#tis deep heartbreak verily so it is!

[viserya-firstofhername]

[...] and the dragons danced.

― George R.R. Martin, Fire & Blood

[lovecraft-sonia]

Pყɾҽ

Darkness pierced the sunless void behind my eyelids, and I awoke to deafening silence. Madly roving eyes espied winking candlelight beneath the door, my fingers spasming outward, seeking to expose that light and witness its fullest brilliance. Desire ate through me like acid; I wished to see flame, but shadows flurried all around, governless furies gouging my sensibilities. Thus, enmeshed in dark and haunted by the ever-distant light, my voice drew deep and bellowing into the abyss.

God, please, let someone hear me!

Fire spilled into the room, enubilating and blinding and more terrific than even the darkness to which I had been shackled.

“Kaz, are you possessed? What do you recall of last night?”

The svelte silhouette of my God-sent savior, a beatific beacon of hope, turned fiendish to my fright-possessed psyche. The woman’s face swum with shadows; natheless the softly lilting accent incited within me an aching familiarity as well as vague, forlorn love eclipsed by antipathy; bittersweet, I suppose. 

Warily, the woman drew nearer to me, and I trembled.

“Where am I, and who are you?”

Frail white fingers laced with my own darker, leaner digits, shadows filling the gaps betwixt our knuckles and underlining the proud angles of her cheekbones. Her arsenic-pale eyes pensively explored my face, as if seeking to unearth a terrible mystery only to find it kept under seven locks. 

“’Tis I, Svetlana, your sister-in-law; please, tell me you remember that much.”

I was idiot-blind; as foolish as a babe, incapable of reminiscing, for I found the entity encased within my skull, the matter comprising everything I am, curiously vacuous. I fell back upon the bed, swathed in bedding, the pillow lush and downy beneath my head. I thought of suicide. Verily, death would be an amicable alternative to this direful state of incognizance.

“Kazimir,” cautiously Svetlana spoke, her countenance lachrymose as her glacial grey eyes welled with tears. “Your name is Kazimir Dragomir; you had a wife, my sister, Apollinariya, with whom you begat three children, Roksana, Svana and Afanasei.” I looked at her in alarm, a numbing coldness suffusing my gut. 

“Had?”

“They perished,” Svetlana sniffed, lips faintly trembling. “Last night, a conflagration left your mansion in ashes. The constables found you comatose lying with the remains of your family, somehow untouched.”

No, no, no! How could this be? These people, I knew them, I could feel their absence, but their faces were emulsified, voices dissipating. As I pondered these elusive figures, heartbreak and ferity surfaced together. I abhorred these people. The children’s names ignited sensations of astringency and alienation, but the woman, oh, the woman--nebulous recollections of her austere visage erupted within my brain an asperity so fathomless I dreaded it would be all I ever felt for as long as I lived.

A ruthless surge of clarity prompted conniptions in my body, and Svetlana held fast to me. Vasilisa. The beldam. Her fateful kiss, sealing our deal. The ward she set upon the manor, entrapping my wife and my children and myself as the flames roared higher and higher. I stood tall, mesmerized by the carnage suffused in hellfire. The children clung to my hands and legs, kindling for the inferno, and I wept as my wife’s eyes boiled in their sockets.

I did not miss them.

Was this liberation, or desolation? The two were inextricable. Relief seemed abstract, extant beyond the bounds of this world, spirited from my grasp; all was forfeit.

I turned to Svetlana, my eyes dry. Hers brimmed with crystalline tears, jaw tight and shoulders shaking. I pulled her close, sobs and low whimpers were loosed into the night, and the shadows encroached once more.

Vasilisa was waiting.