I, the author do not own any of the characters appearing in this story, they are the copyrighted property of Mutant Enemy and its various owner's/creators/legal rats. No infringement intended. This story and the situations therein are the original work and property of the author.
Referances, though not really spoilers in my mind, are made to "Becomming."
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It is green here. The garden shimmers, gleaming emerald, lush and serene. This is not the green of roadside field and forest that surrounds her now.
That green was harsh and blurred, barren branches pointing insistently behind her, slashing recriminations across the hunter foliage slipping by as dull as army camouflage. That kind of green sprinted quickly past the bus window, back to the place she was running from. It was unmindful of her as it hurried along, its impartiality the greatest reproach and the most painful recrimination. Even nature looked through her now, the orphan of a living parent, the slain slayer, as it rushed on its way to a Requiem for the fallen.
She had turned back at the next bus station. Running couldn't save her now, she had been mortally wounded by her own betrayal, the guilt that tore at her now slowly extending her injuries until she was numb unable to feel even the pain of the ragged wound. Wrapped in the iced black veil of mourning, she was oblivious to the young mothers and old men crowed around her, staring fixedly at the seat in front of her, trying to mask her wound as boisterous college students eyed her with youthful appreciation. Amidst the din she silently tried to remember how to feel, but her heart had descended with the fallen. Her emotion draining with his blood and spilling into this garden.
The late afternoon filters easily through the trees here, embossing everything in twenty-four carrots of sunlight. The leaves glow like stained glass, vaulting high above her like the windows of a cathedral. They hang from their stems as gracefully as the wings of an angel at rest, rustling intermittently by the afternoon breeze. The air is perfumed with the incense of flowers and the silvery gurgle of water murmurs a quiet dirge. Itis the cathedral before the requiem, the silent, arresting beauty of one who sleeps and will never wake again. A beauty and a horror she can neither be moved by nor soothed by anymore.
No coffin greets her as she continues up the flagstone aisle to. Fallen petals are strewn across the stone. Solemn wreaths of fragrant roses nod on either side of her while lurid blood roses stain blossoms on the path under her feet, ominous flowers sown in battle the night before. The entire garden is trimmed in its flowery finery it seems, decked in a profusion of bright colors. It is a celebration of the daylight she had successfully defended and a tribute to the one who fell. Every flower has turned out to pay its respects. All, that is, except the jasmine.
She stops before the statue, reaching up to pluck a tightly closed bud from its vine as it swings from a wiry tendril, lightly grazing the top of the rough stone. The deep amethyst petals are cool and silken against the skin of her palm, clenched against the rays of the day, waiting for darkness.
The flower slips from her hand, falling where he had fallen and lands beside the blade that caused his descent. He, like the jasmine was night blooming, a dark, sensual being in the bright and vainly colored garden. He had made the sunny roses envious because even with all their much heralded sweetness, they could not match the quiet, starlit allure of jasmine's perfume. And, like the bud lying on the ground beside the sun-gilded blade, she plucked him. Twice she had slashed his wings, sending him plummeting into darkness. And for her sins he will suffer eternally, tormented until the end of time.
She doesn't feel the tears as she picks up the blade, still tainted maroon. And she doesn't hear her own whispered, "I love you," as she offers penance to he who had fallen, next to the single dying jasmine in the garden green cathedral and the 24 carrot sunlight. She sows her own blood roses to atone, scarlet flowers spreading quickly along the stones at the foot of hell.
And another is called.
The End
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