The pale woman gazed into the night, an absolute blackness without moon or stars.
Night stared back, defiant, silent as the sudden hush before a storm.
The woman let it press against the sunken opals of her eyes and flood the frozen contours of her mouth. She’d lain too long in darkness, captive of its suffocating abyss, wrapped in cerements of time and memory. Winding sheets now as tattered as the remnants of her clothes. A reminder bitter to her as the silt that blanketed her limestone bed and the seasonal detritus that sifted down to lodge in the hollows of her bones.
Sift and fall and freeze and thaw: so many seasons had passed, she could no longer count them all. Time had forgotten her. She could sense it in the movement of the currents, in the texture of the omnipresent darkness, and in the silence pressing in all around her. The dead silence that was a sound in itself. In its echoes of words unspoken and actions never undertaken, a void of discovery. Shadows passing over its surface disturbed nothing.
Forced to bear the mantle of non-entity, discarded and unremembered, she chafed within the boundaries of her unmarked grave, writhing in a repose devoid of rest or peace like a worm within a chrysalis. A prisoner of time, forced penitent for a crime she did not commit, she could not forget and would never forgive.
Squirm and scrape and scratch and claw: gradually the walls of her unwanted carapace, worn soft as a square of old cloth, thinned and frayed and finally, snapped. Freedom flooded in and she floated out, floated away.
No longer pinned like some unfortunate insect against an agar slab, she rose, eager to pierce the fragile membrane that separated her world from theirs. She breached the invisible barrier with the ease of a swimmer surfacing for a breath of air.
Long had lain the nights she’d waited, destruction and desecration titillating her nonexistent tongue and taste buds with hints of salt and savory: the promise of the ultimate cold meal served to ultimate satisfaction. Each morsel stirring, as it plummeted into a gnawing chasm whose enormity stretched beyond the farthest horizon, a singular realization. The unjust deprivation responsible for inciting that initial craving, ultimately had transformed her, transmuted her. No longer starving, she had become the essence of starvation itself, gifting a face to famine.
Only her name, intractable even in death, was still her own.
Her name was Tanith. Tanith Harper. Forever young but no longer an unwitting pawn on a plain marred with secrets and sins. Now the terrible butterfly had emerged from its poisoned chrysalis. It was time to go, time to reclaim what time had stolen. A life so cruelly ripped away, innocence abandoned, casually discarded to conceal avarice, envy, and abomination.
Gathering speed, flesh, and form, she rose, a spark ignited, wrath streaming in her wake. Blood called for blood, although an ocean roiling red, its waves a sticky crimson tsunami, could never expunge his stain.
Or theirs.
Those he left behind, unworthy to receive his legacy, those responsible: all would know her and despair! All would die choking on the dreams they’d drowned.
With blackness behind her eyes and in the guttered lantern of her heart—
She rose.
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