Merlin – 25 Shadows Fall
Wandering a forest, red leaves on cold night duskfall, of mist on the ground and breath are all to see in the moonlight, deep in the autumn evening forest frost past the pines that hold out the cold. After laying down in the fallen wet leaves and leaning against a tree, crossing arms upon the chest in a timid shiver closing eyes and focus on a point. A bird flies stolen by the wind upward into the black night sky and dying without a sound, a dream of an owl vaguely resting on a newborn summer sunset peering into a soon endless night. On a branch of a dead tree in the wood, a paisley bird or dead tree limb with desiccated peeling fallen bark, like a contrast coal sketch it seems as if it sings a failing song dying, it falls through the air landing on the ground. Aside from shaking the rain from the branches in its perilous fall, the beak is part of a tree and the bird a seed, it begins to grow into a dimly lit rapidly expanding tree of power, and energy amazing. The sun comes up and the leaves of a growing tree turn into new birds and scatter at the first strike of light, dark ravens now gone to breathe the wind.
A solitary sun passes thorough, the gravel rolls at sunset, endless countless grit with rolling lines that wave and amaze as they sway, everywhere hills endless sand at glamour, granule spheres of glass at sunset and a megalithic bluff anent rising star of a slowly turning and spiraling horizon. Rolling wind whistling and hissing, roving aspect points, standing to view surveying the land becoming nauseous and eventually ado dizzied at the same time, like jumping or trying to run across emptiness in the dark lungs of smoke at the speed of light in infinite time to the nearest awakening.
Gasping for breath, sitting up alarmed and aghast, awoken and soaked in the clouded fog, the grey and yellow prophet in bloody sullied robe begins gathering more kindling to dry sultrily his red cloak from sweat and the midnight rain. Tangent temerity for an abstruse distraction from memories of vampires and chimeras while huddling a small fire and staring at dark delusions in specific darkness he shakes his strife torment and recounts what he has undergone, three days grace from escape.