Red and black marred the snow. The carer strode through the expanse of softly shifting shape, for his thoughts sculpted the scene; an iced branch here, a dewy body there, white knights and wights that waltzed with a sweetness.
Each footfall stamped his hate. Those wisps parted, ephemera; he slashed and dived anyway, for the look of it. Or perhaps for the feel. No one was watching, after all. Tantalus had nothing on him - how painfully did those faces return, evil glimmers, to mock him and part before he reached them, as they always had.
His own willingness to die would not help the one he sought, and so the road goes ever on. White noise was his companion, puckered with a drifting memory of the voice of his goal. His long half-blinded stare happily drowned in the blank deeps; he could not get distracted by the features of his mind, no, no. Never again; he suddenly awoke and yelled in silence. Never! yet it happened all the time. Anger then grew, and with a leap and bound and a blow, the branch of an ash fell from the blue.
After a furious pause, he took it and cooked; today's menu, snow-slugs - ash and ash mingled, charcoal begotten of the road already travelled; the universe provides. Sap writhed, the firelight making livid earth's pale shroud. Snapping an icicle from his clothes, he speared the grub and chewed; a dark slither and it was done. The daily revulsion passed in minutes, and he was used to it: discomfort draped the heavy head.
Leaving behind today's thanksgiving, he walked on. The campfire slowly slid into crimson and ebony, as it always did. But now the felled tree still stood. Bemused, he cast about; his line of sight splintered against constant thicket and redwood. It is easy to miss, in eternity, what lies ahead. For the first time in aeons, he found himself pathless. Those fickle old bones let a cold seep in, and a horror licked his heart. His quest was etched in his mind - in his lost blood - and that same mind had ensnared him.
The murk fell, grew grim; eddies scattered the light into a half-dark. The shadow felt like an end; his drooping eyes had never known a night, or a sleep. Before - had there been a Before this place? Maybe, maybe - dull ubiquity drove all else out. Lost in circular thought, Night took him prisoner, for the first and last time, and he spread-eagled on some branch, helpless.
Freefall: fluttering and violent, he free-fell in the long-estranged spiral falls of sleep. The null space hid a great memory, bequeathed by events long past. The very thought of Before picked his stone apart pebble-by-wretched-pebble, pebbles of the beach and earth and peak - it was a whirlwind tour. The quiet time for reflection was wrecked by the wrestling fists that pummelled this new memory, leaping from crag to bleeding crag; he almost longed for the expanse again. Poisoned bliss that it was, that lively, surreal green called, a beautiful place to sink and never surface. The bitterness swept him once more.
And at last his darling lurched into view. Wicked, sharp spectres carried on the waltz around them, the darkling carousel that stranded us here.
Tenderly, so tenderly, they cut insidious slivers into his darling’s slowly marbling flesh, flickering as the waving flame atop a pyre. Tenderly, so tenderly, his darling curled their
sweet little arms into lithe and supplicating forms, to be caressed all the better by these vile imps, these cursed shades of smoked garnet ink which scribed with slitting quills while his love sat still and bloody and broke his heart. A spaced smile: the lovely eyes turned vacant, zoned out to the growing crimson pools below. For they know not what they do.
Twisting the knife. For the one who spectates his own life cannot bear to witness the slow torment of another, another who truly lives, unlike he, through their own soul; a life more deserving, more beautiful; a life not remote not stuck watching, locked in, all views - scenic and horrific - unchosen. Tears froze over in his eye - that soulless subordinate eye - a disgusting rime; a dull thump as his coarse blade fell, gratefully swallowed; figments replaced with impotence. The mortal engines of his care ground to a halt. The hanging tree opened; he keened, and it rang and roiled and surged through his universe, carving valleys through the blood-let ice.
Nathan Adlam
our monadic musician