Topic: The Haunting of Wren Juke

Wren Juke

Date: 2008-09-02 11:58 EST
Licks of black hair swept her forehead and arches of brow as she speared straight up in the frigid waters of her receding bath. The level had dropped while she had been most comatose, a soaring consciousness under the weighty drapings of erstwhile and crestfallen memories, tripping over one another as she lay still in her bath tub before shooting upwards to stare across the way at the steam slick mirror that fanned into double glazed frames before her. A hand reached out to the surface to wipe away the film of smog like sheen to view her face. Eyes widened as she took in the damp, lacklustre waves of raven that fell to shoulders small, even frail seeming without clothes or much meat anymore. Collarbones prominant sickened her. In revolt, she turned her face away and bit her inside cheek, grasping at both sides of the bath tub she sat shaking in. Nails bitten down and jagged scraped along the old porcelain as she scowled into the bitter darkness of the back of her eyelids. Momentum draining. Plughole too, as the last of the waters now frigid seeped away.

She found herself gazing upon the drain for some many moments before retreating for a frayed robe and faded towel to enwrap her face in dabbing away droplets of cold and tousle the damp from her hair. But delirium was great. It dove into Juke, mumbled incoherent, strained whisperings into finely shaped ears. Delicate already, all the more for her gaunt face and sable-green eyes in the shadowy corridor of creaking mansion.

Hand out to turn the handle of her bedroom she gasped. For bloodied streamers of darkness groped up the patterned wallpaper. They spelled out her name. "THE SHIP HAS SUNK WREN JUKE"

"ALL THE WAY DOWN"

"AVAST! THE CITY HAS DROWNED AND SO HAS ITS DAUGHTER!"

A trembling circuitry of wired chemistry, she wailed and fell to her knees, stricken with the terror of the phantom bleakness that wickedly spun its entrancing horrors in a wily script down that wall....Her life blended with a new furnishing, a devious decor, that hummed at the edges of her reasoning, had her feel like so many slurps of water running away, down a drain..

Wren Juke

Date: 2008-09-02 12:10 EST
The house was constituted of four corners, four walls, and four floors. Turreted with iron gates and decorations, stone statues and fountains amidst the tall, untended grass of the meagre gardens. Vines crawled the walls. Crows took perch on balcony and topmost tower. It was a monster of architecture, a feat of the imagination unleashed in wood and steel and stone skeleton. It smelt musty and musky and leaked. It seeped. It creaked. It groaned. It howled. It echoed. It's voice was antiquated. It stood regal despite its overgrown delapidation, like some unsung hero battle worn and still standing despite the barrage of the elements wounding its fading facade.

Inside its mostly bare walls was Wren Juke. On the outskirts, the Nowhere land of Rhy'Din, with the crows and the echoes.

It was such a place as this, of darkest fairytale and fable that this haunting came alive. Where ghosts and gravestones were every bit the threat of the resonance of only their title.

But the girl had gone into herself. Hidden away under the slight physique and long, unkempt waves, so like the decrepit character of her "home", and in the recesses of black or brown garb she did not reveal herself but buried herself deeper and deeper until not a soul could reach out to her, dead, or alive.

Wren Juke was as much a shadow as a woman. And for those that lived nearest the mansion rumour was she was her Shadow now.

Wren Juke just wasn't the sort of girl to contest such talk. It was unlikely she'd even heard a mote of gossip on the wind. Hearsay over the hills.

In the brisk breeze of this grey, sullen landscape, this wasteland out of the way, the house stood firm and unshaken. It's protestations of stone spine and wooden ribs only the shiver of gargoyle and shutters as any inanimate object is to breathe with the life of a stirring wind...