from his coat, relying now on his elegant cane for support. He tapped the serum and its needle and offered Lucilla the subtlest of winks, one which might be interpreted more as a spasm of age. “Master Tidwell claims to know you well enough to surmise a mere sleep may restore you. I shan’t intercede without your permission, though we would observe only a taste of medicinal repose. Is this sedative kind enough to your eye?”
“I will try anything to shush their prattling.” Lucilla sighed and the winds encroached on the window with weepy tears through the armada of welkin vessels. “Whatever repose is in that thread, I insist tis more than necessary. Let it be enough to ease my way across the glaring threshold.”
Gravel jostled in his humor as Valdred shook his head. “That would be breaking a great contract with my oath. As much as it pains me to refuse a lady, I cannot indulge this fevered want to fly into death.” He propelled himself up with his staff, his wounded smile towering over Lucilla. Her eyes flittered with a greater fear of being jabbed with his protracted nose than the translucence in his serum. “That being said, none of us our immune to mistakes. If chance and fallibility conspire. Our age of reason (and the glory of progress from vagabond fens to high walls & bright towers) is only so ‘enlightened’ as to see one corner of our quarters. We illume what we wish to believe and chase all else back to the shadow of old fears, and those instincts we long to deny.”
“Then, I shan’t deny my longing for rest.” Lucilla tucked back the frilled lace along her forearm then reclined in cadaverous pose. “I need not maim breath to speak the reason.”
Valdred nodded. With the tourniquet clamped to her, the gentleman’s solution quickened in her vein. “Gird yourself for the phantasms that stalk our rest.”
The fang breached Lucilla’s skin, dripping its venom into her rivers. Arctic tremors followed the needle’s bite, yet a summer’s darkness soon pursued and washed the cold. The jaw of this current holding her by the nape subverted sound as it bathed her in languid broth. Storm-light broke as the sky’s navy brought bolt & black sails to conquer the waning day. She sank into the dusk within. Drowned in infinity, wreathed not by dreamless seas but a writhing nadir.
...
True dark persevered as the boisterous tempest spent the bulk of its fury. The brunt of the assault passed on, satisfied with besieging Gorgotha’s heights with a few inches of rain, though reserves remained to herald triumph. The howling scavengers of the air were aplenty. Even without the gloating ballistae of lightning, the profaners of peace & slumber ravished the scoria of starlight and snuffed all stubborn luminance of man’s make. Any insomniac fool, drunk sod, or startled resident who dared their eyes to survey the night would find no aurum glow from lampposts or the dangling torches of street wardens. Only the gloss reflective from nocturnal hunters and the lucidum layered the black gulf. Pews of teeth packed the midnight corridors, inching toward the skin of tortured dreams and bleeding hearts with every groaning pulse.
In the apex of fell hours and the court of gloom, the hunter grinned at the proud curves & wet pores of the Duskmont manor. Wraiths whipped the building as they did all bodies caught outside the comfort of a proper stone hearth, but their lashings only teased him, the prowler. Bloodlessly the windlassing currents offered the pale shadow a smattering of slaps and licks to spur his ascent. As mist & claw he scaled the wall, leaping onto a dreary garden bough that shook off heaven’s excess tears but not the thirsting body of predation perched on its limbs. Eyes akin to a strix chased entry into this home where his heart slept yet no avian hoot offered accompaniment. The odorous saliva outflowing from the corners of that snout belonged to a beast that was as saurian as lupine.
Breathy gales resuscitated grievous liturgies, carrying the banner of the storm through chittering arms. Each branch, an instrument; every stone, a drum to hammer; all banshees snared in the necrotic filaments, sopranos to lead the choir, caroling bane. Centered in their sway, the shape – in wan tragedy of human likeness – hung from its brief roost and hummed the prime part of the night’s hungering melody. With moonlight banished to a memory and the sordid dew of passing storms whose absence was threaded by yet more fog, unhallowed light sprang in the gulches. Vespers hemmed the dark with the glow of salivating eyes and lunate lilt. Earth’s unguarded creatures were lulled to their cradles, pretending innocence to shiver off the lion’s roar woven into the burgeoning brass in the hunter’s serenade.
