(№3.1)

Another admirable, magical thing about myths or sort of any legend you were told or came across in your life, is that a legend is not chiselled, carved into stone or rock, yes, as a matter-of-fact stories you might stumble upon one day, are a liquid, a very mysterious fluid not bond or bendable by time or limited by its seeming destruction and also susceptible to changes and implemented lies.

The only important variable it applies to equalise and anticipate in our calculation, are the imperfect solecisms of human nature.

Or better their longing for brutal adventure, for never-ceasing passion and everything in between, taking the liberty to embellish and amend the tellings of ancient tales to serve their purpose furthermore, sometimes indeed only for mindless entertainment, albeit properly for precise manipulation at other occasions.

As so, the humans in any historical time lap wished to experience a strong heart palpitating, cheeks reddening by the mere encountering of an enticing story, a new gem never encountered before, they'd carefully add to their collection of many such alike, to their never-ceasing attempt of gathering recent things, such as rumours and mutating gossip was. Fables of heroic deaths were quite popular and recurrently seized to perform anew in extrinsic crowds, ruminating about how peaceful drowning might be in the last crucial seconds with water snorted up your nose and painfully small bubbles of precious air dwindling, escaping your livid lips, before yielded away from the shores of life somewhere else. Or really simply-stricken legends, how once the ruler of an enchanted land was to track and hunt down bestiary wolves, devouring with untamed hunger sheep and bulls and daft humans roaming nightly the streets where only monsters waited in dear forbearing, knowing some would swing unquenched by the stench of death, bestowing appalling dismay and terror upon his people over the course of dreadful months.

Long before they were comfortable computer screens, long before there were pristine-white sheets of paper to drool over while managing to write a few verses, that wouldn't sound so bad, people of ancient calibre had other methods, different types of crafting and storytelling, carrying thought to paper and prior to stone, papyrus or leather.

With their mere voices – believe it or not – they had the ability to evoke and fill the minds of fellow villagers with every painting, haunting image they sought to conjure and summon with precision and detail, wireless towards the bereft of breath listeners.

The storytellers adjusted their tone to the environment, brought requisites for sustenance, perhaps actors to let the story move on a different path, a more visible one through the drama of theatre, popular in Greece and soon creating their own genus, category of the ornate art of scripture, termed according to the avid cupidity of people fornent to doom and drama.

Or some preferred only to sit in front of a fire, a sizable, near audience of no more than a dozen, almost squealing in anticipation for a new tale, as the storyteller rubbed his hands and started opening various doors with his charismatic, ruthful voice, staring into the consuming, hungry flames seemingly only enhancing and fueling the abilities of the storyteller, esteeming long before the wistful, impressed shudder of clapping and exulting would dawn upon the group, after the tale had been told, the applause finally the biggest reward story-tellers craved, just as the attention proposed better than liquid gold.

The gathered listeners were often so mute to have not missed a crucial passage of the story, only the breaking and cracking of the fire ought to be heard, ribbons of anthracite smoke eddying upwards, curled within, imparting the ambiance with a tinge of enigma.

When a myth was once told, it was very hard to get rid of it, as it holds onto every straw, begging and screaming to be continued, to be alive, to be turned upwards and downwards in all mouth feasible, to never cease and nearly a duplicitous concept of human comprehension developed, as if they understood the complaint and needs of a myth and obeyed passionately, following the instructions without second-guessing, letting the story arrive and once anew thrive when other people stumbled upon these special, silent spectators, tuning in.

And as everything alive changes and alters to falter over time, one grave day where the end would pursue, as Time and other factors would love to continue one's vision equally to evoke blights, one's appearance contorted and adapted by featuring here a scar, there a wrinkle or a crinkle hugged tight in the corners of a smiling eye, to watch the perfect imperfections of life wandering around like an inferno that had a sudden violent force but would fade away as a result by its mere appearing, because it existed, it was born, it lived, it breathed, it thrived, it suffered, as this was the philosophy of live, the inferno having fed and consumed everything it could, trickling away from a flame to flicker, and then to a sizzling curl of fumes.

