Chapter Text
Life goes on grinding up
glass, wearing out clothes
making fragments
The old van lurched as it hit another pot-hole in the long neglected dirt road. The driver swore, stubbing out a nearly spent cigarette in the in-built ashtray of the antiquated vehicle as they slowed. As they came to a stop, the young woman leaned her head out the window, seeing the road stretching ahead, though crowded in by trees. Eerie, but also familiar.
“I do not go further.” The driver grunted, as he pulled another cigarette from his pack. “This is last stop.”
She sighed, and inwardly debated whether or not to argue with him, or intimidate him as she was certain she could do, but she would just as happily have some more time to herself before arriving at her destination. It was somber enough as it was and she’d grown tired of the repetitive music that had been blaring from the blown-out speakers of her ride.
“Fine.” She grumbled. “How much further to the village?”
She threw open the sliding door, taking a step into the cool autumn air. In the fading, filtered sunlight her pale wispy hair peeking out from under her baseball cap appeared almost white.
“Two, three kilometer?” He dragged the cigarette, before letting out a cough. “It is cursed, you know? All the people there, gone, twenty years back.”
“Yeah. I know.” She yanked the oversized pack out of the van and shouldered it. She walked in front of the van, and didn’t turn her head as the sound of the old engine reignited and the sound gradually dimmed till it disappeared entirely.
The young woman began her trek, seeing the overcast sky beginning to dim above her. Sun was setting earlier every day now, as the chill of the coming winter nestled silently followed.
The village was engulfed in darkness by the time she arrived. The sliver of a moon supposedly shone overhead, but was obscured by the persistent fog that seemed to shroud the place, to live up to the haunted sense of its foreboding stories. Had the young woman been subject to suffer from the cold, she may have turned back, as it leeched what little warmth she did possess and even with the Cadou’s fragment of security she still felt a spark of longing within.
Something had been drawing her back for the entirety of her living memory. The deep, gutted desire to find the answers to her own existence, her story untold. Even in the village’s cold embrace, there was a sense of belonging. She fund herselves at the cemetery, stepping over broken headstones, and more than once her weight coming down onto a crunching sound of her foot crushing old bones beneath them. Even in the dim twilight the remains of the village’s sunbleached refuse looked bleak. The only strength remaining towered above her, looming behind the engraved gate.
The castle’s walls stand in defiance of centuries of progress, like a dragon’s lair corrupting the landscape around it as if feeding from the livelihoods much like its otherworldly inhabitant. A heaviness inhabits the shadows it casts, and though the physical embodiments of the monstrous creatures have all but disappeared, the ghosts that haunt its halls make the air cold enough to see your breath. It’s undead matriarch stalks the halls in mourning, edifying three of those devoted spirits now lost, unrelinquished, and watches her domain like the stone beasts that crouch atop its parapets. Her hunger had quelled in recent years. No longer the necessity to consume the flesh and blood, now only done out of desire. And desires she has lacked since opening her eyes once more. The Lady is as empty as her castle.