Colours. Colours. Colours of reds and yellows, purples and blues, like the swirling rings of Andromeda to an infrared lens. Lilacs. And daisies. And tulips. And lilies. The bark of the trees screeching out in an autumnal desire for warmth, the leaves on the ground fading into the muck underneath, the moist grass leaving its scent onto any passerby – a reminder that no matter where you go, you have forgotten the face of your father. Your mother. Your pasts. And all the things you wish so desperately to leave behind. Colours sprayed into the air, lighting up the forest with a mystical glow – shrouding the witches in shadows.
The witches and their chanting levitate the body of Shadow Frostbite into the air: the rigour mortis coating her skin dissipates, the skin of her body begins to shed, the hair upon her scalp seeps straight off and lands in the fire below. Her eyes bulge out of her face, the coldness her body once felt was now a fiery red. This is how my story ends, she thinks watching from a distance, her soul wavering. A wind brushes past her and it’s Jay Fate, her Lover, and as she smiles she realises he has to mourn alone. He has to take this journey, and this story of his, to an ending he has to write himself. A happy ending?,she thinks. No. Our stories aren’t meant to have a happy ending – we’re lucky enough to have an ending at all. And she thinks of her love for him, and how it flutters in the darkest of nights – how it prevails like a glimmer of light in a child’s bedroom. How their love, sacrificial and justified, blossoms in the way a burial is a birthgiving to another life.
“Is there time?” Jay asked, his hair flailing in the breeze of the spell-casting overhead. His eyes supernova – dying, and yet alive all at the same time. The glisten of melancholy like the spores of a lily.
“There’s still time, Jay,” Luna replied, turning her head and smiling softly.
The witches stepped back, laying the palms of their hands by their sides. The body of Shadow Frostbite in all her rebirth sang down from the air and rested in a small grave in front of the ruins of an old building they once knew. The windows smashed in, colours of violets, tulips and carnations reflecting against the limelight of the spells. And then they disappeared. The witches. And Luna.
A heavy sigh – Jay’s head hung low. An execution. The beheader of fortune. Jay Fate knew it would come to this, his whole life he had been warned about falling in love – warned that – “If you lose your focus, Jay Tabitha Fate, you will stumble, and you will fail. Do not lose your focus, Jay Tabitha Fate. Do not lose. Your. Focus,” someone had once told him. Someone important. A member of his God-sake. And now, hundreds of years later, when he’s old and matured like the spilt wine on the table of a crying mother, he heeds that warning again. And he hears those words, echoing. Echoing. And now he hears the melancholic tune of a Christmas song playing softly somewhere in the distance – of fairytales –of loss and love and desire. Jay Fate’s face falls into a crescent moon, shadowed and lit by violet glass. He falls to his knees in front of the open grave, her body resting silently six feet beneath him. His hands shake, his lips quiver, his pores let out, and he cries, his tears crystallising on his scarred face. He whines, loud and muffled into the cups of his palms, the lines of his cheeks throbbing and grinding against his eyes. He knew what this would come to. It was all his – I walk the path he walked to my lay of rest. I look upon my lover as he throbs helplessly into his own hands. And a smile caresses my face, naturally, knowing one day he will heal from this – he’ll move on from me. In a way it makes me fearful, and does that make me stupid? Being fearful when the one I love, knowing I’m gone from this world, eventually moves on from our love – from everything we had? It’s a birth giving, it’s grief, a giving to another life. I kneel down and gently fold my hands upon his warm shoulders – I feel a warmth on my shoulders – and I lift his hair – my hair moves with the breeze, calming in my grief – and I pull him close, his head against my chest – I hear a heartbeat, maybe my own – and I say my goodbyes – and I say my goodbyes.
Jay Fate looks up, a grave standing tall towers over him. The statue of a goddess wrapped in robes and a cape. The name on it reads:
SHADOW FROSTBITE
1611 – 1989
“To our hearts we do not regret the ones we love –
for time is all we have with those we choose to walk with.”
DAUGHTER OF MARY FROSTBITE.
SISTER TO WINTER FROSTBITE.
WIFE OF JAY FATE.
He unclipped a necklace in the shape of a crystal heart, shimmering in an indigo blue, and dropped it inside her grave.
Josh Clough
Josh Clough is a published author by Olympia Publishers. His first book “The Chronicles of The Camp: Love & War” released last year. Originally from Accrington, Lancashire, he is here at York St. John’s on a scholarship to do Creative Writing. “Violet Glass” is a prose piece written for his second epic “Waning Evanescent,” inspired by his partner, Felix Lawson, and of the writing in Stephen King’s “Wizard and Glass” and “Bag of Bones”.
Photo by Jacek Raniowski on Unsplash.