the enigma; sasha

[macabreheroine]

<center>

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently?
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free?
Up domes?up spires?up kingly halls?
Up fanes?up Babylon-like walls?
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers?
Up many and many a marvelous shrine
Whose wreath?d friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye?
Not the gaily-jeweled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Among that wilderness of glass?
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea?
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave?there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide?
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow?
The hours are breathing faint and low?
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.</center>

(E.A. Poe)

[macabreheroine]

She sat in silence and listened to the rain pound against the aluminum roof. Somewhere distant somebody sighed and she stopped the constant strokes of her hand in guidance of a pen across paper. Hierophants whispered cryptic messages against the hollow of her throat and the touch of their lips to her neck made her tremble. The sightless one, they had called her. The great enigma. She shifted on her pillow seat, folding her legs up indian style and dropping the pen flat on the paper.

"Is there something wrong?" They asked her.

"Are you all right?" Others whispered.

"I am fine." It was monotone, flat and cool. Her weight shifted again and her fingers clasped around the pen to carefully scrawl words across paper. Words she had never seen only heard in her dreams. In her nightmares. In those she had 20/20 and saw all that happened in the world. Those times were different. Another world. "I need water." A request that was barely audible over the pouring rain. They hustled off and fetched her request, sitting it down beside the paper with an audible clink. She uttered no thanks, she never did.

She moved, again, this time her shackles clanked.