Plague Daughter.

When she sleeps she dreams of ravens and fields of red poppies. When she speaks it is ever but a whisper as if death might catch her on a whim should she chance to drop her guard and call attention to herself. Her tongue is morbid even at its lightest, for it tells of what she knows.

Tears are her currency of choice and she trades them with the fleet west wind for the solace of emotional abandon.

“She never had any steel to her, she was born under an air sign after all,” her mother explains and the smile on the old woman’s face seems to ebb a bit as she notices her child’s palest moonlight hair peppered too soon with cloud belly grey.

“A sad world, one that would steal the glow from the soul of one so young, you know…” a tinge of color drains from the mother’s skin as she watches the girl wander moodily away. A new wrinkle cuts deep into skin worn paper-thin by time and toil.

The girl leaves the thatched-roof hamlet of old women and motherless sons, widowers and lineage cut abruptly short. She is weary, ever weary yet still she will make her way to the usual haunt.

Her gait is of one all but shackled by exhaustion, hunched as if she’d thorns in either side. Even away from the gardens overgrown and gone to rot, she can never quite brush away the dust of fear that enshrouds her light.

She staggers through the reed fen where the mud sucks against small feet in tattered boots with every step, and willows trail low their weeping limbs. She acknowledges a stately red-crowned crane in her path with a nod, but neither a pause nor an upward glance as her approach sends it soaring off into the gloaming.

Faint of heart and slow of step she moves on. In the distance the heather breathes lilac hue across the bleakness of the bracken-strewn moorland and its scent is ever on the air. It is a scent that haunts her.

Several miles into the wetlands what was once a well traveled road emerges, leading way to higher ground. Disuse has reduced it to a meager trail, coarse foliage encroaching from all sides. Her mother would explain that all things return to nature in their time. The girl is of the bitter opinion that the road has simply died.

Only a little ways down the dead road, a sprawling field extends to the girl’s left. If she were to think on it, she would recall in this place the myriad colored ribbons of a maypole, the sweet taste of nectar sucked from a honeysuckle blossom, the intoxicating rhythm of laughter.

She does not care to recall and she does not dwell on the field. Instead she follows the path as it cuts a sharp turn away from this place of a childhood that no longer seems her own. She breaches a final hill and raises her slate eyes from the ground.

Three trees jut cruelly from the pinnacle of the barrow-hill rising from the bramble-traced earth, serving as beacon of the nameless dead ensconced within. Here lies plague; the walls of earth emanate. Here lie your loves defiled in unconsecrated ground, here lie your dreams stolen in the night on the wings of a God who is not merciful. Here, your tortured souls, here a restless peace.

Her lips part slightly and the breath she sucks in is sharp and labored, catching on a sob somewhere between her throat and her lungs. Surprising, that she should still have reaction to this place, and yet also not. Her hand flutters to the cross at her throat, pale and luminescent that the blood in the veins is nearly visible in its transgression as she clutches at the silver emblem.

The girl lingers, unnaturally still for what feels like a long while. Motionless, all but lifeless, she purses her lips and curls her fists hard until nail bites flesh drawing blood. Then, with her eyes gazing not upon the atrocity before them but rather at the star-splattered night sky she lets drop the bauble from her hand and traces a shaky sign of the cross from forehead to breast.

“Rest in peace, dear one.” Softly does she whisper that death might not hear.

And when she turns to go, she seems older and she is ever more weary.





Ok… so I’m having problems with this piece. We have this morbidly depressed black-death survivor who makes her way to this mass-burial site… clutches a cross and says rest in peace… to whom we do not know. Is it anti-climactic? I fear it might be. Any oppinions?

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