And as stories and tales were born, they'd change exactly as their human-storytellers decided for them, they adopted at hint and cue decorously.

Attaining a little control, to rule at least about something entirely and be able to change it after wish and pleasure, such was this rare power assumed by these people surrendering themselves to a story as a common man does to his concubine.

So, let's change the start a little, let it not happen in a Greek amphitheatre, yet better located on the highest hill of the English Empire or out in the blue deep ocean, 10.000 miles milling under the surface.

Let's decide to kill an unnecessary character, starved of love and affection, for not really being liked by anyone or contributing even in the safe frame of a four-angular book anyway to a swifter pace and exchange it rather with a seraphic guise fallen from heaven, poised on a left shoulder, whilst the demon, promoted from the seething torture of hell on the right, met in common middle-ground and whispering what you longed and preferred to hear, tapping a trident replenishing you with the visuals of your deepest, darkest desires fulfilled, nothing but lies, as the angel beat his feathered wings of light together, murmuring the rules of kneeling down and following the morally-correct path of tedious redemption and unmet expectations, telling you exactly which you ought to hear, instead of what you wanted. Which one would you like to guide and lead your life? Who to listen to?

How tricky the choice! How delicate the future!

Do you see now the direction we're heading? Perfect.

Maybe other forces, apart from angels and demons stronger than they ever could be, as those above being only the fruitful, lacking invention of humans, in conclusion being just as imperfect, concepts based on gut instinct rather than sharpened reality. Other creatures, not alive but not able to cease away as they were never born, called gods for there is no other way known in calling these. Almost like they coaxed a different type of energy, a sprouting, endless source, ruling truly over the world as King and Queen for eternity.

Perhaps feeling a little bored once in a while, so for more dramatical outcomes settle in a weary, eerie discussion to bestow on humans the sentiment of light and shadows, muses to nurture their dreams and phobias for their nightmares, other factors to be said regulated by gods, at least in antiquity.

Especially with being transmitted mouth to mouth, unsettling any details or proof of the truth, so historians none the wiser despair in centuries to come to discern one from the other, failing terribly.

That might be the day when the common saying of "All legends have a true core" might be celebrating its birthday, for at least this expression should hold some meaning deep within the thicket, integrating events from leisurely scripture, as truth from lie.

The point in all of those meanings is that the sad story about the girl seeking, the sought girl, never to be seen again for fleeing an unlucky, sure to be sorrowful marriage, could have happened exactly the way I told you it unfolded, but it is impeccably not very unlikely I didn't make up some strings, added surprises and deleted unappreciated story details or put them completely somewhere else and anyway: I already confined in you, friend, reader, it had never happened this calm, sensational and tame way. The ballads of the Skeleton Crew may be a concocting vortex of a little bit of everything and nothing, eerie, tenebrous, horrifying and disheartening, but the ride would never be gentle and careful and kind, of all things.

Maybe the tale about this particular girl is the best example to elaborate the human constant – that metaphorically isn't a constant at all for there is not a caper fixed and steady – for own fantasy and own carried plots combined with the desirable lust for appreciation of storytelling might have changed the story and turned it into something else. Something it never was, but could have been is currently.

Or it could be the absolute truth I'm only wasting your time with my fancy description of simple things I could have spit out at the very beginning in vile, straight-forward manner, but didn't. My metaphors, carefully petting each and every detail I'm trying to get in your stubborn heads for nothing, encapsulating your sanity and crusted resistivity. Blooming everywhere like despicable weed in a fine garden does only to spite the owners, despite the amount of toxins sprawled and distributed on these pages, and still I'm exerting myself to show you the real picture.

The real being of the Skeleton Crew in its core curated, the complicated yet fine construction of details decorating the reality of it, yet how difficult to explain, a curse, a benevolent boon, gather what you can for your own life.

