Maiden Of The Dark

• Beatrice Chiew
• Short Story
• 2008

Countless delicate white butterflies flutter about, waltzing to the mellifluous voice of Joe Frost, humming his melancholy melody. His plaintive song rustles the naked trees, stripped of the gaudy colours they so proudly exhibited in the summer. How it echoes through the winding paths; each so deceptively similar but ever different.

“Emptiness, hollowness,” he whispers into her eager ear, for he is but a lone cello. The orchestra of life has abandoned him; the birds take their crisp twitter, the frogs take their resonant croak with them to their dreams.

The dying light in the distanced sprinkles magic atop the shadows, transforming them into inchoate monsters.
“Joe Frost might rest his weary head but for the nightmares which await him. How pitiful are his howls, trying to endure them until the sun peeps its sleepy head over the horizon,” muses she, bitterly drawing closer her cadaverous cloak.
The black cloth draped over her shoulder softens the harsh imprints made as she treads across the powdered snow.
They are lonely footsteps.
Her shadow is her second companion.
“Fool,” she thinks, “how weak you’ve become!”
“You attached yourself to him and now, your only attachment is to his grave stone.”

Her path halts behind a singular stone. Engraved in it are two words – ‘mon amour’.

For a second, her hardened gaze flickers.
Her hood is no longer the sword, but a shelter from the arctic world in which she immerses herself.
Bitterness is her aura, but her aura grows less when she treads into that circle.
“My love,” she murmurs, tenderly placing down a solitary rose; its flesh, stark against the bleached snow.

But a second passes all too quickly and her granite expression returns, stoic and unyielding as ever.
All that remains of her gentle state is that rose. But even that begins to wilt as she has.