How the body yearns for desiccation and decay. The roar of the Isis in my ears, the wind whipping my cheeks, cold leeching into every crevasse and crack in my skin, and the hot rot of the blood pounding against my fingertips cannot overwhelm the clamoring voices of the dead, tempting, begging me to join them in the eerie mist of the morning. Yet that is the beauty of the meadow in the early hours. Lush green pasture, high green grass, and the chilling embrace of its deadly mist elicit pinpricks of desire along my spine. I breathe in, letting the bitter air leech all warmth from my lungs. My body screams in protest, my legs long past numb. Yet I swing my arms forward, propelling me to run faster along the little path cluttered with the rotten menagerie of fallen leaves. The mulch provides a cushion between my feet, a slick path propelling me farther.
Soon, the torrent of the river fades, replaced by the gurgling of little creeks feeding into the great beast bellowing behind me. A green slick covers these bodies, too, the water consumed by the sickly stillness and glossy fragility of the freshly deceased. The skin, delicate and only beginning to peel and grey, remains undisturbed. Not quite the rich emerald of the moss that creeps up trees and oozes from every stone, this water is soft, the same sweetly muted pastel of the aurora, the haze over the meadow, and the peaking turrets of the city of dreaming spires looming just beyond the fog.
Spirits whisper from those slick stones, from the bubble of the creek, even each step I take strikes back with the reverberations of the dead that permeate this sepulcher city. Ghosts fly with me, hovering in the very corner of my vision, separated by the veil of what I see and the unknown I covet. Their voices, ethereal, echo through the rolling mist. Their sweetly tones stir the mist, churning its unfathomable depths to create little eddies and shapes, memories arising in the shadows too dark for me to see. The throaty moans of the oxen nestled deep in the meadow’s heart are the only sound of sadness. Even the monstrous river’s cry only explicates its power to rip the veil enclosing in upon me. Those shadows just beyond my sight lie in the river’s depths, too, the same weightless inexistence found deep in its cold embrace.
I exhale sharply, violently expelling all chilling air from my lungs. My lungs sizzle and hiss, steam coiling from my lips like the fiery breath of a great dragon. The myths that used to permeate these cobblestone, mossy streets now nestle deep within me. My fire cackles in delight, my heart thundering as smoke rolls from my shoulders. I fly, wings outstretched, propelling my body through the thickening air. It weighs down upon me, the mist the weight of a blanket pressed upon me. Oh, join us, the spirits in my ear muse, floating and tumbling through the meadow with the freedom my body so desperately craves. The flesh, restricted to its ache, can only run so far. Yet my lungs do not tire, only swell with another great fiery breath. Forward, I demand, toward the great iron gates. Toward the city of dreaming spires.
As I finish my run, my mouth is slick with saliva. Wiping my cracked lips against my glove, I examine my body with acute attention to decay. What a thrill, smacking the blood pluming from my lip between my teeth. The metal rot against my tongue widens my maniacal smile. Pleasure pricks at my skin, little sparks of electricity for bearing the siren’s song of the dead and emerging with the melody engrained in memory. My eyes return to the meadow, watching the sensuous silver of the meadow slip back to the shadows as the sun rises, basking its grassy tombs in the soft tones of dawn.
My head falls back, watching the climbing ivy creep across the great gates of my mausoleum. Even the ivy desires to decompose, its leaves tinged between the deep maroon and eclectic green, turning its center a burning, bright blue. Stepping through the gate, the spirits do not depart. The dead occupy these corridors perhaps more than the living do. Walking up the steps to the great hall, the ceiling shrinks to the vaulted passageways, sneaking little corridors that press down upon me like the walls of my inevitable confide. The ceiling echoes with laughter of the ghosts still haunting these halls, the ornaments on its vaulted arches stretched with the delicate fibers of sinew and intricate interweaving of bone and stone.
Even the stones themselves, stripped of color, appear the same muted hue of faded parchment or ancient bone. My footsteps echo, no other hint of life in my mausoleum of memory. Even against the cataclysmic stretch of tunnels, chambers, and halls, the great arteries and veins of this slumbering stone leviathan, my fire burns in solitary. It fades, without the ferocity and fear to bellow against the moans of the Isis or the great choir of dead clamoring among the meadow maze. I made my grave among the remains of a celestial giant, entombed in a place strung between the veil, passing in and out of existence as it pleases. Time is irrelevant, merely a vessel for me to pass through the calcified bone and leathery sinew of the giant buried here. Yet it leads me straight to its desiccated heart, the great life force of a giant reduced to the stone pillars and crackling shelves piled full of histories, records of its life reduced to paper as flimsy as my own two wobbly legs. As I slide into its cradling, deadly embrace, I only think of returning once more to the meadow tomorrow, bringing back another spirit to join me in the heart of my great undoing.
I really enjoyed this. Love that image, too.