A coin always has two sides, it's on the interpretational goal and manipulation to convince the reader which side to pick, valuable arguments to explain one side and the other, which does not matter, still you subtly need convincing yourself, it shall not.

The same thing with the mysterious ship, sailing where it wants, when, how, if, not bent by influences even of the highest rank of aristocratic stupidity launched on leather couches and bored to a whim by bowing subjects, neither captivated by weather, or tempest raging, by begging and crying or shouts of mercy, nor strife provoked in response.

At least their existence is proven (is it now?) and all the myths we just were introduced to light one's perspective of the story, with blatant, gaping holes, encouraging us rather than to deter, to figure more.

For curiosity is what a great story makes.

Yet it isn't like that as the crew members wished to publish anything on their side that might be too revealing, besides the obvious, gnarling, sting of reality, their reputation blackened and tarnished to hide even more as the blood splatters right and left where they walked.

How they feast over the victory of death, subduing and forcing onto, how they laugh and smirk about human failure echoing over the shallow sculptures of the coast, decorating themselves with trophies of skin and bones, fashioned then into many tools plausible, reaching from a winter coat to a crib mobile. Playing their two-edged music and enjoying their time the fullest, meanwhile inviting death itself to dine on the expenses, the porcelain of fallen souls, not expecting any harm of death, as death can't harm those who are kindred-spirits and act to satisfy furthermore only its aching, terrible hunger.

Howsoever, the Ballad of the Seeking Girl has another side, another flip of glinting metal formed of a coin immaculate and polished on one side, another tale to tell, basically resulting in the same sequences, the equitable consequences, with the same ending I will portray now to you, as none living ears were told about it ever; it's on you which one you prefer to be believable or not from these two, for I dare not say one is likelier to have occurred than the other. We don't exclusively like tales, because they sure as hell did happen once, quite the contrary at times, only if its core and moral resonate deep within us.

But the one stained with blood and reeking misery and murmuring to the brim about failure and fraying nerves and pulsing sadness better should not be considered a lie, for which it is not (totally). None imagination could portray such event as magnificently horrifying, chilling and sickening, as real life only ably produced.

The girl lived like the other girl that is her and isn't, at the shores of the Black Sea, but in this interpretation far more north, touching the boundaries of the small kingdom she lived in, at a time far more pushed into the past, enemies of human nature well in sight, eagerly roaming the boundaries to compound what yet wasn't theirs. Never theirs to have. The passage of this antiquity to mediaeval times supposed not for centuries to arrive.

People found confidence still in the fact of living in a secured sea, a safe harbour of rough, sheltering rock walls, making it nearly impossible to find a way for the damned demons and human foot soldiers alike to seek their way in, a prison marching both ways, for they also were incapable of leaving the minuscule town out unnoticed, walled from the west by thick, bushy pine trees excelling with the salty sprawl of the sea as manure, a pungent scent streaming across whenever you'd pass of sultry resin and perfumed, stealthy wood and east gleamed the magnificence of free rough sea hard to pass in those cockles they considered back-then formidable boats.

As always, the Skeleton Crew would find a gab, a hollow hole to make their way resolutely to each shore, as hidden and thorny it might turn out, the roaring challenge spurring on when it was time, almost flying over the water pitch-black faintly gurgling and clamouring rebelling under the spell put in, for the Black sea was never quietened and oppressed and wouldn't be until its death. In the middle of the night, how the majestic bow pierced its way through the endless water wrapped in an endless blue shimmer and a violent silence that followed, anticipated on the water and the crescent moon, almost with a sigh now hiding behind dark clouds, as it was a piece of theatre, studied almost over and over again, every character studiously knowing its place and role. The moon hiding for it rallied in revealing the very truth everyone suspected but only could guess and to goad death itself by the promise of reigning darkness.

