Trigger warning- Gore, Death
Uncanny Love and Sins
When Hozier said- 'There is no sweeter innocence than our gentle sins' and when Shakespeare said- 'How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame'
What these two lines have dawned upon my instrument of realisation from the very get go is beyond someone's normal capacity to possibly fathom things, sources and reality.
This is the tale of two ghosts of the death valley, whose every existence is uncanny and black in its entirety in the depths of hell. Through hallowed halls of shattered stone, a darkness roams in the deep. It should have laid behind walls of stone, banished by the gods, but it grew tired of such boredom, or one can say mediocrity brought by centuries of containment. Somewhere in their abyss of a body, they thought and whispered,
"Why shouldn't we be free?"
And just like that, they were. They ran all their hands across the cold, hard dirt, their eyes up towards a granite sky. Had they ever stopped to look down, for just a single moment, they might have understood but they didn't. Forward, forward they rolled through air that grew limp and sagged with sorrow.
Their fingers were like frozen ash and bodies like black poison. No smithing or strike of lightning fell swift with retribution, and it swelled with glee. These two ghosts were once inhabitants of the mortal world.
They both were unnamed, both spurred by their families, found in each other an anchor to keep them from losing hold of a world that kept spinning whether or not they had a proper hold of it. These were the two hands that were so near, yet so far, anyone who would have seen the depiction from the outside must have been confused and perplexed for the picture had hands that were at a distance and no matter if that was their union or farewell, both seemed to be permanent.
The ashes of abandonment were still fresh for the only sin they committed was that they loved each other. These two were mortals back in their time and were brutally murdered in frame when they grew older and fought as all of us do.
Still no matter the scrap, they stood by one another when night closed in; protected each other from stray predators until they were hammered and axed into emptiness with their skulls embedded and they read,
"SINNERS"
Hell and abomination were set to break free. The two silver ghosts bled into the city for vengeance, speckled with crimson and glimmer of early sunlight. Breath would have fogged in the icy fields if anyone had dared to do so.
It turned out that humanity was alone in the universe as it came too early to the party. The spirits with vengeance roamed the colonies for the seven men that humbled them and somewhere, deep in the caves at the crux between worlds, there was a fire that burned eternal.
The seven sinners met their fate. The air was ranked with a faint fog of hot breaths that still held the screams of these men.
They died horribly, ripped to pieces by snowy, glittery hands, fighting back in desperate futility, one by one, their skulls were ripped and placed upon the barren wonder, with their skulls poured and dipped in their own blood forming a guarding circle around the two long buried bodies of the innocent lovers whose only sin was that they believed that there was a place for them too.
The vengeance was fulfilled at last as they both sat on some pedestal, weary and their souls ripped apart from the sin, the biggest sin of murder, bigger than the other seven sins combined, as they looked at each other, with green in their grey transparent eyes, with regret and pain and helplessness.
When they reached the canyon's end, there was no rising sun or meadows of pink and green; it was a wall, of sorts. A presence that spoke with words that had no sound crushed its mind with fear. They had, afterall not been as free as they thought they would be, but rather watched with silent disdain.
And on their journey back home, they were forced to count those seven skulls they culled on their path. Counting, counting, then forced to turn and count them again, until the sun turned black as a crow.
Kshitiz Singh Kumar
Ram Lal Anand College
University Of Delhi
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