The World Remastered

The city of Boston, Massachusetts sometime during the twenty-first century.

The rain dripped casually down the grey weathered stone. It was effortless, and it seemed to take no care in its runnels and rivulets. The wind sang crisp music through ancient trees, and whispered softly. It battered the remnants of her tower, and stuttered along ramparts. The balcony was open stone, and gauzy curtains drifted into the wet night. Someone was sobbing.

The soft sounds of her gasps barely echoed in the vaulted room. Its opulence seemed grey, and muted in the low light. A few candles burned, flickering in darkness. The shadows moved like living things along the stacked stone wall. They reached out with inky fingerlings, looking to snuff away the light. The flame flickered against them though, and always seemed to win out in its small corner.

A pool of liquid satin, dark blue and soft as a murmur, lay on the ghostly marbled floor. Within it her figure poised, the pistil of a blossom. The fabric eased, and swelled over her form. A familiar one within these walls, but in an unfamiliar position. She sat upon the stone, one deftly manicured hand supporting a deep lean. Her long sharply tipped fingernails grazed the white marble. The other hand was splayed across her mouth. It did its level best to hush the soft cries mewling from between her fingertips. The floor was littered with dribbles of blood. Tears, red and vital, slid down her pale cheeks to plop unceremoniously on the floor.

Blue-black hair tumbles down her back in a shimmering curtain, and moss-agate green eyes pierce the darkness that calls to her like a lover. She gasps, and chokes over her own attempt to keep her broken cries silent. She would not wake her beloved Dracon with her sudden ache.

It did ache though, this stabbing emptiness she was left with. Once filled with fire, this gaping maw of empty space now had no way to fill. The clean smell of amber and sandalwood, warm and cloying drifted through the shadowed tower room. It drifted from her as the shadows breathed, and seethed. She could feel it like it pulsed within her throat; this desire to wail. Suddenly it over-takes her.

The delicate drift of her angular features snapped up towards the vaulted ceiling. Soft green eyes become piercing blue, and they seem to affix to a singular point. She begins to softly recite… as if entranced...

“Oh my love….” Her breathless voice became sing-song, and chant-like. “We were often in one another's company, and it was happy for us”, the air filled her lungs, slow and labored. “For if the world had been searched from the rising of the sun to sunset, the like would never have been found in one place. Of the Black of Sainglain, and the Grey of Macha. Laeg the chariot driver, and myself and..” Her voice had threaded quietly through the recitation, but then pained she whispers.. “CuChulainn.” Blood streaks down from the corner of bright blue eyes, dribbling into dark hair. She seems to have no choice but to continue… “And it is breaking my heart as in my body, to be listening to the pity and the sorrowing of women and men, and the harsh keening of the young men of Ulster.” The words come out in anguished cries, though quiet all the same… she whispers again, a century of pain in her voice… ”CuChulainn."

"O Conal,” She weeps, red rivers down unearthly pale cheek, “Lift me to his grave. Raise my stone over the grave of the Hound; since it is through grief of him I go to my death, lay my mouth to the mouth of my CuChulainn.” Her keen soft entranced cries carry a valley of pain. It wavers through the deep shadow that had begun to envelope her. Their protective tendrils walling her off from being a disturbance. She seems to be unable to stop, as if cursed. “I am Emer of the Fair Form. There is no vengeance left for me to find. I have no love for any man. It is too sorrowful to stay without my…. Hound.” The livid darkness shimmers with her words. "Heart of my life, my friend, my one choice of the men of earth, many is the woman, wed or unwed, envied me till this day: and now I will not stay living after you…..” A sharp intake of breath, and the blue begins to fade from her mossy gaze.

The shadows she unwittingly summoned had slithered themselves into form. They seemed to take on the exact shape of her heart, within the black bubble that had slowly encased her. Small, sharp gasps swept over her teeth, and the gnawing emptiness grew wider as she noted his form. Her composure lost, she crumpled in a heap upon the cold stone.. and wept at its shadowy feet. The sound of it was gut-wrenching. The wail of a soul long lost in the dark.

This was nothing new. Even with connections, cornerstones, and love filling her unlife.. she suffered this heartbreak each year. Again, and again she witnessed it. She lived it, and allowed it… because without it, she was never whole. Losing him again, and again… was her way to honor him. Allowing pain to spike her blood, and sing in her veins was the only way to connect with him. Now the feel of his hands, and the shroud of his mouth was just a memory. She could never conjure them, not even as her memories shaped shadow into his form. She knew he was long dead, and ash. It did not ease the pain.

Each time the season snaps to autumn, and the fires begin to spark, she bleeds for him. Each season she is left with blood on the floor, and ash in her mouth. This is a repeating wheel that does not end. Perhaps she is just a ghost that wanders these halls now, and no longer a blood hungry beast. She still had hours of night to mourn, and that she would do.. until finally the need to sleep perhaps engulfed her.

Transcripts taken up to this point 6/16/2023