With a basilisk’s eye, Harrow stripped each stone and muscle with a command in his glare. Under the hum of his longing, he surveyed the ambling obstacles inside the manor. The servile case was stripped of their muscle to reveal their auras and the weakness he would call to. A splayed tongue slipped through the alabaster halls and beckoned the loitering heads to hear his hex forced upon them. Sleep… Suggested the gorgon glance, peering past stone and mortar. The eye washed the marrow of those it set upon. Dream.
Thus, the souls his heightened sense uncovered were sundered by the craving for a Lethean rest. With a wave of the fiend’s talons the wind’s evanescent repose was broken and reprised by impish lullabies, plucked from the bushels of the sleepers’ subconscious. Though their arteries felt the violations of a lurking strigoi’s study, the enraptured servants fell to the cravings that conquered them and those dreams they ached to embrace. Forgetting their vigil, the faulty sentinels allowed that perverse eye to persist. Fixations of that preternatural predation gravitated to their mistress, shorn of her heart’s unrest by an unnatural solution, drooling through sallow orbs that replaced the crippled lune.
Awake, my heart!
...
A power surpassing the sweetling drip of her doctor’s venomous needle lured Lucilla from her synthetic coma. Even in the dreams before her awakening, visions of a friend – and far more through the glint in that buried face – given to the grave for her in waking existence found furrows into her sunken canvas. Ectoplasmic threads conned her into memories unfulfilled. Though Luci humored these phantasms of the heart, the pulse they traveled bore an unnatural cadence. She was drawn to these feelings by hands of ether, and yet, unsealing her eyes against the pressure of the residing sedative, Lucilla was greeted by her forlorn lover’s face winking at her. From every corner and gross umbra cast from the furniture in her bedchamber, Arden’s visage congealed and procreated; springing from one angle into the next until she swam in that basin of blending features. Fingers from the bower beyond the pane scratched glass, inviting her into a dream of wanton lucidity should only she answer the rap at her door to the undying world.
Darts landed in the lady’s pressure points. Ephemeral lesions jabbed fresh hairs from her spine, propelling each fiber to the window. Bristled feelers, from ankle to cerebellum, sang for the embrace of what looked like moonlight behind those foul curtains. What longing was this, tilting her heels for the company of the dead? By her gait and those hobbling footsteps, our Lucilla might’ve been confused for an unsteady member of the undead, were there any living archons to grind their stares in judgement against her. Yet salvation bloomed for the maiden, taking shape in a sliver through the drapes.
A dead moon hung in darkness between the covetous stars and the envious dark between them. But beyond that dearth of celestial light, an incarnadine iridescence devoured the pitch of twilight in its witchery. Luminescence emerged from the sunless shawl, reborn by the waxen beams of Arden’s mien. Was it Arden? Could it be? Yet, he looked like a hanged man; suspended as a blind creature in the cavernous maw of that black hour. Against all plausibility, Lucilla lunged toward belief in that inverted crescent of his smile, knowing his fervor as true.
The beacon in his welcoming smirk summoned her even as his figure hung from the branch. The din of far-off thunder and delayed flares of sliver-blue shattered the awoken woman’s eye. In the splintering of gloss and dread, his shape inverted. A waking precision in the thread of night’s hand sewed his likeness into form, misting the door into her hearth. Arden, pronounced by mist and thimble of silver, appeared all too human in the parched gloom just past her sill…
Ritual breaths and the symbols of nature’s flow snagged on the waylaying eyes that gripped Lucilla. Those dreams that borrowed into her bosom orbited toward this specter of Arden, smiling at her from the stairs of her arbor and offering a life surpassing all decadence, sorrow, and splendor through the vow his lips hissed to say. A gibbous will, that was not her own – yet made do of it through her frail thew – swelled up inside her. She swayed under the burning itch that ravaged her pulse until compulsion bid her nails to tackle the glass and break it through the softest welcome in the storm. Twirling before the unconscious ceremony that was asked of her, Lucilla let in the stream of moonlight beaming from a lover’s silhouette.
