Hunger

The skinned lamb seemed perfectly clean. Tissue that is slight and smooth and luminescent always gleams like a pearl, and the skinned lamb looked like a pearl, to me. The thin tissue that had once been hidden by skin was stretched so taut across its form, that I could make out the vague, darke shapes of organs beneath the muscle. There was no blood shed from the skinning itself, although the peeling back from the stomach to the spine of the poor creature's wool sounded like peeling gauze tape away from rubber. It sounded like routine, it sounded innocuous, but the air stank to me of savagery and the guilt that we preyed on such small things. But we were only hungry, and no one who felt the gurgling of our stomachs could ever condemn us for it. When you are hungry, you must nourish yourself, even if nourishing yourself means killing a lamb.

I Had No Idea Where I Was Going With This One

Impromptu piece, needs editing, soon, liek moar emotion!! And a better, stronger personality on Zelda's part!! You can do it, Evanesced! You can make these characters come to life!!
:)

"I can not sleep," she uttered faintly from the moon-lit darkness of their chambers.
It was silent, yet she was aware of his restlessness at night--his fits of haunted reverie--just like her own. What din kept them from sleep in their abstracted minds?

"...For whatever reason?" His voice came like muffled thunder having traveled the thickness of stone walls--how distant, yet how benign that she did not smart beneath his callousness. He was subdued, that was all--defeated and dejected.

"Do your prophecies wake you, still?" Came his voice, disconsolate, again.

Yes, he was still smote by her words from earlier, today. She had always been too good at divining his intentions. However, she did not know that the reason why he could not sleep tonight was because of her deductions, earlier in the evening. He had been very much affected by her, always. Ganondorf Dragmire could hide nothing of his thoughts and emotions from her. To the queen, Zelda, he was a portrait of internal strife--tortured and torturous--and yet, he carried himself with such bearing and guarded composure that at times she felt she was not so good at discerning him as she had thought.

"No," remarked Zelda with feigned conviction, bringing the sheets over her wan shoulders, "Those haven't been coming to me, lately..."

Her husband shifted, with much discomfort, to meet her with searching countenance, his brows furrowed, lips arched into a slight frown.
"What, then, keeps you, Zelda?"

She did not know, precisely. The Gerudo was less foreign to her, his title of 'Dark Lord' becoming ever more a description of his soul's obscurities than his harsh actions.
He was a magnificent creature, she felt--a stag in the silent woods.

And she, too, was equally as enthralling--the starving hunter who spares him.

Ganondorf rubbed his smooth jaw in wait for Zelda's response, but it never came, so he considered rising from bed, for morning was coming. He did not, however.

For she just watched him so intently, and with such concerned penetration...

...that there was an intimate level of affinity, then, at long last.

a good read, a one-liner, and a drabble

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen is excellent.


A number of months came to pass before the wearied monarch fell sick with the ailments of old age, and the once-called princess, soon thereafter, was crowned queen.


He wandered into a forest of tangled brush and gnarled wood, darkened by the shadows of trees that had grown too desperately close to one another. In the midst of his dreaming, a finch fluttered briskly through the canopy, a meek and lonely mass. Underfoot, the damp, loose foliage muffled his steps as he took one harrowing lurch nearer and into what appeared to be the gaping mouth of a tomb; so thereupon winter was the draft from a window ajar as he fell silently into perpetuity. By dusk, he awoke a grave and sullen proprietor of fortune, stepping out of bed to close the snow-laden windows.
There were harsh gales threatening the castle walls, that night, and the ancient stone heaved a curse.

Hadley

I'm posting something original, for once:


Morning lurched lazily upon the horizon, transitioning slowly from dark to dawn.
Rubbing drowsy eyes I felt at peace because waking up in darkness reminded me of rising early to catch a plane at O'Hare.

It was so exciting to be going somewhere, but, Hadley, it had sent tremors up my spine all the same.

After years and so much change--and after all those events that transpired between myself and the town--it was nearly impossible to have come back. The air was too familiar, too old. There was something sad about the place and the fact that no one had changed.
The only thing that was different, Hadley, was the news I heard about you, echoed over the telephone by your mother because your little sister hadn't the solace yet to tell me.


I burdened my ungainly legs again with the chore of traveling. I stopped short of my destination because I had no where to go, and I lingered then, without protest, in solitude for a while.
Somewhere in the universe there was the dull echo of a fading pulsar, muffled and prolonged, as if someone deprived it of eternal rest. You wouldn't have believed it, Hadley; I heard it so that when silence came at last, the frigid chill of polar air was worth the numbness of my fingers as dawn returned.

I suppose that the pulsar was never awaiting death, because a pulsar is already death's manifestation of a star--the carcass--whose weak, residual light traipses wearily and slowly down to earth. By now, it had been dead forever ago, all the while we had been treading the Earth.

Now it's only me treading the earth, Hadley. I often worry after you, because your image still lingers about my life, like the blackness from the pulsar not reached Earth, yet.
I remember your voice expelling breath upon the air like a vaporous cloud later to be deposited in the soil like the bulb of a flower.

