Topic: Flower Prophets speak, petals of the past.

A Fox Mask

Date: 2007-11-26 08:11 EST
There was always fire.

Everything was burning in the wind, spits of delicate fire-fly dots of blazing buildings fluttered before her amber eyes. They made little lines like burnt auburn hair, curling at the very end lazily then whisking off business like, as if they had some where very important to be.

You will destroy everything.

The words were old. They were history repeating itself and she could do nothing to stop it. Beneath her breast and deep in her belly came an ache that words held no description for.

Ran lowered her chin to look down, protruding just below the delicate arch of ribs was the hilt of a katana pinning her like helpless moth to the building behind her.

She smiled.

Kill me. I was wrong. It wasn?t you that destroyed us all. It was me. It was my words. It was this curse. Kill me and maybe I can atone for the sins of my mouth.

Fingertips jerked around the hilt of the katana, amber eyes watching the bits of her city on fire in the wind. She thought it was beautiful. She thought, finally, they are all free.

She slammed the butt of sword?s hilt further within.


Ran arose from the rumpled bed with mouth away from teeth in a scream that made no sound what so ever. Her heart raced for what seemed eternity as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and flattened them on the floor. In the distance, she thought she could hear several male voices and one female?s. She could still be dreaming however, Ran always had difficulty telling dreams from reality.

Though the last dream had not been fake?shaky hands went to her middle absent as the flower-prophet stared across a room far more opulent than she?d ever remembered being in. She would have to buy many sweets in payment?

Expressionless features turned toward the dying fire of a candle lit long ago. One did not need tears or sobs to mourn. Amber focused on the sputtering bob and wheeze of flame.

There was always fire.

A Fox Mask

Date: 2007-12-04 14:51 EST
?Ran, don?t be like that?please.?

The girl to her right barely mouthed the words while the girl to Ran?s left see-sawed back and forth on her feet uncomfortable.

The silence in such a place seemed far louder than noise. High, domed or vaulted ceilings curved forever upward toward heaven while the cold, cool polished marble at her bare feet reflected them and herself. A distant reflection of a girl in fox-mask, amber eyes flat and sullen as the mood she was in.

?I don?t want too.? No more than a child, perhaps twelve or thirteen wearing the same triple white linen robes as the other two girls. Though on them, the first fell to their ankles, the second fell to the middle of their calves and the third to their knees; pleated as well as crisp. They were freshly replaced, these girls, while Ran?s pleated robe had wilted long ago and it being several sizes too big, wrinkled.

There were no exchanges of Ran, she thought. There is only Ran and Ran with Ran, and Ran, Ran, Ran.

?Please, Ran?? The woman to the right like the left wore nothing but a white, featureless mask that left the eyes free. ?Will you not??

Ran filled her lungs and thrust small fists to the domed ceilings. Why wasn?t I born a bird to fly? Or a rat to scurry?

Filled her lungs until they hurt, bracing her feet. ?I. DON?T. WANT. TO. SEE.?

The cry shattered the silence, startled the man knelt before the three women and sent several heads passing to turn toward the chamber.

White fox-mask temper-tantrum thrown at the bent head of random man with random question that did not matter ever.

?I don?t want to see! I don?t want to see! I don?t want to see! I don?t want to see! I don?t want to see!? Useless little hands to the white robe trussed up in, Ran plucked and pulled. The two women had dealt with this before it seemed as cool hands wound around the Auburn headed girls elbows and began murmuring soothing nothings, tugging and pulling the child.

Ran did not fight the pull. Children understood when they were helpless against circumstance far better than they let adults know.

Head bent and rounding shoulders into them, the mantra I don?t want to see, I don?t want to see, I don?t want to see?long echoed in empty chamber, haunting marble like a ghost.


Some where in the night, in the middle of winter a strange bird began to cry outside a prophet?s window.

Ran?s amber eyes opened in the near-dark with startling ease, from dream-deep to awake.

This room was not Tycet?s guest room. She listened and could not hear the sounds of men through walls; the ceiling in the gloom was different too. She could not remember who offered her this place to sleep in after leaving the Inn, but she still remembered the taste of chocolate.

