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Description
She closed her eyes and let it happen.
Like creeping shadows, the old senses returned to her. Voices, images, snatches of memory in song and in thought; ghosts, feathers, and gentle things with menacing tongues. They were familiar, in all their obscure meanings and ominous words, and she invited them into the hollowed place where her heart had lain once; before the day when the Sun had stolen her light. Her fingers against the glass of the window were white; strained hands, icy skin stretched too tightly over the knuckles that raised themselves like tiny animal spines, hunched and stooped, bent down to kiss the blood at their feet. Her nails were long and black, (She made a promise she would never bite them again, it was as if she was saving her wings from being pinioned, thought it was already too late) and she dragged them slowly down the glass to follow the falling snow outside the window, where the Silver Season guided the earth into an even deeper slumber.
Sleep had forsaken her a long time ago. Sleep was now a bitter memory, a black, merciless figure that tore like a bird with bladed wings through her subconscious, bringing armies of nightmarish creatures to maim and to steal the memories, which had survived the snow. Not many had come through it without result of obliteration, and those that did carried countless scars and un-mendable wounds that haunted her with their blood and their tears.
She remembered a face that was not stained with blood, and the wounds beneath the eyes had not yet come into form, and she recoiled from the glass as if it burnt her.
She shivered and pushed the thought from her mind, pushed it deep into the abyss of the Forbidden, and let her body shake as she forced her eyes to open and return to the snow. Despite the cold she made no attempt to draw warmth to her skin from any garment that would normally provide comfort in such circumstances, but she refuses to wear anything but what she wears now. She refuses the embrace of sympathetic flesh, and spits in the eyes of sympathetic faces who's lips murmur words that fall heavily to the floor, un-noticed and unwanted, shattering like diamonds being thrown from Heaven.
The dress was black.
She had put it on as soon as she heard, as if it would bind her soul in her body somehow, to keep it from being snatched by the black fingers of the creatures who made her dreams broken and inescapable, and she remembers when it used to be white and not so full of dust and cobwebs.
Her wedding dress had been perfect.
She had looked like some kind of angelic vision when she had first worn it, when he had first seen it. Walking up an aisle that was the last path to happiness her feet could ever take, her skirts moving like liquid silk across the carpet of feathers and rose petals and stars. She remembered tearing the petals off the roses, white roses that echoed with the humming iridescence of his flesh, and her eyes found themselves swept back into a maelstrom of thought, before she rescued herself from the ocean again. The lace sewn onto the dress was tired and worn now; she had spent hours tracing her fingers over it, night after night until her skin had become raw and painful from her strokes. But the blood wasn't visible on the black silk; it hid itself like a shying butterfly and melted into the cloth. It was still there, just hidden, and she hadn't forgotten.
The white roses paved another memory behind her eyes, and before she could step backward and protest against herself, the creatures had drawn her into it.
The light hurt her closed eyes and her skin was glowing with heat and another kind of feeling that neither scribes nor poets can put into words. Beads of water and sweat glistened in her hair and on her flesh like liquid diamonds formed from her pores. She opened her eyes and let her body come back from the surreality. On her back she lay, her eyes cast heavenward, seeing a sky tinged with indigo, scattered with clouds that had no shape except for the wingtips of angels and the curves of lips she had felt only moments before, and gentle spring trees framed her view in rustling emerald leaves. He knelt somewhere by the water, she knew, his beautiful hands fumbling with a safety net she hated yet dared not risk not using. She rested her hands on her belly and the sweat on her skin turned icy with the cool zephyr blowing off the mountain water.
Then he was beside her, the hum of his presence setting her alight, his flawless face more marble-like in the pale sunlight filtering through the trees, his hands dancing over her body; gentle, and beautiful, with good intention. He offered liquid for her lips to calm what was already calm inside her, and he kissed her. Words lost themselves in the rush of the water close by, and the wind stole what tiny gasps and blissful sighs escaped their lips, sending them to a place where they would not be forgotten nor forsaken, and she heard herself moan a tiny song as his body found hers in a rush of blinding light.
Again her lids closed on her, and the blackness was full of thought and colour, the green of the grass beneath her, the bruised blue of the sky threatening a thunderstorm above, and the ivory beauty of his skin that wept against hers at that very moment. His hair fell against her throat like tiny feathers, blue-black and sometimes red against her breasts as his mouth closed over a nipple, and she found an eternity in the fleeting moments when he was inside her, as if it had always been this moment, forever and a day.
The simplicity of his moments defied all bodily language, he flowed with a grace untouched by angelic jealousy or godly stature, and her very muscles loved the feel of him as he looked down at her beneath the ebony feathers of his lashes.

