SHE BUILT A HOUSE IN THE DARKNESS

[creamsicles]

tw: character deaths

[atrb=style,padding:3px;border:0px solid #D7BCBC;width:400px;background-image:url(http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lieeq1apxz1qcdtsho1_400.jpg),bTable] [style=background-image:url(http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k288/Akuhana/pkmn-031-volkner.png); -webkit-border-radius: 100px; -moz-border-radius: 100px; border-radius: 100px; width:100px; height:100px][style=padding:5px;margin-left:125px;margin-top:10px;font-family:courier; font-size:18px;color:#191919;text-align: left;width:230px;letter-spacing:-3px;opacity:0.78]she rules her life like a fine skylark and when the sky is starless ∞

They were together in a land of trees, a place of forests so thick the sunlight was blotted and muted at ground level – and at the fringes, an outcropping of limestone sweeping three miles across in either direction, dropping down to an expanse of fine-grained sand glittering with quartz and pieces of obsidian glass. The sun descends slowly above their heads, casting a colored glow across his skin - red and orange and pink and yellow – and he looks as if he is burning again, caught up in the flames of her nightmares. But he is whole: smooth pebbled skin and enormous leaf-wings flaring huge and monolithic against the sky, moving in languid spirals and intricate curlicues; and she imagines that she can see his eyes, clear and sharp, tracking her as she walks along the outcrop, skirting the edge and passing her hand across the trunks of rough-barked trees – watching him and admiring. A blues song is written across the sky. Scorned lovers frozen in despair, dying agonizing deaths of solitude in the cold nights of the winter months. “I think,” Sapphire says after some time; and Topiary is wheeling in figure eights now, spinning a path of colored leaves and scattered sunlight in his wake. “I think it’s time to wake up.” And she does. She gets up in her cotton night dress and puts on her slippers; she goes out into the night and startles with her bare legs and mussed hair the guard at the gate dozing off in his box to the radio whispering a static-filled weather report. She dismisses his concerns, his will you need accompanying, champion? ; and she goes into the town, dark and sleeping, seeing only the barest and skinniest of fires - charcoal from the hewn trees, stripped of water and green mass in the kilns, the field of stumps winking at her in the moonlight as she traipses over the uneven ground, bone white and coarse with poorly broken ice, leaving a path of red footprints behind her. His eyes are open when she comes to him, slimy and clouded with mucous; she kneels, touches him and feels the vibrations of his rattling, struggling lungs. He’s not here anymore – she’s seen him in that land of trees and sky. A dark shape looms huge over them, Dinosaur narrow-eyed and uncomfortable in the weather, awakened from his slumber by her late night wanders, bending and wriggling to squeeze into the space that Topiary’s body lays in; but he’s too large and his armored plates scrape against the walls - the shanties groan and shift – so he crouches, blocking the wind and watching them with a solemn eye. Her old friend and greatest protector come to protect her again. Hours now. Her Tyranitar is laboring heavy breaths and Topiary’s body has gone cold and silent. She touches him again, but there is no life in that body, only viscous pus and brittle skin freezing in the night. Her hands tremble slowly, are yellow and strange; she’s tired, slow and bewildered – uncomprehending of anything but her exhaustion - and lays down, puts her head on that blistered, ruined belly and Dinosaur snarls at her, reaches but the walls are too close and his shoulders can’t fit. He thrashes, pulls himself free, and then punches a fistful of claws through the side of one building, bellowing open-mouthed obscenities in that language that she would never understand; and Sapphire can’t hear him over the wind. It’s picked up and his snarls and roars are background noise – the blues song is in her head now, the piano scaling the depths of indigo sorrow and dissolution in time to the sluggish beating of her heart – and she closes her eyes as he crashes through the wall and catches her in his broken, bleeding claws, gathering her up and breaking her frosting limbs. And in the morning, when the worst of the freeze has passed, they’ll find giant footsteps imprinted to the hard earth, a staggering and heavy walk, a burdened passage marked by drag marks and smeared blood. By the long hair they find tangled in the trees.