Rethelia's blog

Original Challenge

I guess I'll post first today instead of right before midnight.

...I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

~Shakespeare, The Tempest

He planted the seed.

He prayed for rain.

“You were always prettier in pieces.”

"This sheltering midnight is our meeting place,

No passion or despair or hope divide me from your side."

Tired, Vaughan Williams

Lovely when we started,

The illusion of control,

He leaves presents in his wake.

Dust shaved from temple stone, mountain roots, and bone,

Sandy, coarse reminders in my pockets and between sun-burned toes-

That I might take him with me.

Sorned flesh sinks to bone,

Weaves nettled nets around

A readied frame.

The words are carved in cracked fel stone,

They mark a quiet, moss-washed grave,

They're whispered in penitent parched-lipped prayers

And spelled in scars the fire gave.

They shape a lesson old and lean,

Teach sleepless nights, in script worn thin:

Inaction is not innocence.

Silence still can sin.

The succubus faded in a flash of green light.

I envy him for a moment.

The enemy consumes,

Our trenches never deeper than her heat,

Our walls never higher.

Smoke withers eyes to weeping,

Metal burns deep into our palms

As swords rise against choking ash.

I am circled, questioned, watched,

A subject, example, entry.

His gaze turns this glade into a lab,

It shapes my soul into a series of marks

Etched on a ledger I cannot read.

And I fear-

That each breath is betrayal,

Each word a weapon

In the hands of a man who cannot see me.

 

A child's scream pounds cracks in the night sky,

Invisible lines that curl around her parents' hearts.

A flurry of blankets, bare feet against the dewy ground.

Hands caress a fearful brow.

When you told me you were dying,

I prayed this sorry witch was not

The only keeper of your legacy.

((Continued from Never Lend a Book ))

The bag looked far larger than her frame could carry.  She limped with it against her shoulders, wobbly like an old pedlar woman or a snail wearing its home like a pack.  If it pained her, none on the streets would notice.  Her head bent with her back, and a threadbare hood sheltered any shadow of the effort in her expression.  The stones below her feet could see.  They stared up with flat faces, a thousand little mirrors of the still resolve in her burnished gaze. 

She had given up on the shovel and now crouched by the hole she had made, a gentle pock in the web-shadowed grove.  Earthy handfuls came away with the outsides of her palms as though she might sweep aside what lay there.  Stroke by stroke, she revealed the outline of the chest.  She undressed the dirt from its hinges with care, each layer a soiled strip of bandage binding an old wound.

Another girl might have buried her regrets in her mind.  Rethelia had wrapped hers in a package of earth.

There were feathers on the floor. A hole in the down-stuffed blanket puffed them out in little breaths when the sleeper shifted.

She had heard the words before,

Or read them in neglected books

Lying dusty on earthquake-cracked shelves.

With them,

The fever wove a spell around her bones,