The Skeleton Crew immediately started playing their main theme song, the skeletal charm shallowing over to their first victim, Constantinople, the guarding sole entrance, as not wanting to travel through the rivers, which they wouldn't, where the people in a hast trance ushered as closest they could get to the Sea, in awe and wonder, watching stunned how the blue ship came towards and turned when coming too close in result of almost halting but never stopping.

A rule they would never break. Never say never, for they all along had done so.

Delighted, intoxicated, spelled, pleasured, every adjective that did their feelings justice were thrown in the room, under laughter and awkward movements of limbs, still sleepy and kind of frozen and mere adrenaline, for reasons, shutting off of the human brain. The night was hardened by the faint fetidness of carcass, laying in wait and frost, occurring strangely mid-summer, skimming over the erected, dampened skin of many people, hairs rising and muscles moving to goose skin. None of the drunk shook with notice, already lost and far too deep to cease now. There was no retreating, only the bitter preceding.

The ship rested calculating, far away from the shores, and curious eyes kin for a glimpse, the creatures more or less living on board watched how their little trick worked out expectantly and akin to the predatory frame they claimed, enjoyed the human's dancing, their worshipping, flames inches under their skin visible only to those whose had been extinguished, lighting on the pitch-point, almost bursting and exploding, but the calamity where to came later, followed by regrets and vibrant pangs of guilt of the human nature with the promise to never, ever give in the weakness, yet humans' vows should never to be taken serious.

Practically bored, they leaned in the shadows, a place of home, reliable canopy and watched how the people repeatedly failed to withstand their magic, their trick. Tossing and turning, wondering, if they once would have reacted the same mortal way... Musing would go no further. Perhaps their work was for nothing, but they achieved what they had to want, hungrily gazing at the awkward vibrancy found in a crowd of joyous, bewitched people, lovely as it was clumsy, hunger and yearning evoked for something else than bloodshed and screams.

Betimes, they craved bare rebellion, violent protests to the alluring, indulging and beguiling, someone else to act for once different, to sense rightly at the first visit, the obvious wrongness and festering straddle of their claws against living flesh, to see through the pretty masquerade, disguised in pulchritude to conceal the sombre, macabre bleak of their clambering skin and withstand, without complete ignorance, hiding behind pathetic sheets and blocking out the longings of one's heart, rather being able to constrain. A soul, refreshing their dry beings and recollecting a time not thusly grim and forlorn, where there was yet hope and light, before devastatingly perishing at their feet, hurled in the profoundest chasm and hiding in continuity still. Now only suffering and punishments amounted, including inflicting it upon others to soothe own wounds and quench the pressured desire.

They stayed and played two other pieces, before having enough of the people in Constantinople – humans in general, lastly being consoled only by the fact how much pleasure the screams and deaths of these people would bring, the satisfaction, the made amends, the noise of death hollowing for miles carried with water, doused in darkness and whispered in the thumb of water against sand or wood even rock. One of the small comforts remaining in dim injunction.

A light diminishing in a losing game, caused potentially by the Harbinger of Destruction, the Skeleton Crew itself, regarding it somewhat astonishing, stupendous, on the other hand atrocious and repelling, the reason why it was a curse and not accruing on immanent account. So, they hunted souls, forsaken and cruel, better that than to think about doomed destiny or their own in fact. That in contradiction sounded quite promising.

They ended the concert with an inferno of magic, a cascade of once lived emotions in their music, raining and pouring straight in the unbolted fists and arms of the ravishing, crying villagers, weeping because the pain was glorious, invigorating, so much divinity not even heaven could bear before the blue ship disappeared on the horizon, almost sorry for these people, streaks of dawn sleepily uprising on the horizon. Exhilarating.

But they were creatures of epicaricacy, shameful gloating, so on other hand loved and looked forward to the pathetic reactions you'd expect from a distraught species, even when confronted by that erratic tug pleated away in their mind, an annoying slip-away, too humane to actually persist. The quenching burn to find a living soul akin was excruciatingly palpable in their hearts, a weird duplicity of sorts, paralleled.

