Stories I Never Finished

Black Rose

Sit Among The Thorns And Let Your Skin Bleed

Overgrown vines strung themselves across the darkened land of forest trees and damp grass; green colours the deep shade of rotting moss. With skies closer to an oozing black like the inky palette of a disgraced artist, the world was ethereal in a gloomy blackened sense of evil as though Alice in Wonderland had come alive after an untimely slaughter untold by the fantastical stories of Lewis Carroll.

Michael couldn't remember how he arrived in such an unearthly place, unsettling in its disease-ridden design of wilting roses forming into blooming ones as time passed in a strange loop he was yet to understand. There was no night or day, only stormy skies, with pitch black horizons one would have to wander miles to reach, and dew-drops in sickeningly damp grass beneath bare feet of the bold and shoe-covered feet of the wise.

He knew the strange place far better than he had ever known himself or the strange creatures living inside of him—begging for food with quiet grumbles and churning in pain whenever he didn't appease them. He had tattered his black suit many a time upon the world's heartless roses laced with poison and drowning in history they would never tell. Those he came across with functioning mouths and thinking minds would often warn him against the being of the roses; making haste to leave whenever he persisted on a reason why.

Nothing among the trees or within toadstool homes would whisper the secret of the roses to him, too afraid of being heard by the deadly flora littered across their land. Roses were always in abundance, pick one and it would return to full bloom in moments before your eyes; they fed off a force of dark magick Michael had never been able to grasp control over. He could raise water from the depths of the earth and coax the trees to bend down for him with a simple 'please', but he could do no more and for no one.

Even so, through endless warnings hushed and hissed at him, he would often pay the rose deity a visit; wandering the vast never-ending land bare footed and feeling the earth brush its soothing serenity through him with each step against pale green he took, eyes curiously gazing upon the rolling hills in the distance.
Sometimes he could see the faint outline of powerful storms over the hills, electrifying lightning cracking down into the land and thundering clouds flashing with furious colours.

Today, he awoke to the world with nothing more unusual than it were when he closed his eyes to rest, his mind growing weary when he spent far too long with his eyes open. Green orbs glimmered as he peeled his eyelids apart, his gaze cast upon the sky above for a dragging moment of dissociative time—this was not reality. Wherever he lay was far beyond any time he may have once known.

Michael stared at the greying clouds as they sat seemingly motionless in the sky far from his touch until eventually he decided the patch of long grass he had taken rest upon was no longer comforting. He hauled himself to his feet, movements almost robotic as he picked broken grass stems from his black and white clothes; heading down a path he often took.

He ignored the wandering gazes of the eerie creatures dwelling within trees and plants, some slithering through the thinning grass and others walking aimlessly among their own existence; such strange inhuman beings of odd shapes and animal mutations. His path was a short one to reach the destination he desired, coming through the narrow passageway of the forest he had slept within to reach an open patch of pretty and soft coloured daisies all growing together.

Each flower was desperate to reach for the sky and he wondered if any would make it far enough to see where such gloomy illumination came from without a sun in sight.

Among the fair-sized patch of daisies, whites, pinks, greens and yellows all gorgeous in their plight for life, stood a familiar face dressed in a plain white gown.
It was simplistic, nothing more than a tattered white fabric wrapped around the slimming body of a strange human-looking male with uneasily soft olive skin and mysteriously solemn brown eyes; a gaze like the soil hidden beneath the surface of the earth.
In his hands he held a singular yellow daisy, the long green stem clutched delicately between his small fingers.