Adrenaline, and that spectral appeal to her core, washed her sinew of lethargy. Lucilla’s eyes, once yearling crescents dragged by lines of spiritual exhaustion, bloomed to engorged moons. Terror distended her pupils; a caress across her nerves widened her iris. New hues radiated brilliance that meshed regret with desire, flickering through her marrow, splintering her course until she was staked before Arden’s changeling glow. His apparition eclipsed her breath. Her lungs tested their cages, squeezing melancholy to make way for flight – or else to recede and cease.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Will you let some moonlight in?” Asked the apparition.
To Lucilla, Arden looked immeasurably more beautiful in this half-ghost phase than he had in her earthly knowledge of him in life. The withering effects of his spirits (and the other ointments for the soul & liver) had been polished away. No creases of age, stress, want, folded his luminance. He was taller than ever, as handsome as a mountain and offered just as steep a climb. To journey along the heights his hand promised – what impossible dreams, what fields to find above the air – hinted also at the chasms and the gnawing gulf, more certain than the summit.
“What are you?” A hoary whisper inquired for her.
“Your friend, of course. Your servant if you wish. Yet so much more.”
“Will you answer how you have come, and why? This hour is most unchaste.”
“I come to adore…you & your virtue. To abjure my faults as well… What better hour than midnight and this new moon to reinvent ourselves. To be naked of old vices and the fetters of our day.” A gentleman’s affected charm blended with a rakish element in the tilt of Arden’s voice. His words rumbled low but rose over the trailing sirens in the resurgent winds. A tone richer than aurum and smoother than eastern silks dressed Lucilla’s ear. “Allow me to illuminate a hope beyond the mystery I must arrive in. Only, let me speak these revelations to your lips. At least without this glass and your fear between us.”
“You renounce the grave? You truly are a sorcerer then? Yet… there was never an Aldred. You are Arden, the same man who-”
“Died for you? Yes.”
“Do not place the anchor of your coffin on me. You died for boisterous ‘chivalry’ in a dispute more fit for a schoolyard than any court. You bloodied your heart by offering it the wound. For your pride, not for me.” Lucilla’s scowl fell, her spite shambled. Erosion conquered what maimed her heart, replaced by the impossible light now smiling at her. “You admit you died! How is it I converse with the dead? By what power does your shade appear?”
“A miracle, of course. One that can be shared.” Arden pressed closer to his lovely, shivering inquisitor. The curtain between his face and hers was thinner than its fabric, more transient than an insect’s life. Lightning, siphoned from the retreating horizon, flushed his eyes. Electric vines stemmed from his hue and shuffled a nest of fireflies in his pupils, reaching in their dance to shine for and into Lucilla. “A brilliant ‘shade’, am I not?”
When she did not answer, this spectral caller folded velvet into his smile. “I am not of death. She is a whisper in the dark before she opens wide to scream all silence. I bring light. I bear inoculation against old shadows. Let me honor your art. Let it last and grow beyond the boundaries of any hour. Let them pass before us and be freed! We can have wings to span forever. We can shed all shackles, all sickness.” The captured traces of welkin fire leapt from his eye into hers. Nocturnal gloss waxed animal intent and a lust deeper than soul. “Be more than a witness to this wonder. May I enter? Might I kiss your ear with this word? Come, put your palm to my breast and know what vitality - what vision - courses still. Bright with a heart to shine the way.”
“Perhaps I would tarry with this phantom until drawn breaks the storm wall.” Lucilla let out a hail of half-spirits, borne from the bed of nightmares coupling in her lungs & festering through her faint silk. In her sigh a windfall of tremulous vespers misted the aperture, catching the dew of longings, fears, and prayers for this cursed fate to pass. “Would I then see this friend’s true mien in the ruling star? Nay, I think I should see how this falseness is exiled by the sun’s Triumph.”
“I would be with you even then. Yet our ghosts would both prove restless.” Arden whispered his refrain. Stars plummeted, splashing verdant fire, through the darkling depths of his iris. “Let longing lie and let me in. We will dream without burying our heads under Night's flightless feathers.”
His eye asked entry for the rest of him. A gentle if reticent nod from Lucilla, wearier than firm in the motion, granted passage. Fibrous mist devoured the handsome revenant then hissed his essence through the cracked aperture. A fully hemmed & muscled Arden reemerged beside the chamber’s host. Incandescence rippled along his form as the fogling spray dispersed. A faint, quasi-mechanical pulse thumped an off-beat march while his chest imposed on her. Harrow crossed the gap between her sleepy materia and the gulf that evoked him. “Thank you, lady of majesty. Let this light you’ve allowed burnish wisdom to defeat the dourness of our day.”
