Orpheus awoke suddenly to complete and utter darkness, the smell of old flesh lingering through the air. A weight pinned him above and he felt the tracings on his face of something round and deeply grooved. As he moved his hands along the heavy object he felt the makings of an arm, a finger, and a hard chest. A corpse and its coffin lay upon him.
Flailing in place, like something wild and deeply afraid, he pressed his hands against the heavy stone covering him and swiped the skull from his face. Orpheus heaved until the beams of some blue light bled through the cracks. He continued until, finally, the brittle door of the coffin gave way and spilled over and out onto the outside floor.
He heard the crumbling of the rocks as he rose and tumbled over into the grey grass patches dotted between the rows and rows of coffins and headstones. All through the sanctuary the erections of granite pillars loomed over him, his visions etched in every crevice. There was a foreboding orange light chanting a crackle in the braziers across the lone altar between it all; statues of priests prayed on either side of the podium with the sound of clicking tongues chattering beneath their sealed lips.
Orpheus held his face in his hands and the blood from the shallow wounds marked his blanching skin. Each breath ran ragged and he moved as if he had been struck with an arrow. Smothered in the darkness, he moved his illuminated fingers in the brief peerings of moonlight.
When he turned he saw his own motionless corpse below him, a spectator outside his own body, called forth by a disordered symphony of deafening church bells and the clicking of tongues. He tried to scream but he was without a voice to speak. All around him the slow awakenings of silhouettes that cast no shadow of their own rose from their coffins; their weeping cries intruded upon his distorted hearing. The shadows walked toward him.
As he stood, he tried to cast a spell of which to ward them off, but he found he could not - his voice stolen still. Orpheus saw them tremble like unattended flames in a campfire and, as they approached, they lifted their fingers with the faint shapings of men and women. Carefully they heaved his corpse back and forth in the black garments that were torn and ragged from the fall. Then he saw it. His own corpse had begun to rise and looked him in the eye. It seemed as though it was talking amongst the silhouettes as if only in thoughts.
"What are you doing?!" cried Orpheus, his words finally escaping the silence.
"Unbeliever," replied his corpse. It moved its finger like the company of shadows and approached slow and sedated with the exchange of heavy words. A dark mist leaked from the corners of its eyes, squirming with the motion of tendrils.
Orpheus felt the touch of a lone finger on his shoulder, but as he turned the shadow dispersed into smoke. He tried to move and noticed the illuminated flesh of his arm dulling to a black. He searched for solace, but could only see his moving corpse and the dribbles of blood from its lips.
Scattering quickly through the headstones, he lowered himself behind them to hide from the loudening weeps. The church bells chimed again. With the moonlight over him, he could see the shadows searching as they rounded the light from the braziers - stepping only into the spaces of darkness they could reach. His mind raced. He rose and moved out of the moonlight and called out to his mirrored corpse.
"Orpheus!"
The corpse turned. It raced through the light and the shadow of the sanctuary, writhing in some unseen pain toward him. The shadows followed. Orpheus moved back into the moonlight and watched as they circled him as a wild dog to a man in a lone fire, drawing only his corpse beneath the shimmering rays.
Orpheus stepped back until it immersed itself in the moonlight, watching as it limped and pulled at its own hair. It let out a groan and the dark tendrils with it, clawing at its teeth from the bottomless pit beneath its throat.
His eyes widened and his legs trembled. But Orpheus had taken one to many steps back in the fear of a violent frenzy and the roots of the Murmur Yews seized his footing from under him, ushering him back into the grasp of the darkness. A clawed hand seized him from the crook of shadow as he tripped into it and plunged deep into his chest, tearing the flesh beneath his skin.
He let out a cry, grasping his chest in the agony with trembling hands. He crawled himself forward, inching back into the moonlight, and raised his head. He watched as the corpse too fell to its knees, darkened blood falling from its chest and dispersing into black mist as it kissed the stone.
As he reached to hold the corpse in the moonlight, it moved and struck him and when Orpheus rolled into the darkness the shadows pursued him. He turned over and lunged at his corpse and they tumbled through the moonlight, holding one another like animals; they punched and wrestled and fell between the light rays and the dark corners.
Amidst the brawl, the corpse began to choke him in the darkness leaving him in a struggle to move. The dark eyes of his own cold, pale face stared into him. Orpheus reached to the shadows around him, as bait to the gluttonous, and they reached back. As their fingers touched his own, devouring flesh and skin like malevolent frostbite, he saw the corpse tremble and weaken in its hold.
He gritted his teeth, retracting his hand and taking his corpse by the throat. Orpheus hooked its legs and rolled over, pinning it beneath the lunar light. But he was left half in darkness, his legs vulnerable to the shadows that descended upon him. He watched the black mist leaking from the corpse's face, like dust carried in the wind, with a clenched jaw - groaning as the abyssal figures clawed at his calves. When the darkness finally faded from the corpse's skin he jerked it by the collar and called its name.
"Orpheus!" He cried, belting through the gurgling husk of his throat.
As if he had drawn a new breath, he collapsed into his corpse like a pale liquid in the dim rays. His gaze darkened.
