i overdosed my soul with beautiful fragments of you.

the writer

• return.

aesthetics & inspirations

connections

adieu, mon seigneur

Death did not become him.No — that did not express it. Death, that spectre waiting in the shadows of wings, in the cruel glint of talon and fang, should never have touched him. His lord — his master — possessed far too great a will ever to allow himself to sink into that withering embrace. Such a refined magnificence could never belong there.He should have triumphed.He should have outlived them all. Yet here he lay, bloodied and broken, a child’s discarded doll thrown carelessly from the parapet above into the stones of its ruin like so much ballast. The last of greatness born to this ancient house cast from his height with no more ceremony than a swift kick into the depths of Witchdrop; while the son, with his father’s name and half his valour, knew the agony and the glory of dragonfire. It was an insult.And yet death had not taken his beauty from him along with his dignity. Was it mercy? Or simply a final mockery, sneering at him from beyond the veil already shrouding those perfect eyes?The answer, its glassy stare turned endlessly to the heavens, twisted in his heart like a lance.

sepelire

No light had touched the walls of the Vauntelaire crypt in the long years since its latest viscount had found rest there with his son. Its seal, rime-veiled granite hewn generations ago from the depths of the Spine and carried to its appointed place at the heels of a dozen sturdy fowl, resisted every attempt to part it from its frame save one.Gièvaix raised a hand to the sigil graven in the stone. In his palm, the brooch of his office shivered and warmed against the ice, then shuddered to a heat near fit to sear him as if to echo the fiery gallop of his blood in his veins. A weaker man might have dropped it there; he clutched it tighter, even as it began to burn its silhouette into his palm. The purpose that kept his knuckles taut could bear it — and did, until the sigil’s wards brightened and flashed, then faded to no more than shadows.Quiet reigned.Then, breaking it, the weight of stone grinding upon stone as the seal parted to admit him.Upon the darkness that waited within its maw only the single lamp he carried cast its weak flame; in it, the breath that rattled from him curled and dissipated in a thin, fragile fog, easily swallowed in the tongues of shadow flickering across the threshold. Behind him the day’s waning rays retreated far and away from this precious place, as if to usher the Fury’s eyes far from Her sleeping ardents; from the need which had driven their last living servant to disturb them.The only breath which rose to greet him emerged from the depths of the sepulchre itself. A frigid gust stale with damp and old stone curled at once into his nose, choking what remained of surface air from Gièvaix’s lungs. He sucked it down greedily, swallowing with it the thread of his pulse weaving ever tighter about his throat. In it, no foetor of putrefaction — only the dust of bones and their once-stately raiment saw fit to welcome him.Past the threshold, a shiver swept the length of his spine. His masters had ever kept their tombs in the manner of the mountain cloisters: close, steep, labyrinthine, unlit and untouched by any living save those who shared kin and purpose. No different was that which he trespassed here: every rough-hewn stair seemed to close its walls tighter about their intruder. The welcome they offered him came upon the clutching arms of the dead — that embrace that brooked no departure.In every downward step he sank, sighing, deeper into its clutches. Here the walls closed about him as heavily as the air, until at length every step ached and every breath filled with the perfume of the grave. What sweeter succor could find him than here?Head bent, shoulders arched, he pressed onwards through the tight sphincter the corridor now made about him, and thus bowed gave his obeisance to the dead who waited beyond.Swallowing, he passed through.