Blaise Carter felt her heart thunder in her chest, felt the blood swell and bloom like the kiss of a thousand roses in her cheeks. Her soft, ebony curls now fell across blazing cheek, the spirals bouncing with every angry movement. Her helter-skelter walk seemed to drag of her of it's own accord over the floor to the target of her fury. She stared incredulously ever forward, looking up and down the hooded figure before her...
"Clay!" the name sounded through gritted teeth more like some ancient curse in a long forgotten tongue.
The figure that Merciful figure of death, an angel of omen stared blankly ahead at the wedding gown clad woman. A stark white to the wordless reaper's Eigengrau cloak. The woman, nearly tripping over her train and fumbling on icy stilettos that now clacked so swiftly along the stone floor that they sounded and felt to her like the dragging of chains...
The woman did not speak another word, yet her hand slammed so haphazardly forward and landed with such force across the skeletal mans face that the sound reverberated in the dank air of the crypt that hung just a bit too heavy; the feel of rot and doom here hung so stiflingly in the air that one's chest began to heave for breath as if taking this tiny death into themselves. The man's hood fell to the side, revealing a skull of such pale white bone that one could almost think him newly dead...
"We had a deal!" Blaise cried, teeth chattering and knuckles cracking from the rockling wave that she felt brewing in her stomach's pit, "You were to take me, not Emily! She was only 20, she had so much life ahead of her, and-" her voice trailing off into the darkness of the chamber.
As the tempo of the racing drums of war thundered louder in her chest, baying her to action, dozens if not hundreds of memories glowed in her mind. A night in February of so many winters ago, a dark shape slinking around the corners of her house, flittering in her peripheral vision. The image of him watching her sister sleep from the window seal out in the darkness. Scenes of blood and anger (the kind of anger she felt now) and fear (the kind of fear that brewed deeply beneath this sheen of glinting rage sharpened as a knife.
Then came new memories, memories of him coming to her for brief moments, to return things she'd lost, to watch over her when she walked alone at night in the big city (Some nights as the glint of the ivory moon bore holes into the ground and through the trees threw strange shapes along the ground, it was unsettling to know this angel lay out in the darkness watching her; some nights she thought back to her childhood wish that he might embrace her and not the young girl set to die in front of her).
She saw in her mind as her teeth ground finer and finer even as she listened; the bone sifted away like delicate sand by her Mulling Masseter. Her blood boiled like flowing veins of liquid rock and molten metal as she could see the faint layer of the deepest eyes she'd ever looked into.
"And?" The man finally spoke with a big and empty voice that you could feel in your soul and that would make your heart drop into your knees.
"And, I've wanted you for so long! I've wanted you for nearly 10 years! Every time my parents fought when I was a kid and I could hear their screams down the hall, the clattering of plates on the floor. Then in college, when I couldn't find reason to be a part of the land of the living anymore; I'd cry in my bed at night, praying for the moment I could embrace you, you'd take me in and cradle me in your cloak of everlasting twilight so that nothing could ever hurt me again...and now, today, today you take my sister who still had so much life ahead of her when you were supposed to take me!"
"Your sister was very sick, it was time for her to rest."
"My sister needed a chance, a chance to make something of herself like I never got to. I never wanted this marriage..."
"What do you want?" The man queried.
"I want you...I'm in love with you!"
Their eyes met and for one brief moment Blaise could feel a warmth in those empty eye sockets that she had never felt staring into the soul of any other. One chased kiss as cold as ice was placed between the angel of death and this beacon of life. He caressed her cheek ever so gently, his cold hand reminding me of the frigid February night when they'd met. She looked again deeply into his eyes and saw there a look of passion, of regret and of restraint.
"Take me with you, I was already there and I can be again. Bring her back, we shared so many happy moments inspite of everything and you've showed me so much. I love you, please take me, not her!
"What is done has not been undone. You have brought me so much joy, you truly blaze, just as your namesake. You blaze with fire and passion and for the time we've spent together, you have been the Persephone to my Hades and you've shown me the most of life I've ever known. You made me find new love for the living that I had long forgotten, you make, you love, you fight, you hope and in time, you die."
"Please..."She whimpered.
There was a subtle glow that suddenly emanated from deep within the skull of this lovely death that began to shine ever brighter, illuminating the crypt and basking Blaze in the frantic, fluttering glow that stuttered now like her heart. As the flame crept ever higher, lighting up darkened beams of stone that cradled the roof of the mausoleum and brought a slight smile to Blaise's tear-stained face. She had seen this light only 3 other times. As her breath startled and caught in her marvel of the flames; she saw him now the night she'd crashed her mother's car her junior year of college...The first time she ever saw his face (I'll be it, she saw but a glimpse of fleshless face and the soft glow of something lit up like a jack-o-lantern through the she sheen of blood and the haze of the concussion that should have killed her...and should have killed her, he had came to her, meant to take her, but at the final moment, he could not bring himself to end something so gentle.
"Not now, it is because I love you that-," whispered the man resolutely when he could again breath, "You must live, for yourself and your sister. You must find meaning." and with that the figure was gone...