The next day appeared to be completely normal for the villagers, as with latent, sluggish bodies, they woke up late and wondered how the effect of the Skeleton Crew once again could compel an entire population in, abandoning deeds and chores, the events of the last night unfolding as the ability to thought dawned among them. Thinking hurt though, so they didn't put much relevance behind, as considering themselves lucky, beating the minions of death in their game by coming out completely unscathed. No one felt as if it was only the beginning of the mirthless conclusion of Constantinople and its foolish citizens.

Undisturbed, perhaps a bit more rusted in the joints and perpetrated headaches plaguing the temples, working idly to maintain the metropole in condition of splendour, denying the violent whooshing through trees and the erection of blades of grass, doom-doused spikes glinting in a weak sun, shrouded by milky, tarnished clouds. Much too late were the huge clouds acknowledged for the evil-spirited spectres inhabiting, towering furiously over the village with a dark smile copied by its conjurers.

The tempest of gales, mother of blusters approached within brief trepidation, with thunder and lightning to have the villagers pray for their lives and all godly mercy in their houses, squeezed together like wild animals, howling exactly like those in a fight for survival, but a fight that couldn't be contested by the facile man against the elements.

They could have even had a sliver frame of time, a fleeting chance to run and flee, if they wanted, perhaps they had managed to live then, knowing to leave houses in ruins and gentry in sheaves. They contemplated to stay though, they wouldn't desert the sacred earth, what a bummer only, that the holy soil couldn't care much more for them. People are just never truly satisfied, are they? The clouds thickened and thickened, then with a sigh let its abhorrent content be rejected on the poor villagers.

Blood. It rained blood.

Cold, dead, blackened blood long ago collected and reserved for this very precious moment, as it poured and poured with no reasonable ending in sight, gushing out over the swallowing sea and caching the landscape behind a veil of crimson ruby-red, black, blurry flickers, drops as thick as fists, gulling over roofs with the noise of a thousand marching soldiers, eager for slaughter and battle, yelling the declare of war, trickling steadily through narrow, tricking cracks and running in rivers inside the houses, not letting one single soul escape the plaque planned, no surrendering. The blood, quite dead and fouling, reeking of the stench of rotten meat and coagulated snippets as dark as eclipses.

The people cried and prayed to their God whose hands were tight in this matter, as there was no way of ceasing a punishment once it began. It must only be endured.

Perhaps the villagers would have survived however, remaining strictly bridled in mostly shielded shacks and pouring the excessive blood, no matter what out of their windows with chamber pots – as they did – and the eventual one or other droplet definitely meeting their necks, cool and freezing, but quickly wiped ought not to be of much peril. It seemed rather, they performed formidable, faced with an abominable crisis, a crisis yet unintended to sanction a warning. It was far too easy, wasn't it?

The blood was contaminated.

Not even the huge, titanic walls or their fancy fortresses were of any help against the smallest, invisible foes.

The whole city passed away after several weeks of suffering, blood coughing and succumbing to sinning disease and peckish ailment and let's say the grounds of Constantinople stayed clear for a few decades. Why never mentioned in history books, are you musing, dear reader? Imagine you hallucinating with fever and beguiling, trembling limbs, hardly able to brandish quill and feather to paper to retort for an afterworld all suffering passed, and the infection simply spread too quickly and waisted too eagerly to have neighbouring towns notice.

One might throw in now that the infection in the blood, the cradling, strictly swarming clouds brimmed to the finish line with the decaying liquid might as well poured the contents of nearby towns and villages alarming them thus, or the sea flushing the blood to other shores, effectively infecting and befalling some other villages too, but it strictly rained over the city, or touched ground beyond the city limits. The blood was miraculously diluted to the extent, it was hardly incapable in besetting the weakest, illest soul now; if they even attempted to drink the entire Black Sea. Do not be mistaken, reader and interpret this for miracle or even just clemency.