The shadows over the moon saturated their claim. The umbral conquest pronounced a growling fever from gestations in the lunar womb, where legions of stillborn fiends skittered to scrape open the wounds in the aether and burrow into new hosts. Lucilla could suffer no more tremors; could summon no shock from her nearly vanquished arteries. She stood her ground, renouncing shivers, though perhaps her poise was more from paralysis than pure-hearted defiance.
Frozen by the rime coating Arden’s arrival, Lucilla’s eyes traversed the visitant’s trek while her body remained in statuesque vigil. The breath aroused with his words came forth from no natural lung, yet the astral wind beckoned to ferment wine in her veins. With its kiss came the ripe splash of dreams she never called to before but now bathed her in longing to defeat any borne from thunder in her breast. A fount of vibrations cascaded from her cerebellum, through her core, down to her thighs to her toes, then took wing on rapture that leashed her sensation to threads reverberating beyond what the body should know.
“Speak clear. For I am perched upon a bed of exhaustion.” Ectoplasm trailed the Lady’s voice. Cessations of sound swallowed all but the creaking of bone & gale-tempered stone in the undertow beneath her curt but fumbled breath.
But Arden’s answer was not so brisk and easy. He loomed near, scintillations over his glassy stars, screening her temper. “Oh, is it the bed? Exhaustion alone?” A presumptuous talon nicked her chin, bringing her brooding mien to face his – where promethean torches pitched excitable embers. “They have you ‘medicated’. For what affliction? The ills of not being able to rest, to know comfort, in their world of dreamless obligation and callow ambitions?”
Bulbous lunes glared back at him, though she did not yet recoil. Arden stepped further. “They would poison you to befit their wants, their ideal place in their mausoleum – where they can scratch an epitaph for their perfect dove. Mourned & misplaced! O, let them have their drowsy, mundane, claims to dust. Won’t you embrace me? Taste nectar from the night’s basin. Let our dreams, our passions, carry us to the sky. Be borne up past trifling fetters by our own power.”
“How can you claim to know my dreams? - or my sorrows?” Lucilla stepped away from this strange house guest. In her meagre flight, she stumbled on clutter by her headboard, and Arden caught her with fluid ease. Looking up, startled by her drop and its prompt end by his hands, she heard flushed questions escape her. “Would you chain my wings – this sky you offer – to where you wish to fly?” A torturous beat, languishing & melting in the now broiling touch, before the next. “What is the price, the tithe?”
“Turn your head from me and you will see naught but shadows. Sure, you can weave little illusions from the dark, but they will bring you no lasting light. All I ask is one kiss. Taste passion; freedom. I shan’t press you, tis your choice alone.”
A lion’s strength was in his grasp, yet careful precision and what might be confused for gallantry gently lifted Lucilla up with feline grace. By her own willpower Luci refrained from falling forward with her nocturnal guide’s propulsion, hanging there half between. “How should I know my own heart anymore, when all this death, all this decay of mind & spirit abounds in every face – every angle of the world? Why trust even a taste-?”
Rogue waves from the visitant’s oceanic Will swept Lucilla’s thought from her tongue. Hypnotic flambeaus burst melodies from the winding contractions & expansions of those deep-set eyes. She slipped along an abyssal incline. Though the plunge was bottomless, the bridge of infinity inverted and sent her soul to a plane above the welkin crown. The lacerations and triumphs of existence threaded her pit with black, resplendent symphonies. The immolating deluge of worlds, surpassing the little garden of the one she’d been rooted to, fed nourished seeds to become forests before ripping them from the earth. All this while she remained afoot, hobbling in that purgatory of the moment, standing -floating - where she was before. She floated above herself while the words of this fallen envoy offered ascendance through his passions alone.
“Trussst the flow of that pulse, your heart’s angle. Know a taste of freedom from death & pain.”
Was it Arden’s push or her own abrupt yearning, enflamed by a whisp that blushed stark need, that lured her to accept? By a force invisible to her, Lucilla’s lips leapt to meet his. In that kiss, and the bite it bloomed to, she tasted sweetling iron and the warm wetness of blood. Her own?