When his vision returned he found that he could move in his body and as he left the moonlight and turned toward the shadows, they lunged at him in the darkness, rabid and savage.
A glimmer of blue light. He muttered to himself while hobbling forward and flinging out his arms. Streaks of azure darted from the corners of his eyes and sparks flared from his fingers.
"Blinding Death," he uttered with the reverberating tone of untamed energy.
In a flash of blinding light, an arc of electricity curved along the earth in indiscriminate destruction; stone cracked and the Murmur Yews spat embers as they were scorched. The crackling storm ran through the shadows as they approached, leaving them to burst into dark mists like a gale had dragged them to nothingness.
He staggered to one knee, forced to catch his breath.
"Piss. Off."
The moon shone down in shimmering illumination, opening across the sanctuary as if a window had been pulled ajar. The chiming ceased, and the priests were silent. He heard no sound save for the pulse of his breath as he flinched at the aggravation of his wounds. Blood welled from his chest and he could hear the distant whistling of wind from the stairs Northwest.
He positioned himself on the high stoned walls and laid his back to it. As the noise drew closer, his heartbeat in his chest like the irregular gallops of thoroughbred horses. Turning up the stairs he ascended slowly, through the remnants of vermillion halls - now a deep red-black and torn from the ceilings. In a blurred glimpse of a vision he saw spectres in their slow commute; each one he recognized in the portraits of the family hall back home. Histories unfolded before him.
Orpheus then saw the shadows of his mother and the shadows of his father enter and return. He soon found himself behind massive double doors, moved his damp hair from his eyes, and pushed them open.
Before him lay a rectangle of low steps. Faded marble floors and rows of chalices on red-cushioned seats and broken shelves. Petrified corpses slumped back along a circle of high tables as if they awaited something that would come even in death. In front of him the lone flame from his dreams in the candle of the shattered chandelier; upon the ceilings from which it fell was a dead coat of silver. Only a single sliver of the moon could reach this ominous place, slipping through an empty corner of the room.
And then he saw the being on the black throne. It sat in the high seat and, as its flesh writhed, he could see a beating heart in the exposed ribcage; he recalled the feeling of its fingers upon his mother's womb. It turned its rotten face from beneath the black crown. Maggots slithered from the sockets. But there were no eyes to see him.
It extended a lone finger to him and the world seemed unmoving.
Orpheus fell to his knees. As if a heaviness had fallen upon him. When he could stand at last he noticed the finger retract into its hollow palm.
"What in bloody hell, are you?" He mumbled to himself, his eyes peering through the caged hands that held his face.
For a short while, he stood watching it and it occurred to him that it would not answer. He took a few reluctant steps toward it, but before he could reach the rotting corpse he heard footsteps approach and stop behind him. Orpheus turned.
"Dear brother, I'm not entirely sure you should be here," she mocked in a playful tone.
It was Clio, and yet it wasn't. He could see the hallway through the spaces of her skull - the pallid beginnings of her scalp loosely bound along the decaying tissues of her forehead. She extended out to him her bony fingers where the former grooves of veins and muscles melted from the elbow joints and hung like the long cuffs of darkened sleeves. She smiled with black teeth.
Orpheus turned from his sister and to the corpse and when he turned back to her his brows furrowed and his fists were closed at his side. His lips quivered as he spoke.
"What are you," he began. "What the fuck are you all?!" he continued with a scream, "the shadows. The corpses! The visions and the dreams! All you! It was all you!"
"Oh, dear Orpheus."
"Don't. Don't you dare! Demon! Don't you dare shit upon her image with your fucking imitations! You've seen her only in visions! Your visions! All my life, always in my dreams, always your visions! Why must I live through you!?"
"Live through me? Surely you're not that daft," she replied, her disfigured chin raising with contempt as she took slow steps toward him. "You are no more Blackwell than the dogs chained at the gate. You will live beneath me, grovelling - wasting away just as your whore of a mother did."
He listened to the whispers of her laboured breathing as she moved closer.
"No," he responded. "No more of it."
He moved a hand around her throat and struck her with the other. As she stumbled he carried her up by the collar and hit her once more. She flinched when he raised his fists but he could see, on the margins of her lips as he attacked again, the faint smirking. He struck her once more. Loosening from the muscles of her face the rotten jaw began to hang.
On the floor he kicked her between her ribs from which he could see his boot sticking out from the other end and, after he had slammed her skull on the broken tiling, he moved back to collect his breath and watched her crawl away on her hands and knees.
She collapsed in the moonlight. He could see the full ivory skin where the rotten flesh had disappeared completely, bruised beneath the trickling blood from her facial wounds. Tears came from her wet eyes and for a moment he paused. Looking down at his trembling hands as if perhaps he had recalled a certain humanity he could not displace. Orpheus walked toward his sister and stood over her in the moonlight. His fists were sprinkled with blood.
Clio raised an agonising expression.
"Father will have. Your head," she muttered between coughs of blood, "Have your head. For this, dear Orpheus."
There was a twitch. Still, beneath the pain, she was amused.
So Orpheus struck her again.