Bare feet and legs were swung over the side of the bed to shock-touch the cold floor. Auburn braids were tousled fuzzy and tendrils fell upon the smattered freckled cheek as she bent down to examine her feet. Now without white robes, now without the chubby roundness of childhood; long feet, woman?s feet.

Ran sat on the edge of the bed like this until morning flooded the room with light.

A Fox Mask

Date: 2007-12-05 05:38 EST
Fire.

Her city was on fire, burning spires of broken half-shelled buildings. The smell of blood and sweat and sorrow and rape and madness and hate and death wafted all together to fill her nose.

She looked down to her belly. It was there again?the hilt of katana, hand guard glinting metal along with blood. Freckled hands lifted to wrap around the end of it but kept slipping.

?This is your fault, y?know?? His voice, casual as well as flat came to her as if from three different places, seven different times and echoing. When she focused eyes upward, his face wavered into view like faces plunged in water, or perhaps Ran was drowning.

?Kill me. End this madness, before it is too late. You hear it too, don?t you??

Blue eyes so pale as to be white, dark brown hair falling over his eye, he smiled. The corners of his smile looked like fish guts on hooks. ?This is your madness. This is your fault. You and your big fxcking mouth, Ran.?

Fingers that were not fingers, but constructions made of metal, wire, robotic appendages that behaved like the real thing twitched unreliably in the dribbles of the flower prophet?s blood trickling from sword-hilt. Ichise lifted it before his face and inspected it like one would something fetching. ?You had to see, didn?t you? You had to see and then you had to tell people what you saw.

Haven?t you seen enough already? Haven?t enough people died for you??

This was one dream she could not control or keel-haul herself out of. Ran meant to reject this?this was not truly Ichise. This was not truly her city. This was a memory wrapped in nightmare wrapped in self-hate. Her dream self disagreed, thought it was real and whimpered.

Ichise smiled, when he did so his teeth had been replaced with rows of shark?s teeth and he leaned forward, snapping them near her neck.

?Death is too good for you, Ran.?

Then he bit her. The pain?



--The pain of landing face first on a cold floor jolted Ran awake. Cheek slathered against dusty, nearly filthy floor-boards harboring frost the woman stared blankly across them toward an equally filthy wall.

Each breath inward she took twitched the dust on floor, each exhale sent it flying in the morning light, dust motes swirling like leaves.

Winter had come. Flowers would not last forever in winter. The seer needed to learn how to be blind.

It was time to find a place.

Amber eyes sought the dying illumination within cob web covered hearth?

Fire.

A Fox Mask

Date: 2007-12-12 04:55 EST
Please could you stay awhile to share my grief?
For it?s such a lovely day,
to have to always feel this way
and the time that I will suffer less
is when I never have to wake.


Everything was on fire. Behind the thousands gathered, grey silhouettes with gleaming flat eyes, Ran?s city burned. Flames licked toward the sky while it ate cold steel of modern design, flames so hot as to melt the skin from several feet away. Embers dotted the air, hell?s snowflakes that never seemed to end. The same smell permeated the air, cooked skin, burned hair, death?s rattling screams.

Ran burned. The city was Ran, and Ran was the city. Her voice dying with the people that fell because of her?because she could not keep her voice silent. Because she saw.

All the dead had lined up in row upon row upon row of perfection. Zombie soldiers of what might have been or should have been. Bloodless skin that held no life became a wall of living dead that stared at Ran with accusing eyes.

She twitched her arms up to try and comfort them, to close unseeing eyes?so many, so many, so many?and freckled arms through torn sleeves dripped in rivulets of red. A glance down at her stomach revealed the hilt of a katana. Thrust so deeply within flesh behind russet coat, not even a single glint of blade could be seen. Slippery and sticky, Ran?s freckled fingers tried to grasp wrapped hilt or pommel, to push it in further. To end it. So many. So many. So many?

?Heeeeeeeelllllpppppp usssssssssssssssss,? Ran?s head jerked up as a woman herky-jerky marched forward from the mass of staring dead. Blue tinted skin gone nearly charcoal in soon-to-blacken death with a red ribbon grin below her chin. When she spoke, her voice and the air used to do so trickled through the slash across vocal chords. Ran could see the woman?s voice box splutter clots of blood as she whistled speech.