â€¦.And torn again from her dream-spell she was, by the cruel and dainty hands of the nightmares with painted faces and silver wings.
His taste burned on her tongue for a few bittersweet moments before she fell back into the frozen prison of her body. Her dress was now tear-stained, the faded black unable to hide the darkness of them, and the hair curling at her waist glistened with a few sparse droplets that she shook away with a toss of her head.
She returned to the window, as she often did, and stared out into the swirling snowflakes, unable to see through their icy air-maze, but knowing what lay beneath their shroud. Snatches of songs filled her ears and her lips mouthed their words silently, knowing what hold the verses still had over her, though her throat could not breathe the tune. Pain was better left silenced. She had no need for the feeling of dread to creep up her spine and possess her again, too long had she battled it and now she was tired and aching for sleep without terror, aching to weep a whirlpool of evanescent light without the guilt of not being strong enough to keep her tears quelled and hidden. In a thoughtless action she lifted her fingers to her lips and inhaled what was left of a cigarette that had been burning so long that all that was left was a cone of grey ash, and she breathed out the tasteless smoke, watching it curl and try to penetrate the glass. It fell to the floor with the dust and the other ashes, and as she walked towards the door the ash clung to the hem of her dress as if it was desperate to go with her into the storm.

Barefoot and uncaring of the frozen ground beneath her feet, she carried a bouquet of 8 roses in her arms. Like a cluster of tiny children, she held them against her chest and sometimes let her lips brush their petals as her mind whispered secrets to them.
Velvet black.
Black roses, a shade he called a colour, the stain of ink she wrote him poems and letters in; the colour of her wedding dress she had dyed when she had heardâ€¦ Eight for the number that when lain on its' side symbolizes infinity, a number she had carved into the underside of her left wrist beneath his name, a tattooed-green reminder of the helplessness which she was bound to him. Her lips parted as she glimpsed this and was reminded of its' significance, and she whispered the first four words she had spoken in years, the sound torn out of her and leaving a searing pain like burning flesh or broken bones. The four words carved in the outline of a statue that was just visible to her now, the stone rising out of the snow and into the light of the stars.
"Forever and a dayâ€¦"

She knelt.
Helplessly she fell to her knees as if she was suddenly crippled by the weight of it all, and her dress spilled like liquefied velvet into the snow, too heavy for the wind to lift and steal, though the ripped lace raised itself like sewn flowers and threatened to tear loose from its threads to desert her. Her hair whipped about her face that had barely changed in expression since time had stopped for her, and it's auburn tresses were full of snowflakes as she bent her head to press her lips against the snow. If the elements had been watching at this moment, they would have seen a broken doll bent and bruised by memories she could not silence, her head bowed below the outstretched fingers of a stone angel as if it were blessing her in unuttered grace, in a coldness only statues can feel. If they had been watching they would have seen a mourning angel, the most gentle black widow in existence, weeping tears she had forbidden for too long, that hit the snow and froze into the white. They would have seen a timeless despair, a child cast to ruin by the cruel unkindness of spoiled Gods, with a winged messenger of such deities poised above her, it's marble body stooped as if the weight of it's onyx wings were too much to bear.

