A SILKEN ROSE

Locked in unending darkness. Lonely without light, passing through despair into madness and back again, into a cold kind of sanity that left her begging to be let out.

She’d been unwary and weak. Had let herself fall prey to her passions, and in return for her love she’d been gifted betrayal.

She’d been Hungry for so long that she imagined she’d been withered to bone with a stretch of paper skin over top. She felt desperate in her weakness, but the stone casket wrapped in chains had been beyond her ability to break out of even before Hunger had stolen her strength.

She rested in the darkness and dreamed of OUTSIDE. Of life and sky and scents different from the smell of her own must and rot.

She was dying, year after year, century after century, time seeping into her as she HUNGERED unending.

Memories, all that she had in this cage, had begun to slip from her. First her mortal life, then the early years of her immortality. So much was gone that she didn’t know what was left to her other than a desire to be let free.

She wanted OUT.

The desire for freedom was all that she had left to her. But desire could not bring action, could not lift her back up into the light.

Time passed as time was wont to do and there was nothing for her but darkness unending. An eternity of dreaming of light she barely remembered, her dreams warping and twisting as her memory of life OUTSIDE faded around the edges and developed holes all through the middle.

It had been so long since she had laughed and sung. Since she had danced in the moonlight with a love she had thought so true and fine, drinking the blood of mortals and rhapsodying in the finest things of LIFE. Exulting in everything she was and wanted to be, boundless and effervescent in a pure glory of SELF.

She had been powerful and unencumbered. Nothing and no one had been able to control her or compel her to do anything she didn’t want to do.

Until she had been betrayed by love and confined to darkness and despair, loneliness her only companion as her mind twisted and bent in upon itself but was unable to break her free.

She languished in her captivity, helpless and hopeless, until one day…

A sound came to her from outside the confines of the casket. The rattle of chains. The squeal and shriek of metal being twisted to the point of breaking and beyond.

There was the scrape of stone against stone. Then a sliver of light–so bright in her personal darkness that she had to close her eyelids to keep her eyes from burning. It was barely a dim glow, but it had been so long that she could practically feel heat from that bit of light.

There was a whisper of voices, one of them as dear as memory unremembered, but she understood what was happening even if the words were a gabble of nonsense to her ears.

Someone had come to rescue her from her hell. She was going to be let free.

Her darkness was come to an end.

=END=

~Harper Kingsley
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