Gilded Evenings Dark & Late

 Tendriled tongues of memory lashed in melancholia, dancing against a glow as bright as fire. The color burned with the fervor of heat from flame. I squinted even my sleeping eyes. 

“Kassia!” It was my voice and yet not, that the word escaped into the aurora of red and black. 

A staccato clack of heel and toe on tile assaulted my mind. I heard more than saw the retreating Kassia. Her ragged breathing a song against the aural senses of my slumber. 

“Kassia!” My voice all around and nowhere in mobius echo. 

A distant shattering of ceramic joined the cacophonic chorus. At once the din drowned in a viscous burbling of burgundy lapping at my heels. The wake of my slipping footing was at once swallowed by yet another wave of pooled crimson. Thickness glommed the thirsty silk of my stockings, dying the crisp white a rich consuming scarlet. 

Raising my feet did little against the syrupy liquid rising to eddy against my shift. Within the flow and current of the spreading ocean of crimson I swept my arms to stay afloat. 

My hand struck back as a solid form alighted on the blushing waves. Another bobbed at my shoulder, and a third at my back even as I fought to swim against the rising current. In my mind’s eye I shifted to spy the culprits of the assault. 

Roses. 

What had begun as a few stray florets wafting on rising waves redoubled with each ripple. From above a shower of stemless buds plummeted to sumersion to rise a moment later in full maturation. As the storm of roses concussed my body, the level of the liquid threatened at my chin. 

With the deluge of roses stemmed my horrors were renewed by a bubbling froth from beneath the caressing waves. Each murmuration from the depths a steady breath upon me, where in the dark ocean I was forced now to swim or be swallowed. Each sweep of limb and leg sliced and submerged a rhythm with my ragged breath. 

A wish that I could wake was my only thought. That I could escape to the soft cotton of my bed clothes, or if so perturbed by this fit of night terror, to the arms of dear Kassia or Ama. 

So remote I felt in my dire struggle, yet on I kept in battle against the tide.

In the distance the silhouette of land reached out to me, and from it’s banks emerged a prodigious twisting score of towers. My heart leapt in terror and relief as on I pushed for this cursed shore and the sprawl of manor looning there. Dark though these walls appeared backed in the fire glow of a burning sunrise, a single light high in a tower window played lighthouse to my soul adrift. 

Short lived though was my salvation as these great structures too crumbled in a cascade of brick and shingle against the fathomless sky. Their descent a shower to the birth of a great spiral upon spiral of reds, black, and gold. A rose of titan proportions with it’s velvet petals whorling like a great maw before me. The tilt of this monstrous flora caused shift again to my viscous ocean and filled my mouth with salt and copper. At once the flow focused in a rush toward the bobbing bloom. And in the instant that the image within the petals rested above the crimson waves my eyes grew wide in awe and terror. Thorns lined the blooms center, stacked row upon ghastly row. In arc and churn they drank from the ocean which I swam, sucking downward smaller rafts of roses with each new froth and wave. 

I flailed, arms threatening to give in to this demon of petal, vine, and thorn. 

It was then I saw another in the sea. “Kassia!” 

I choked on the name, the copper sea, and my sorrow.

She floated so calm, eyes upturned and vacant, past my laboring, past my darkened vision. In succession then went her dear mother, Ama, in the same trance with eyes upturned. And last, sweet strange Lilly, here for but a moment her eyes were dark upon me. Away I swam from the hatred there and let her pass with the others. 

I dared not affect my gaze again into the estuary that lay behind me. On I swam. Kassia was lost though I did not see her body consumed by the rose. On I fought. Against a current to which I held no command. Yet again hope floated into view. A raft, no, two, narrow and long, with a shape that I only recognized as my hand claimed the gilded rail that ran the side of the raft in reach. 

My fingers slipped for purchase leaving momentary streaks of gold to gleam through shimmering red. At last I pulled free from the sea and into the safety of this goalless pall. It was by dreamer’s miracle that I failed to capsize my pine asylum. This too was far less the hope I had desired however as my gaze into the coffin revealed me not alone. 

A face near lost to memory lay reposed before me. Pale flesh framed in dark curls, and lips as red as those raining roses set in gentle sleeper’s smile. 

“Mama.” The thus slipped unbidden from my lips and though no more than a breath it’s echo shook waves into the crimson sea. 

Two orbs like green fire snapped into view with the flutter of lashes. How they stared. Love, horror, hatred, a passion of emotions reeled across those long forgotten eyes. 

I started, rolling the coffin lee and to. Still we did not spill. She rose then, reaching. Wan hands forgetting the bouquet at her breast in a tumble of dry and wilted blooms as her arms longed for me. 

A thump came then against the walls of our shared and doomed ark. A hand was then upon my shoulder, it’s fingers broad and long, the grip firm yet yielding as I turned to follow to it’s agent.

Here too a face from the past that drew a brew of adoration and abhorrence as I stared into my father’s sapphire eyes, so like my own. 

More hands turned my cheek to face my mother’s waking corpse. Her bowed lips so soon parted in revelation of the secret their smile had kept. From her gaped mouth no words escaped, there instead a rose yawned from bud to bloom. The same conjure illumined too from my father as I turned again to him. They closed upon me, our weight combined on the single coffin a threat to the raft’s buoyancy. And yet before the ocean sucked us all three into its depths a leviathan surge set us aloft and free of the waves, the consuming rose, and those who passed away. High we were above these horrors in the hand of augmented monstrosity. No face accompanied the clawed fingers that plucked me from the grasping embraces of mama and papa. 

The brush of these against my parents though set their flesh to rot and peel as they should look with so many years beneath the earth. I clung in desperate passion to one outstretched, gnarled finger as splintered wood, and scattered bones bare of flesh tumbled, splashed, and submerged into the sea of red so far below. 

Rounding my gaze from the terror below I found my own reflection. Entombed in sanguine radiance. A reflection, and yet in this ruby visage gleamed a smile.

And thus I spent my last night in the cottage embraced in the foyer of my new reality.