But the silver eyes of Winter did not see, they did not look. Instead, they averted their gaze from her and pretended they had not seen the ghost-like girl who pressed her lips repeatedly against the earth her hands had swept of snow. Her whispers rose to quiet sufferings, and her sufferings rose to lilting songs of lament, and her laments tore loose from her throat and took hold on the air to become screams that stopped dead in the wind without an echo of memory or recognized despair.
His name was ripped from her chest repeatedly, sent into the air gratefully and with a hope that he would hear it - like dandelion seeds sent with a wish into the breeze, a child's lips mouthing their hope, their fingers clutching the stalk of the flower as if it were a magic wand possessing some naÃ¯ve power to grant Fate to their favour.
Yet her screams only fell back down upon her in weighted snowflakes, bruising her back as she let the frozen ground kiss her forehead. The stolen memories came back to her in a whirlwind of light and shadow, and she was summoned by love to a place where the blind and the bleeding could see each other's woundless flesh. Something inside her collapsed, a bridge across a ravine that was full of skeletal lies and tormenting jests that echoed with dreams she had forgotten, full of angels in cages, behind windows unbreakable by time or by the hands of the promised healers she had never received. And in that moment she abandoned God like God had done her, and she curled up like child in the snow, her arms tightly around her precious black roses, their thorns pressed against her breast drawing the blood in tiny rivers to hide in the black silk of her dress.
Snowflakes filled her eyes before she closed them to the white, and the wind brought back the tune of the song she had forbidden herself to remember, lulling her to rest as she lay like a collapsed doll beneath the angel that marked his grave.

Her breath was no longer haunted; her hair danced freely and fell to cover her bare arms like an auburn blanket when there was a lapse in the wind. The Silver Season's sleep began to take her body, and in her mind she saw his face and he was smiling, reaching out to touch her, to fold her in his arms like he had done before the Winter.
And as she let her flesh find his in a realm untouchable even by the selfish Gods, she felt the nightmares leave her spirit in a rush of disintegrating shadow.

No longer the caged angel.
The wind clothed her now.

