Swansong to the Raven

The night was falling. The gentle and cold winter breeze rustled the persistent fallen leaves. In the purple sky, full of tiny stars, silvery Selene was being challenged by some disperse but gray clouds, battle reflected in the quiet lake of frozen borders.

It was impossible to count how many moons he had been coming to that place, how many times he had been on his knees holding a wake for her. She had been lying inside that absurd walnut box. There was no gravestone pointing out her place of eternal rest, just a blackened and dried up tree, like him since everything happened. The stirred ground revealed she was buried there. He still remembers the day he found her… Dead.  

***

He was walking through the foggy streets with fast footsteps. His leather boots echoed between the walls of the narrow alleys. After going round the corner, a shiver travelled down his spine and he felt an icy cold expanding through his body. Inside his head, he had heard a terrifying deathly scream. From her. 

He run all the way home, closed the door and ran up the stairs till the last floor, ignoring all the people he had come across. He opened the door and called her. How big was his surprise when he discerned the pale and lifeless body lying grotesquely in the Victorian armchair. He forgot how to breathe and his heartbeat stopped while his bloodshot eyes were staring at his lover’s body.

The corpse was lying, languid and sensual, white as snow. Her hair, almost platinum, was all dishevelled. Her hand was hanging inert to the floor and her fingers were dripping a viscous liquid from her thighs. There were some scratches on her cheeks, her mouth was gagged and her open eyes were giving him an empty look…

He was conscious of himself again when he felt two warm tears rolling down his cheeks. Getting rid of his hat and jacket, he flopped on his knees, without caring about the pain it would cause, in front of his lover’s corpse. He embraced her cold body, taking off roughly the cloth that gagged her. In her lips, red in the past, bruised now, were left the last remains of that stifled scream, only heard by him.

He cursed and cried embraced to her beautiful body, stroking her bright and silky hair, licking her scratches and wounds, kissing her purplish lips, caressing her porcelain skin, cleaning her stained thighs with his tongue…

A gray morning full of leaden clouds threatening a storm, he put her body in a walnut box he got. With his own hands he dug her grave and saying goodbye with a kiss he buried her in the wet ground.

***

The night had fallen and the moon was radiating silver sparkles over the lake. And there he was, tormented, guarding her death, punishing himself for not having guarded her life… His spirit was decaying, like his lover’s body. Going mad for seconds, cursing and blaming himself every single moment of his existence. For him nothing made sense now. His hands were covered in the blood of those who had ended the life of his sleeping beauty. Without even thinking, impulse of the lustful moon, determination of his appalling insanity, of his yearning for seeing and feeling her again, he started to dig the ground with his own hands until his dirty nails brushed the coffin lid. He opened it and found her body dressed with expensive Victorian apparels he had ordered to be made just for her.

He was squatted, observing her shut eyes of dark long eyelashes, her pale cheeks, her crimson lips, her serene complexion, her entwined hands…

With the strength of insanity, he took her body out of the coffin and, under the cover of the lecherous moon, undressed her so all the living beings could see her ethereal beauty. Finally, again, naked. He kissed her. His lips travelled across her. Feeling the fury making his flesh burn, he bit every part of her body, lying on the dead leaves. He scratched her legs, dug his nails into her hair, licked her skin and loved her for the last time, in the eyes of the world. 

***

"Now I dream, enwrapped in pure clouds of the sweetest oblivion". In a cold cell, immobilized for life, condemned to be without her, but with torment. They call him crazy. "I scream through my bars at the stars that for these crimes of mine solace me". Lovesick for her. And with the escape in his mind, he is dying emotionally. "As with our ghosts in the fog when we both turn no more…" He sees her. Always. He sees her holding out her hand to him, with a mischievous smile on her face. Because he is not insane, but dead inside.

"Clarissa..."

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This was inspired by this song. There are some fragments of the song lyrics in the last paragraph. Also, this is one of the few "straight" stories I've written.