Promises Unkept

Earth to Earth

The two weeks passed, the month wore out and with it wore out the flavor of summer that had been endowed paltrily to the year.

The vibrancy died around, or perhaps, fair it is to say, revived in another shade. Days of warm spring fell into slumber and world rose in another dominion.

Red. Arid. Cold.

The fall.

Autumn.

Persephone met her Hades.

The moist green got washed out, slowly, as the soft, slithering blush of inflaming red and rich brown started hinting the noble-headed bushes and trees. The hills showed an odd mixture of those named colors. Weeds started to shrivel and die their seasonal death, only to return with more stubbornness and fierceness the next season. Grasses were all littered over with dry leaves.

Wings of Dandelions filled the sky.

Nature bloomed here. Nature bled there.

Suffice it was to say, that the events that followed hereafter, amidst the cold, moss-ridden walls of the grand manor called Ashleyton, took much after the season only.

With the fall of this year, so much fell apart never to get up again.

It was strange how nature behests warning in its most arresting allusions and we human.... we human misread it as a parade of its valor.

Its glory.

***

Sometimes, it is not the giddiness of heart or the soft feeling which tells you that you are in love.

Sometimes, it's the besieging pain, the engulfing fire, the killing moments of solitude.... what hints you of this sweet plague.

At times, love makes itself known like that... in its callous, demonic way.

Then why, was this pain so harmonious? So cherished? Why was she forgiven for being the cause of it and was loved all the more for causing it?

Why was she the bane and she herself the cure?

He didn't know, couldn't understand.

Couldn't tell.

It was madness.

These past few days since that evening had been madness.

He had avoided Eden like blight and yet sought her out in her unguarded moments. He had not given her a glimpse of himself, but he had been watching her on every possible occasion, she had been relished in his thoughts all these nights.

A staid frown had arched his brows this morning as he was cuffing his sleeves. A sad pause then followed, an upset sigh.... a distressed scoff.

He had felt like a true maniac. A little unwise....a bit insane.....a man in love.....a man in vain....

Gritting his teeth, he had glared at his reflection closely in the glass, for some sign of lunacy. Some stupidity. Some madness.

Or perhaps some suggestion of her. Some clue of her presence within him. Her air around him. She seemed to have crept into his heart, to poison his bones, seeped into his vessels, his blood like some contagion.

That woman! That necromancer!

He didn't find her anywhere in his own manifestation. Nor did he find any sign of fanaticism in himself. And that made it only more dangerous.

That was in the morning.

Tonight, however, was different.

Tonight, he wished to amend his primeval follies.