Description
She closed her eyes and let it happen.
Like creeping shadows, the old senses returned to her. Voices, images, snatches of memory in song and in thought; ghosts, feathers, and gentle things with menacing tongues. They were familiar, in all their obscure meanings and ominous words, and she invited them into the hollowed place where her heart had lain once; before the day when the Sun had stolen her light. Her fingers against the glass of the window were white; strained hands, icy skin stretched too tightly over the knuckles that raised themselves like tiny animal spines, hunched and stooped, bent down to kiss the blood at their feet. Her nails were long and black, (She made a promise she would never bite them again, it was as if she was saving her wings from being pinioned, thought it was already too late) and she dragged them slowly down the glass to follow the falling snow outside the window, where the Silver Season guided the earth into an even deeper slumber.
Sleep had forsaken her a long time ago. Sleep was now a bitter memory, a black, merciless figure that tore like a bird with bladed wings through her subconscious, bringing armies of nightmarish creatures to maim and to steal the memories, which had survived the snow. Not many had come through it without result of obliteration, and those that did carried countless scars and un-mendable wounds that haunted her with their blood and their tears.
She remembered a face that was not stained with blood, and the wounds beneath the eyes had not yet come into form, and she recoiled from the glass as if it burnt her.
She shivered and pushed the thought from her mind, pushed it deep into the abyss of the Forbidden, and let her body shake as she forced her eyes to open and return to the snow. Despite the cold she made no attempt to draw warmth to her skin from any garment that would normally provide comfort in such circumstances, but she refuses to wear anything but what she wears now. She refuses the embrace of sympathetic flesh, and spits in the eyes of sympathetic faces who's lips murmur words that fall heavily to the floor, un-noticed and unwanted, shattering like diamonds being thrown from Heaven.
The dress was black.
She had put it on as soon as she heard, as if it would bind her soul in her body somehow, to keep it from being snatched by the black fingers of the creatures who made her dreams broken and inescapable, and she remembers when it used to be white and not so full of dust and cobwebs.
Her wedding dress had been perfect.
She had looked like some kind of angelic vision when she had first worn it, when he had first seen it. Walking up an aisle that was the last path to happiness her feet could ever take, her skirts moving like liquid silk across the carpet of feathers and rose petals and stars. She remembered tearing the petals off the roses, white roses that echoed with the humming iridescence of his flesh, and her eyes found themselves swept back into a maelstrom of thought, before she rescued herself from the ocean again. The lace sewn onto the dress was tired and worn now; she had spent hours tracing her fingers over it, night after night until her skin had become raw and painful from her strokes. But the blood wasn't visible on the black silk; it hid itself like a shying butterfly and melted into the cloth. It was still there, just hidden, and she hadn't forgotten.
The white roses paved another memory behind her eyes, and before she could step backward and protest against herself, the creatures had drawn her into it.
The light hurt her closed eyes and her skin was glowing with heat and another kind of feeling that neither scribes nor poets can put into words. Beads of water and sweat glistened in her hair and on her flesh like liquid diamonds formed from her pores. She opened her eyes and let her body come back from the surreality. On her back she lay, her eyes cast heavenward, seeing a sky tinged with indigo, scattered with clouds that had no shape except for the wingtips of angels and the curves of lips she had felt only moments before, and gentle spring trees framed her view in rustling emerald leaves. He knelt somewhere by the water, she knew, his beautiful hands fumbling with a safety net she hated yet dared not risk not using. She rested her hands on her belly and the sweat on her skin turned icy with the cool zephyr blowing off the mountain water.
Then he was beside her, the hum of his presence setting her alight, his flawless face more marble-like in the pale sunlight filtering through the trees, his hands dancing over her body; gentle, and beautiful, with good intention. He offered liquid for her lips to calm what was already calm inside her, and he kissed her. Words lost themselves in the rush of the water close by, and the wind stole what tiny gasps and blissful sighs escaped their lips, sending them to a place where they would not be forgotten nor forsaken, and she heard herself moan a tiny song as his body found hers in a rush of blinding light.
Again her lids closed on her, and the blackness was full of thought and colour, the green of the grass beneath her, the bruised blue of the sky threatening a thunderstorm above, and the ivory beauty of his skin that wept against hers at that very moment. His hair fell against her throat like tiny feathers, blue-black and sometimes red against her breasts as his mouth closed over a nipple, and she found an eternity in the fleeting moments when he was inside her, as if it had always been this moment, forever and a day.
The simplicity of his moments defied all bodily language, he flowed with a grace untouched by angelic jealousy or godly stature, and her very muscles loved the feel of him as he looked down at her beneath the ebony feathers of his lashes.

â€¦.And torn again from her dream-spell she was, by the cruel and dainty hands of the nightmares with painted faces and silver wings.
His taste burned on her tongue for a few bittersweet moments before she fell back into the frozen prison of her body. Her dress was now tear-stained, the faded black unable to hide the darkness of them, and the hair curling at her waist glistened with a few sparse droplets that she shook away with a toss of her head.
She returned to the window, as she often did, and stared out into the swirling snowflakes, unable to see through their icy air-maze, but knowing what lay beneath their shroud. Snatches of songs filled her ears and her lips mouthed their words silently, knowing what hold the verses still had over her, though her throat could not breathe the tune. Pain was better left silenced. She had no need for the feeling of dread to creep up her spine and possess her again, too long had she battled it and now she was tired and aching for sleep without terror, aching to weep a whirlpool of evanescent light without the guilt of not being strong enough to keep her tears quelled and hidden. In a thoughtless action she lifted her fingers to her lips and inhaled what was left of a cigarette that had been burning so long that all that was left was a cone of grey ash, and she breathed out the tasteless smoke, watching it curl and try to penetrate the glass. It fell to the floor with the dust and the other ashes, and as she walked towards the door the ash clung to the hem of her dress as if it was desperate to go with her into the storm.