Arden’s hand across her back drew adumbrations of daemons and avatars of unborn pleasures from the silt of the chamber’s dusk. The carmine wind serving as his breath, tracing her rhythm, and winding along her neck, banished the doldrums. A rapturous promise curled around her with his tongue, leaning to offer hers & entwine. Yet an infinitude of shadows rustled under the blanketing joys on offer through this pulseless epiphany, belying what shape she could become should she indulge this kiss. The blood shared between their lips pooled into her pith, implying the cost in that tender iron: to make a martyr of her flesh & sear the soul to swim the eternal river.
Perdition & paradise dwelt as one within him. The deathless suitor showed Lucilla to vistas in the glare where his hope thrived. A continent of verdant wonders; vast mysteries beckoning to be explored beyond; misty seams between land & air, where ether joined the void; a brush of glories & gore that sprouted bushels of miracles across the palette. But she knew the toll demanded to cross through the window. The scale supplanted her conception, and she wavered at the threshold of fathoms uncharted by the human mind. Yet, to flee these limitations?
“To follow you,” Lucilla warned herself, faintly pushing against Arden, “is to renounce the earth. Another kiss and Gaia will declare me a vagrant, an exiled-”
“An interloper? No, no.” Honeyed lunes dripped from this interloper’s sight. His sheen suggested a realm above what flesh could not touch, one which would never wane. An invitation curled on his lips: “All Gaia’s corners will be yours to explore. All heaven will be yours to draw down into your art. Artful beauty that needs no audience to be known, to manifest from every sumptuous fold. We can watch the stars die and bear their incandescence back through affection that can last, without being passed to some heir. Why lay down and surrender to the soil? No, the air is yours to win. With just one draught of the depth that outlasts these winds.”
Were it not for the serpentine crack in the lightning of Arden’s iris, Lucilla might’ve been fooled by so grandiose a proposition. But bitter was that glint. The chasms between his radiant confidence fallowed flumes that drenched the trenches lying under the heights he promised. Sulfur soiled that lasting taste of red iron. “Can you cease drawing on my breath? The wyrm writhes in your eye. I am so… vexed already. Please, but a moment to consider.”
He allowed no such reprieve. His passion would not lie dormant, harrowing her yield.
The dewdrops of their kiss congealed; crimson pleating airs and teasing pores till they pled for more nourishment. Lucilla’s palate lapped venom from the loving wounds, pouring the trace of blood. That test of affections, that blip of judgement which brought bliss & poison, trickled serenades onto her tongue. Threads from that bite ached to solidify as one. Her veins craved for the fangs to liberate them; to bleed their rain. “You are an outlaw to earth. How can one even bear the hubris to deny the goddess?” Confusion pushed from her mouth, pressing down her rushing pace. “Only horror can outlast the hours nature has given her children for their-”
“To wait is to rot. To be forever latent until that potential is eaten by the grave, or else despoiled to serve idle phantasy of ‘modernity’. Be witness to miracles unknown to civilization’s cycles, their faiths, their sciences.” Arden entangled his hand in hers, resting together over Luci’s bosom. “You shall be your own goddess. Let heaven adore you! Tear all illusions away. Bare your brilliance, show that luster more tireless than the moon. Let the sky be clad in you.”
Arden’s finger became a talon, tearing through the threads of her nightgown. Lace and silk slipped low, stabbed by desire’s thorn, exposing her shoulder. “You need no ornaments for your beauty.” Enflamed claws removed more ribbons over Lucilla’s waxing beauty. Wellsprings fizzled through the unveiling course of her naked virtue. Worship shimmered in his eyes to behold her. He windlassed the threads of her night-skirt, tearing away cumbersome cloth to bathe the pristine warmth hidden along her legs & hips in his reverence. “Do not drape that moonlight in murk.”
