love is the red the rose on your coffin door, what's life like bleeding on the floor?
The wild roses wither and die, akin to the shrivelled skin of those that lay forgotten beneath the soil. I replace the flowers, silently willing them to find a path on the hereafter. Part of me wonders if the years will shape me like they had shaped my mothers. Perhaps in time my coat will grey to the dishwater colour of my corpse-like dam. Forbidden are the signs of the mottling in patches on my shoulders. I am wearing away like the teeth that grind and wear the flesh from the bones.
I watch him, the bleeding, the broken. I watch him with the same curious gesture of a bird, looming from above a branch. He has been spared from rotting beneath soil and bone, and yet he looks as withered as those dried roses stop the graves.
'Caius.' I repeat his name. My tone lilts against the frost bitten wind. 'You bleed, Caius.' I offer, my tone hauntingly quiet, barely above a whisper. The lulls of Crimson that roll like tears from his wounds, they call to me. My steps are careful. Tentative in their movement to his side, where I lengthen my neck, attempting to press my dark nose to the drip, dripping life.
Where they destroy, they take. I attempt to give, to patch wounds too far gone, to sing a song for those lost, forgotten. The twang like copper, I breathe in. It is home, and yet wrong. So very wrong.
'They'll find you. You leave a trail. They'll find you.' I say, my voice quite meek, weak like the crushed bone beneath my corpse mother's hooves. I swallow the suspended breath in my throat, and say again, 'You're broken.' like the rattling bones that hang from trees, the fresh skin turning to leather in the sun. I shake my head, silver eyes like gloss, filling with the unshed tears of a hundred victims and for s hundred more. For Caius, for what he has had and for what he is. I cry because they cannot, and I can.
v a e r m i n a
chantale x nykeln