Barefoot and uncaring of the frozen ground beneath her feet, she carried a bouquet of 8 roses in her arms. Like a cluster of tiny children, she held them against her chest and sometimes let her lips brush their petals as her mind whispered secrets to them.
Velvet black.
Black roses, a shade he called a colour, the stain of ink she wrote him poems and letters in; the colour of her wedding dress she had dyed when she had heardâ€¦ Eight for the number that when lain on its' side symbolizes infinity, a number she had carved into the underside of her left wrist beneath his name, a tattooed-green reminder of the helplessness which she was bound to him. Her lips parted as she glimpsed this and was reminded of its' significance, and she whispered the first four words she had spoken in years, the sound torn out of her and leaving a searing pain like burning flesh or broken bones. The four words carved in the outline of a statue that was just visible to her now, the stone rising out of the snow and into the light of the stars.
"Forever and a dayâ€¦"

She knelt.
Helplessly she fell to her knees as if she was suddenly crippled by the weight of it all, and her dress spilled like liquefied velvet into the snow, too heavy for the wind to lift and steal, though the ripped lace raised itself like sewn flowers and threatened to tear loose from its threads to desert her. Her hair whipped about her face that had barely changed in expression since time had stopped for her, and it's auburn tresses were full of snowflakes as she bent her head to press her lips against the snow. If the elements had been watching at this moment, they would have seen a broken doll bent and bruised by memories she could not silence, her head bowed below the outstretched fingers of a stone angel as if it were blessing her in unuttered grace, in a coldness only statues can feel. If they had been watching they would have seen a mourning angel, the most gentle black widow in existence, weeping tears she had forbidden for too long, that hit the snow and froze into the white. They would have seen a timeless despair, a child cast to ruin by the cruel unkindness of spoiled Gods, with a winged messenger of such deities poised above her, it's marble body stooped as if the weight of it's onyx wings were too much to bear.

But the silver eyes of Winter did not see, they did not look. Instead, they averted their gaze from her and pretended they had not seen the ghost-like girl who pressed her lips repeatedly against the earth her hands had swept of snow. Her whispers rose to quiet sufferings, and her sufferings rose to lilting songs of lament, and her laments tore loose from her throat and took hold on the air to become screams that stopped dead in the wind without an echo of memory or recognized despair.
His name was ripped from her chest repeatedly, sent into the air gratefully and with a hope that he would hear it - like dandelion seeds sent with a wish into the breeze, a child's lips mouthing their hope, their fingers clutching the stalk of the flower as if it were a magic wand possessing some naÃ¯ve power to grant Fate to their favour.
Yet her screams only fell back down upon her in weighted snowflakes, bruising her back as she let the frozen ground kiss her forehead. The stolen memories came back to her in a whirlwind of light and shadow, and she was summoned by love to a place where the blind and the bleeding could see each other's woundless flesh. Something inside her collapsed, a bridge across a ravine that was full of skeletal lies and tormenting jests that echoed with dreams she had forgotten, full of angels in cages, behind windows unbreakable by time or by the hands of the promised healers she had never received. And in that moment she abandoned God like God had done her, and she curled up like child in the snow, her arms tightly around her precious black roses, their thorns pressed against her breast drawing the blood in tiny rivers to hide in the black silk of her dress.
Snowflakes filled her eyes before she closed them to the white, and the wind brought back the tune of the song she had forbidden herself to remember, lulling her to rest as she lay like a collapsed doll beneath the angel that marked his grave.

Her breath was no longer haunted; her hair danced freely and fell to cover her bare arms like an auburn blanket when there was a lapse in the wind. The Silver Season's sleep began to take her body, and in her mind she saw his face and he was smiling, reaching out to touch her, to fold her in his arms like he had done before the Winter.
And as she let her flesh find his in a realm untouchable even by the selfish Gods, she felt the nightmares leave her spirit in a rush of disintegrating shadow.

No longer the caged angel.
The wind clothed her now.