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Thirteen rings upon her fingers:
No gold, silver only;
No diamond or
Pearl, onyx and hematite.
Nothing of warmth about her, only chill
And black, icy desire.
Thirteen steps approach her throne, and each
Bears the tortured, final visage of a damned soul.
The throne of crystal blacker than the heart
Of a willing executioner, twisted and malformed
In a manner no living soul
Could ever verge upon envisioning.
__
She sits in her robes of state:
The black of plague they are, the weave of a
Silken shroud. Her skin
Is the white, near-translucency of paper-thin china.
Her hair is the fine film
Of a widow's gossamer web. Her eyes are hard,
Sharp-rimmed globes of utter vacuum.
Her lips are full and red as heart's
Blood, curving in a smile sharp and cruel
As the finest watermarked blade ever cured
In human flesh, as she surveys
That over which she holds sway:
The dead, the living, and those yet to be.
__
She calls, and they come:
She sings, and they dance;
She pulls their strings for the puppets they are.
And if one should chance to hold her fancy,
Perhaps she will call it soonest.
Or perhaps she will wait with patience, and
Have her way with it in lingering, shattering horror
Before granting it the peace of her
Poisoned kiss. Thirteen beats
Of a heart ring sharply. A plea, a
Soul-rending shrill makes the crystal throne
Resonate, and her eye falls
On two in particular: one who comes all
Willing to her bed, and one who would follow.
__
The willing one makes
No hesitation in drawing nigh her
Throne, but smiles, sad and sweet,
A look of yielding as it makes the
Thirteen strides to kneel and place a
Moon-bright head upon her waiting
Lap. She strokes the hair from its
Brow--the strands fair as the rest of
It--with a glacial fingertip, and bends to
Brush her lips against the
Silv'ry locks. The plea shrieks out
Again, not demand, but appellation.
The plea of the one who would follow--
And finds it cannot. She is drawn,
Nigh unwilling, to the one who lives, and
Feels its pain as she has felt
No pain in all her unending existence.
The plea approaches prayer in its
Intensity, in its bereft, wracked
Hope. She hears, and lends
Consideration as she has never
Thought to do before, save once. the
Prayer is not a single entity, but
A duality of thought. The one, it is
Impossible. The other . . .
The other a difficult choice. She pets the
Pale one lying in her lap, and it turns a
Gaze on her so full of
Supplication she feels her very being
Tremble. The one who cannot follow echoes
The suit, with all the anguished
Longing of the living damned.
__
She wills herself distant, far from
These more than mortal passions, but
Alas, they have found the place that even
She holds precious--not a
Heart, but what in her passes for one. Her smile fades,
Replaced by another: a melancholy thing of
Acquiescence. She moves herself from the
Throne where she has held court so long,
Drawing the fair one up with
Her. she takes its hand, and finds
Them in a bower fair as it is. She
Lays it down and sweeps its eyelids shut
With the gentlest touch her hand has ever known,
And kisses it asleep in the peace which is hers to
Grant or deny.
__
The other, the one who
Could not follow, gives a sigh of slight relief,
Reaches deep within, and girds itself to continue. She is
Transfixed by the inevitability of it. It will go on,
Because it must go on, because all other paths have
Been denied. And she,
She who sits again ensconced upon the throne of ages,
She upon whose smallest breath
Depends the fate of nations and empires--
She sheds one single, flawless tear,
Which slides in ineluctable sadness down
The china cheek, off the
Bold line of jaw, past the arm of the crystal throne,
To the unforgiving
Floor, there to shatter into pieces
Too innumerable to count.
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