The spreading, seething flames began to lap at the water as it spread to every shred of memory from the night, sending the glinting embers to spread over every rock that jutted out with a menacing glint of a warning. It stung as it full on her arms and she flinched, gazing up at the horizon to see the cruelly dim light of a flame emerge, simply a silhouette among the night – perhaps today the sky would clear, and the water would not ripple of ineffable sorrows that pierced through the impenetrable veil of numb indifference. But she saw the ashes as the horizon began to glow with dread, the petal above thorns seeming to also stare into the distance, knowing that something lurked in the crimson light. A phantom of mocking woe that was simply an absence. Among the embers and ashes falling to a shattered urn that cried out silently as it fell to the ground; she glanced away then turned as the morning's ashes came to mourn the perishing safety of the night, feeling every one fall upon her skin. She picked up the oars from the hollow grace of the petal upon a sea of thorns, and began to row, peering behind more and more as the light burned her sight. Then she glances again. It was there. But no, it had to simply be an apparition of madness that haunted her restless mind – and perhaps it was a dark, dark silhouette of every tear ever shed that never quite carried light, only blowing out the candle in a breath. But even as she saw the figure, she saw the stone-black complexion and gaunt shape of the face. Just like him. Even with a ring still lingering on his finger as there had been on hers until it had been tossed away in hopes of a night of warmth, with logs to burn on the fire. It had been just that, one night. One sorrowful goodbye engraved on a gravestone that simply loomed above the corpse. But then, as she turned back, he had vanished, with the only remnants simply the embers that rained from the sky and striking every rock that jutted out and every inch of her hand with temporary pain. Agony for what wasn't there and what replaced it, for the fading silhouette of someone she could have kept, and for the ashes falling before the perishing. Ashes. Ashes. And we all fall down.

But she couldn't look at the sun without it burning her eyes, so with a final glance to she phantom where he had been, she looked ahead as thunder rolled with clouds over the sea of viridian tendrils lining the shore and bleeding and ebbing out until the slender sticks seemed yellowed and dry, with branches falling away, cascading into a bed of nails. She saw the thunder veil the horizon for a moment as she strained against the current, and set the boat sailing out into the distance, toward where the sun had once lain; there lay paper tearing with wretched screams from the chasm left behind simply choked away by many veils of cloud and thunder that blinded every eye to the anguish within that flash of light as the paper tore. Tearing her gaze away from the brewing storm, she set out a net across the rippling sea of torn pages, jaws rolling on ravenously and echoing every whisper of a wailing cry of agony as they recoiled. The net simply followed. With the cry of those poor lost souls within the crevices, the dark waltz began again; the dark waltz of blood-curdling screams echoed into the night as the sea rolls on with jaws swift to flee forward, but hesitant to return with no blood spilt – even shadows lurked within the back and forth of the sea as time ticks away cruelly, snatching away hope with sorrowful cries that simply reached forward, hoping that perhaps the next second held a light, one with a glow of hope, not despair of the dying. But that blood-curdling scream as the horizon tore was simply from the throats of vipers, and corpses can't scream. Corpses can't scream. And yet they bled out as a white froth into the horizon and into the sea as it echoed every step the sky took, ringing out in anguish. The net seemed to be pulled forward, but something about the rippling waves of torn love repelled her – the fangs began to form as more and more flashes of lightning lit the horizon in dread, in pale hope, in ashen joy, but perhaps in melancholy. After all, corpses can't scream even as they're torn apart and turned to the bones and teeth of a cog. They can only whisper in agony. Only to fade into the fog.

She cast out the net and paused among the turmoil of rolling flame and jaws that wandered on and on, teeth decaying as they snatched away the father of a weeping child, or the sister to an ancient, lonesome ghost, who simply stood, unable to weep anything but an ember that slowly perished. They were the voices that cried out in agony as the silken papers of the sea rippled and shifted, opening in the sky; their complexions were concealed but she heard their breath every time she pulled out a single, writhing, desperate corpse. It always fell still just like the apparition of embers the old lady wept, unheard and unseen by the serpents that simply embraced the necks of those who screeched into the night. They were simply the tongues that choked the prey as the net dragged her forward, saliva bleeding from their grotesque scars as the sea fragmented; almost drifting apart and casting rifts in the cruel, cackling agony of every silent whisper that rang out from the scar before it healed. And the ashes rained from the sky as every shred of ink that spoke of it burned along with the paper. But it cast no light.