I realize that I never thanked you for convincing me--for making me feel as though when we die, though the blood within our veins may recede from our limbs, retreating into our cores, we will be like your breath bequeathed unto the wintry air.
Thank you, Hadley, for reminding me that our nerves and muscles will dull and atrophy sooner than our souls do, and that nature spawned us merely to admire her work on otherwise trite creatures.

How very cruel it all is that we must be a species so very driven by fate--so very controlled and drawn indefinitely by and towards it, sometimes even feeling judged by it, as we selfishly opt for agnosticism so that when we die our loved ones are left on Earth to worry after which gates we entered in the afterlife.

Hadley, if you had lived so splendidly and charitably, your only vice a faithless upbringing, then where the hell are you? Please, Hadley, don't tell me you are where they say you are, because then...what will I do?

"Rigor Mortis" and "Abrosia" from Hyades

I feel a bit guilty for constantly updating little drabbles as opposed to the actual story. Inspired by an Elizabeth Bishop poem. Sorry in advance for any awkward sentences. I tend to write those a lot, haha:


Velvet curtains were drawn so as to prevent no more than a sliver of yellow light into the cold parlor, which settled upon the pallid figure's viscera like spooled gold across a white statue.
The prince slumbered in silent and lonesome eternity.

Lord Dragmire, as he stood upon the dais before the oaken casket, recalled the crippling chill of the armistice eve in Aldous Hyrule's wan complexion. Juste Hyrule, as the Gerudo recalled, first heir to the throne of Hyrule, assumed the very corpse of Aldous years ago on the final night of the war. That night, even blackness of the snow-laden field failed to hide the prince's stiffening cadaver beneath a reddening shroud; there had been no service, no suffocating crowd of infantrymen beside the carcass of the hapless, mangled prince. A footsoldier simply stole away with the heavy conscience of having slain him, and throughout the remainder of the night, there was a curious silence in the wilderness that surrounded the confounded, wretched beings of Hyrule. Something was noticeably lacking in the afterglow of that single event. A great release transpired that none bore witness to, yet was profound enough to have bequeathed a terrible sensation of solitude lingering in the stillness of the atmosphere for many more wintry nights.

It was the eve of the armistice that unsettled Lord Dragmire, and it was the eve of the armistice that taught him that a prince's life in times of war held just as much value as his subjects'. Status, wherever the laws of the natural world were concerned, meant nothing.

It was always war that pitted friends against one another, made them realize their disparities, and turned them into murderers whose only stimulus was the prejudice of their nation. It had always been that way, he knew, and the effects were never quick to resolve from fear of one another to understanding.


In the parlor, far to his right, Lord Dragmire was being eyed warily by the princess. He had encroached too assertively upon the affairs of the Royal Family, and she was very displeased. What his motives were, she did not know, yet she was insistent upon setting her thoughts against his.
Sensing the princess' hostility, Lord Dragmire turned to match her glower as he stepped, with much egoism, off the dais.

After all, it was not his father who wept as to why the remaining heir could not have been a boy.

__________________________________________________________________


She had, all at once, become the most admirable and sustainingly beautiful young lady in Hyrule, to him. And he, she thought, was never particularly attractive, with his sharp, exotic features so starkly disparate from any Hylian's definition of beautiful. He was too much, too overwhelming, too wild.

No matter how reserved he kept himself, he could never hide the fact that he was from a rugged race of people--a race that her own people would call savage, and yet, he understood her, gave her what she needed from a companion.

And she loved him for that.

"Poison" from Hyades

Now if only I could write a decent opening chapter to Hyades...

The mere reminiscence of being dealt such kindness evoked within the princess a desire to weep. The love for this man's empathy managed to exceed all of which she was capable of retaining, as well as transcend all Hylian prejudice; not even her own father had ever graced her with such sincerity.

However, she did not weep, having grown too resolved in her practicality to place her own needs before those of her country. In her life, it was always simply a matter of overcoming her personal wants to satiate those of others; one’s duties always came first, after all, and whatever liberty had a princess in tending to her own needs? Of course, very little, for a princess could not even leave the confines of her castle’s walls without more than one shadow trailing behind. A princess could not even escape from thoughts about a country of ever-unsatisfied citizens.

Yet it was for the horrid truth of her servitude to an ungrateful people, as well as for the knowledge of her emotional deprivation because of it, that her self-sustained temperment finally slipped from her faltering grasp, and salty tears rushed forth, swelling her eyelids as she wept.

Suppression of her grief was too much to ask at this point, though she refused to desist in finding a way.
"For now," she thought fitfully, struggling with a slender vial of lithium, "a dose of this should have to do."

And tranquility thenceforth came in small phials.

"Justice" from Hyades

Hopefully all of the mistakes in grammar have been corrected, here...


And such was the law; one must certainly always pay his dues. If not he himself, then perhaps another who is ill of fortune and least likely to question authorities. Another, another...
A less fortunate other.

Poor young man. Confounded by his alleged crimes, he struggled with great effort to know remorse for his unlawful, unfamiliar deeds--which were recounted in great detail by the public court--though he himself remembered none of it.

This humble guest to Castleton from the surrounding Hylian country, was condemned to die by the hands of justice.

Palsied with instinctual, mortal fear, he rattled his shackles at the stand.

The near-destitute spectators from above, removed from the misfortune below by barred windows, trembled with a similar intensity.