PROSE – 3TC

“All things end, but not all things die.”

In elder days, ere kings were crowned and seas were given name, there lay at the uttermost edge of the world a garden unseen by mortal eye. No chart could find it; no path did lead to it. For it was hidden behind a hedge so wild, it did snarl with the very sinews of time, its roots gorged upon the dust of ages forgotten.

This garden was no verdant haven. Nay, it did blaze with a terrible, floral fury — a sea of poppies red as the blood of stars, each bloom fed upon the sighs of worlds long perished. And amid that fiery bloom stood a lonely bench, smooth-worn by the passing of countless aeons. Upon that bench sat a woman.

Her true name was lost, spoken by none, for fear or reverence, who could say. They called her the Watcher, the Lady Beneath the bunting of Stars, a soul unclaimed by death or life. Her hair fell like rivers of midnight; her raiment shimmered with the ghost-light of a thousand vanished moons. Born she was when first breath quickened flame, and there would she remain until the last whisper stilled the last ember.

Above her, the moon waxed monstrous and red, no gentle beacon but a colossus, strained fiercely against the dark. Tales of old proclaimed: when the moon should bleed full and low, when its furnace breath did wilt the very blossoms, then would the Watcher stir, and with her rising, the world would fold in upon itself, spent and hallowed.

The bunting of stars frayed in the heavens. The hedge withered; poppies fell like the tears of a dying host. And yet still she tarried.

Some said she wove the fate of all things in her stillness — that kingdoms did crumble at the closing of her hand, that battles were lost and won by the flickering of her gaze, that lovers were fated or sundered by the turning of her head.

But upon the last night, the Night of the Final Bloom, she moved not.

The moon, vast and bleeding, filled the firmament; the hedge burned with silent flame.

At length, she stood. The earth sighed low, not in fear, but in weary release. She stepped forward into the floral pyre, her raiment whispering secret oaths to the ashes. And with each step, the stars winked out — one by one — strung like dying bunting across the velvet of the void.

Behind her, the world did fold, not with clamor or woe, but with the solemn grace of an ancient song ended.

Whither she went, none can say. Perchance she walked into a realm yet unborn; perchance she became the hedge, the poppies, the furious moon itself — a silent covenant that every ending be but the herald of another beginning.

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