A cathartic light began to glimmer on the edge of the page where rugged, torn branches reached for any semblance of order, the sky hollow, with simply a cruel light of empty dread behind each shred of a letter, or perhaps a receipt. Or even a bank note tossed among the wind into the river, who twisted it and engulfed it in dark, crooked tendrils. But any light felt as if it were a warm hand in hers – a small child's flame burning within as it held a cruel, skeletal figure's icy embrace, oblivious to the rambling malady within every thought and every trenchant word spoken. Any darkness was perhaps more welcoming, however, as it contained lights – eyes that glared from the dark into every trace of a footprint upon the ground and every glint of false moonlight in lassitude-haunted sight. She saw them watching through everything, no matter how swiftly she fled to the one flame, it always revealed the shadow she carried. The drowned heart. The pulsing darkness and writhing gloom. They were always there. Watching. She glanced away, fleeing once more to the frail, weary hope she had once carried as if it were a feather – and yet in a fleeting moment; one word. The Somme. A sea of blood flashed before her. Before the waves retreated and she gazed at the net now tucked back into the confines of hollow smiles, dragging her gaze down with an oppressive string pulling it from the depths of blinding light; then the figures revealed their putrid complexions with sinister beauty draped across their writhing masses of ink and ash. One drop after another they seemed to reveal crimson eyes. Oh, so familiar crimson glares – cold yet so benevolent – kind yet heartless as they wept tears from the sky, plummeting and cascading toward every shred of hope, a flame that must be put out and would always be. In every step she took she saw a light flicker and die. One of innocence. One of a lifetime of falling petals and a golden ring. But that malady glinted in every tear; perhaps it was false, a hysteria-driven hallucination of madness. And yet that vitriolic glare still echoed as she came closer to the shore. A woebegone, cathartic comfort of many grains and pigments.

Smoke began to glimmer with ascending embers of the false, agony-ridden hope and she couldn't help but stare – for something of a cruel echo lurked in every word she said. Vipers crawling through her mind in vile, sinister tendrils of flesh that never once halted, considering the cogs that turned within; and yet those screeches never once stopped echoing in the cavern of crimson walls, always lurking with embers winding in a serpentine path around the shadows, leaving smoke to lash out in its trail, revealing the hands of the dead. It waltzed to the ominous, looming melody of melancholy dissonance as the echo trailed away into a mere mark in the shadows that lay still in every word she said and every face she saw – shadows growing, extending pale, corpse-like arms towards a vanishing goal. Before only the echoes of an ember that once was remained to weep for complexions torn away to reveal flesh, and gory depictions of cruelty cast before innocent eyes. Those tendrils knew she had seen too much – she felt a brush of smoke against her skin as she murmured in terror like a child cast out among a sea of pages, some fantasy, some gruesome and vile, tossed before her with intense malice. She felt that single dread as those tendrils of darkness reached out before a single beam of false light. She had seen too much. And corpses can't scream. Couldn't even as gas enveloped a life they once had, as they weren't buried in the soil and devoured by crows but left to perish. Corpses can't scream. Corpses can't scream. She opened her eyes to a sea of them, all reaching toward her eyes to blind them with flickering lights of darkness. Veils to disguise them as they multiplied. Festered and formed clusters of agony. Festered with the shuddering stitches. A wound of the dying can seem so innocent, and perhaps curable – if only you reached before the serpentine leeches of infection crept in as silently as the prey who perished and still lived over and over and over. Yet corpses can't scream. And once the shadows creep in, they never leave, only tearing the placid, acrimonious facade to reveal a single figure – one of gloom and deceit. Of ink-black silhouettes. Of dread. Terror.

Because if corpses could scream then people would hear the pigment and the variation in every telegram. And perhaps even before now she would've seen the stitches in the dull, skeletal facade, and those eyes would have blinked as the vile, deafening melody played; and still pull the little boat on the lake toward a shore of gloomy tendrils, thorns reaching for the ashes that still lay in every part of her, keeping the piercing glares of ravens and crows following, leaving corpses of the dead to rats as they stood among fields of blood; stepping off the boat, she shuddered as the agony flooded back, full of trenchant mockery as it lashed against her – shadows engulfed all joy, looming over her mind. And yet when she gazed up, she couldn't see them crawling among the veins of wood extending across the glowing sky, so full of joy, and yet the candle flame that revealed the shadows whispering in her ear, barely drowning out the calls of crows as they glimpsed even for a moment the golden threads in the ink-veiled deceit she breathed.