Arden’s conjured luminance brought knives to the shadows of the chamber. Slits & serrations from his aura tailored the stifled dusk inside to serve as wings. Lucilla felt the membranous pinions wrap behind her, reeling her closer to this irradiated angel. She lunged, half to leap from the slithering abrasions of that umbral mesh. Reaching up to wrench plumes from his unfurling spread, her arms punctured only a gauzy haze. Then gravity, and an inclement force to rival it, bid her claws to sink low. Her grip faltered, rending nothing palatable. Keen nails, among the last of her defenses, plunged into the sorcerer’s shoulders. A feckless motion. Doubling back then only to slip forward. A sharp hold clenched her waist, eliciting a gasp, the phantom pulled her in.
“Stop. This is evil. Tis- Madness in your eye… I cannot endure another hour with you… let alone an endless night… You… and Vinc-ent… you are perjurers of love. Woe to my House. I’ve not met the one I can trul-” Lucilla’s final fervor to fight – to remain untarnished – arrived too late. Her ardency was to no avail at the end, futile against the plunging of his elongating canines through her glistening skin and the spirit he sought. The threshold ruptured. With the deluge of her essence, decanted for the lamprey, demoniac delight adjoined with gnawing pain. Soul afire, immolations of her cells brushed the wake of her hollowing tide.
What was wan became cherry, then bled all hue to pallor. Euphoria churned in the burning anguish of a rapturous hell. Luci’s fingers flailed, calling to him and repelling him in tortuous motion. Her body curved, arching to indulge simmering ardor. Her limbs were not her own, possessed by more than lunacy. Her hands; her shivers; her moans; all corners of her form, peeking from her sheared gown, summoned his head to her breast. Leaching her soul from the wound rose flushing the paleness over her heart. From those glaring craters where sat the basilisk stars the creature’s sway asked more of her.
“You will taste ash only a moment. Then you will be born again unto your own star. What wonder you would hide from this world. Do not keep it wretched by shunning your true form for ‘modesty’, o gorgeous star.” Arden voiced effulgence through the streams still left to Lucilla.
Her mouth, agape, made silent entreaty for more. Arden sealed her lips with his, seeping libations back to her gullet. The draft of their bloody kiss exhumed the woman’s vitality and altered her organs. A velvet breeze rode in on the torrent through her arteries, offering a balm of elation atop the changeling miasma burning up her inner tissue.
Lucilla hung on the tip of the harrower’s teeth. Suspended in his maw, she dangled betwixt the trenches of being. Her rose turned sallow, awaiting resurrection by sanguine miracle. Arden suckled animation from her fiber, relishing the skin of her spirit as it succumbed to his ravenous power.
The protracted gasp, that gulch between knowledge of being and the alien country beyond the air, widened. In the serpent’s unhinged maw, Luci’s essence fled and forgot. Lethean waves; opaque tides of Limbo; she was strewn before the gates (of the realm forbidden to mortal conceit). Ignited libido had led the way, yet that force too now soaked the envoy’s fangs along the tide to entropy. All suspicion, all quarrels, all grievances & exultations of bodily mind: mutilated by gusts of the dwelling void.
His snared star stretched out in courtship with the abyss, Arden fulfilled his pact. Reveries in flesh, her substance he gorged. Harrow had crossed that threshold where she now dwelt, where she now died. A new epoch pronounced itself through fresh perforations – the first in his age of resurrection. The essential brine surged back for her, ripping her from the basin between and washing her in the salts of undying seas. An intoxicated beam broke loose from him. Frost shivered before incandescence burst. Oblivion lashed tendrils from this hecatomb within him, yet the revenant smiled glee. For the sacrifice of vitae and the enfeeblement which followed was a passing pittance compared to the pursuit of resplendent eternity. To rend his tendons and bleed his power was but the joy of creation, and worth all pain to bring her to this place, this seat beside him within his deathless chasm.
The void yawned. The shadows hardened. Twilight reigned. Ashen billows, the mist of a soul’s conflagration, allowed the only light. The heiress of the manor groaned vapors, relinquishing her earthen clime to the grasp of Fury’s nails at her thighs and by her nape.
Rain showered trinkets through the window, but silence had been ordained. Droplets of sorrow burst from the firmament, weeping for her children; deaf to all but stygian undertows. From weakness to sinew to supplant the grave’s dominion. Saturn smiled. The old Father, ringed by malice, churned revolutions that upset seas and drowned the sundered manor with his eye. His glare professed omens to prevail over the tortured dark, piercing air to count & observe any outlaws to His withering declaration.