A Hallows-Tide's Elegy ⚰️

Fair Zephina's grave was nestled amid bramble-bush and weeping birch in a little copse atwixt a cedar forest. Her coffin was of uncured oak, and carved on it was an intricate design of woodroses. All of this was of no immediate concern to Zephina, whose priorities were currently somewhat elsewhere: she was dead.

Yet she seemed not to be permitted to leave her mortal coil. Though Zephina had felt that dark cold veil of death fall over her soul and had felt the steel-plated blade of the inquisitor enter just above her collarbones, swiping an icy arc through her neck, she remained still, thinking and feeling in some kind of whisper-dark dream deep within her shattered mortal vessel.

It was at the beginning of August that she first awoke. Peering at the ceiling of her coffin, she confusedly called for help, and when none came she glanced downwards at her pale hands, not yet touched by worm nor rot, and deigned to free herself by her own will. Desperately clawing, she broke open the carved lid, and in doing so found herself under the blue vault of a late summer sunset. Elated to once again be in the sun's kingdom, she raised herself out of her mossy grave…and immediately fell four feet below yet again, for in those long three months Zephina's flesh had been heartily feasted 'on by the grave-worms, scavengers, and gloaming fungi.

Over bramble and briar-blossom, a Lady of the Queen was slumbering in that sameself bower of moss, bow, and quiver by her side. Awoken by a vague festering and strange noise, she, quite startled, drew her shortsword.

She peered carefully over the bramble bushes to the other half of the clearing.

Ice-blue eyes met a strange visage. Crouched in what looked to be some shallow grave was a sallow willow-slim maiden with plum colored hair resting on her shoulders and a pale white cravat fastened tightly over her neck. A finely-jeweled necklace sat just below it, little carmine droplets of ruby flowing over her collarbones. Not a speck of gloam nor an opportunistic worm shattered her moon-colored cheek, nor did her bones disarticulate or her flesh creep onwards. Though Zephina was well aware of her own death and decay, some strange glamour of the sorcery she employed in life cast her just as bonny as the day she had died…in the eyes of our dear Duchess Robin, at very least.

Robin gave the maiden her leather-gloved hand, and Zephina firmly grasped it, dislodging a goodly amount of worms. It was an issue only perceptible to her, so it seemed. Zephina begged from her sanctuary from the forces devouring her. Based upon her vague language, Robin assumed that she was being tormented by the inquisition or possibly an irritating spouse, and thus pledged to offer her respite in the sanctum of her winter manorhouse. Zephina accepted such a position. She informed Robin of her inability to walk and the fact that her jaw occasionally fell off. Robin, confused, duly offered to carry her to the carriage-train she had arrived in, and perhaps offer some wire or glue.

The Duchess's manor was a sprawling affair, dripping with ivy, grapevines, and trite little tea-roses. The aforementioned room was a vast carpeted chamber, furnished with a curtained bed and naught else. The sheets were of fine silk, and Zephina sighed with pleasure the first time she laid upon it. Homespun and linen had been her lot for the last sixteen odd years.

Later, when Zephina's thin yellowish chemise had been replaced with a scalloped confection of a robe-dress, festooned with a great manner of pearls and glamoured lilies, deep aubergine hair twisted cleverly into a pouf, and jaw firmly bolted to face by use of bandages, she turned to glance in the mirror, and what remained of her spine was prickled with frost. Gazing back at her was a grayish corpse, eyes rotten out, teeth caked with dirt, and bones lancing the skin of her face. Her hair had faded to a sickly pink, and the cravat was bedecked with thick plum like jewels of coagulated blood that cascaded down to her chest like some wine-colored lace collar. The thick batting of her stays and Robe á Kaleida mercifully obscured the rest of her body.

Robin seemed not to mind the addition of a cadaver to her cadre of noble ladies. So little, in fact, that by Hallow's Eve, she had proposed Zephina become the ducal consort. Zephina weighed the quandaries of such an imposition in her mind. She truly knew not much of Robin, but that which she did was favorable. Robin could not see the gloam that ate at her mortal flesh, but then again, nothing was permanent. Zephina thoroughly just wanted to run away, but nonetheless, she wed Robin on the first day of winter, descending with her from their estates to the town-chapel some ways below, nestled in the shadowy valley that once laid claim to Zephina.

As she walked through the streets of her once-home, Zephina found her memory replenishing. There she had worked as a cigar girl, there she had been executed by the inquisition, there - oh, she who had been her fiancée in life, amid the crowd, knife fastened neatly by her linen pantaloons! The grave had robbed her memory of many rather crucial things.

Drawing her craftswoman's knife, Leopoldine strode 'across the lane, and, with a strange fire in her eyes, buried it up to the hilt in Robin's silk-clad side. She, turning on her heels to address Zephina, seemed to say something, but before a word could leave her mouth, Robin's guard had put their muskets to use. She fell bleeding on the plaza's sanguine bricks.

And before Zephina had the chance to fully think about what precisely she was doing, she snatched the blood-wet knife from Leopoldine's hands, and with a cry, plunged it deep into her own gloamy heart.

Zephina and Robin were lain atwain in the ducal mausoleum. And there, Zephina stared at the ceiling until her glamours finally faded, clasping the duchess's rotting arm.

Based on Slavic fairytales