?I?m sorry. Please. If you kill me the madness will stop. Please. The dead cannot speak?? In her moment of panic, she did not see the irony of what she just said.

?Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee uuuuuuuuuuusssssssss. Weeeeeeeeee c-c-c-caaaaaa-aaaaaannnnnot sssssssssssssssleeeeeeeeeep.?

No matter how hard she tried, she could not grasp her fingers around the hilt buried in her belly.

?Please,? Ran had never whimpered in her life. But now the voice that fell from lips did so. It seemed alien, as did the sweat that trickled down into eyes, blurring them. ?Please. If you kill me it will end. Everything will be silent. No more seeing. Please.?

The dead woman became a smear in the still burning embers of the city.

When Ran?s eyes cleared, it was Ichise again. Brown hair falling over one eye in the same manner she remembered with great fondness. He smiled at her, revealing rows and rows of endless teeth.

?Death is too good for you, Ran. There will be no sleep for you. There will be no death for you. We will never let you forget.?

And he leaned forward, opening the endless, cavernous maw of his sharp mouth. Behind him, the thousands of dead began to moan as if in ecstasy, whispers of burnt flesh crackling in the snap of burning bodies.

His mouth blotted out everything, everything but the teeth which descended on her shoulder. Compared to the blade in her gut, Ran had never felt so much pain?

Across her shoulders, like wildfire?pain. Jerking upright in a cot provided to her by some nameless baker, Ran jerked her hand away from her shoulder where deep red runnels welling with red appeared. In her sleep, she had dug her nails in until flesh had torn.

Swinging legs over the side of the cot, she touched feet to hard packed earth. The baker?s oven was dimming slightly; she would have to get up soon and stoke the fire. A small task in exchange for a warm place to sleep at night, but?

Ran found herself staring into the fire.

Everything burned.

A Fox Mask

Date: 2008-10-18 17:21 EST
What a difference a day makes
Twenty-four little hours
Brought the sun and the flowers
Where there used to be rain

Everything was on fire. Behind the thousands--

NO.

-- gathered, grey silhouettes with gleaming flat eyes, Ran?s city burned. Flames licked toward the sky--

NO!

-- while it ate cold steel of modern design, flames so hot as to melt the skin from several feet away. Embers dotted the air, hell?s snowflakes that never seemed to end. The same smell permeated the air, cooked skin,--

NO, STOP!

--burned hair, death?s rattling screams. Wh--

Sheets tangled thick and thin as clinging vines to legs and arms. When the prophet awoke, sweat-chilled in autumn's passing, it was an unceremonious heap of blankets and freckled skin on the floor. The resounding thud-shudder from the floor boards seemed a small dent in the usual sounds of a busy Inn below. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. For a moment sprawled in ruddy-red bed hairs and faded comforter, that was all she thought of and all she allowed herself to concentrate on. The steady and panicked thump-thud of heart beating a delicate runner's rhythm in her head.

Breathe in, breathe out.

She was almost used to the nightmares now. Some nights, she saw a blond woman holding a baby and weeping--some nights, she saw a man with stars upon his knees in bathhouse--the rest of the time she saw fire and Ichise.

The dull ache in her belly and back was a constant reminder of sins left over. A black stain, like ink on a carpet, slowly spreading. Secrets and more secrets, these things that she kept.

When she remembered how to breathe again without gasping or gulping, the flower peddler pulled her blankets around small shoulders, pale and speckled with red head's curse. Pieces and swirls of ruddy dark red hair wisped about in restless sleep-head in her rising from the floor swaddled in blankets. The fox-fire of amber gaze settled on the archaic full length mirror across the wall, framed in brass which browned in ornate swirl corners from age. Her features, softened from sleep and ravaged by passing nightmare were unusually open--this was not a mask. This was something she would keep and guard her emotions well. One pale bare foot in front of the other lead her to her own reflection in the mirror, where the flower prophet parted swaddling blankets to reveal the ghost-white smooth of her belly.

Garish and angry red, near her belly button settled the scar. In comparison with the pale of skin, it seemed livid. Angry, no doubt, that she might try and forget how she earned such a scar.

For a moment, despite the pain, I could almost forget...

She closed the blankets around herself in a fury of snapping cloth, padding bare foot with purpose to the bathing room.