The Skeleton Crew's punishment strictly targeted chosen people and never touched a soul that wasn't meant to be claimed now. So, the downfall of the city was inevitable, but largely due.

Miles away, in the town the girl lived in, weren't the people in the bit concerned about the spreading, hushed, terrifying news, that the Skeleton Crew had arrived in their territory at once, unseen and slipped in the cracks, until that fruitful gaffe of the byzantine capital.

They had hope and stealthy overconfidence to counter any attackers.

Fools and morons aplenty gathered remarkably in such short space.

Writers of historical chronicles claimed to find other reasons for the gaping lack of information and documents no one was able to draft, since they were all dead, but let's address this no longer and rather focus on the majestic core story, the one you have all been waiting for, detailing the girl specifically whom this tale centres around, born in a village, placed amidst an impenetrable pine wood, dark and encapsulating, a lake cooly pooling on sparse clearing, fed by currents of the ambit, seething with waves comparable to the ones plotted in its mother the sea, only mere yards away from the sweet lake, a constant whirring even on the calmest days, waves turmoiling in the greedy wind, miraculously always capable in smuggling its creeping tentacles through the smouldering boscage. The forest made it significantly more difficult to be annexed by the neighbours next door, the brutes from the south and north, yet it also created a tangible grit to theoretical allied villages, prohibiting market and economy in any other way than yielded over the sea or beach, or sand a material stupid for transportation, and the sea too stubborn, except perhaps few instances.

The number of people was clear and easily manageable, a representative more or less fair on position ruling according to commands and assistance shouted from the Carpathian Mountains, deep in the countryside, nestled against hills and so sweetly far away.

The men were fishers, or butchers, or farmers, hunters or priests, the only real building of panoply must be the oratory snuggled on the wide town's square, inviting, imperiously shooing lost souls in the open hands of God. For better or worse.

The children were taught by mothers and aunts, holding an impressively vast knowledge about plants and geography, the teachers those who also tended to the houses, foraged berries and laid out traps for bunnies and squirrels in the woods, cleaning, cooking, the real sturdy backbone of the town, the brace you could lean back in exertion and doubt, always there, for the women were respected and treated fairly better than in all around the nations clustered.

The creatures residing in humane-looking dwellings may so seem rather civilian, but were brutes, horrid in nature and blood-hungry, and their incivility and monstrosity should only be proven furthermore at what lengths they would wander to achieve what they wanted, when confronted in challenge.

The credulous men of the village called this girl out to be cursed, a child marked by the devil, bringing evil upon them, prior she knew to master her first steps, before luxuriating in the pediment of speech, as inconveniently the night her mother was to given birth to her was dated, rather concussed by the appearance of the blue mysterious ship, coming and ghostly sailing at the cliffs, to spin their beautiful tales written, deployed in tone, only to grant the villagers next day with a horrible gift, one they knew was to let them suffer, wrecking right their Achilles' heel, the flawed demerit of any town, population, species generally for the next precarious decades:

Every fertile woman in the town had dropped dead at dawn, far before the remaining men and a handful of children discovered the loss of their family member, tear-struck trying to revive their cold bodies when they would wake, glassy-eyed and numbed in their beds. A friend, a wife, a sister, a daughter, an aunt, a grandmother, a lover, a friend gone in an instant and alike the thinly-wavering house of cards faltering and crumbling to dust at the gaping eyes of the men in town, left-overs, broken, clasped by woes and sorrow they never could have fathom to experience.

And of course, a baby girl left without ever meeting the person supposed to love her the most, not understanding how awful her conditions to embark on this life would be. The universe gave her terrible prejudice and premise it stood to dissent, or to embrace.

The Christians would spit at her, mourning their losses about their wives - every young wife indeed - for weeks, years on end and would have let her be killed, yet unfortunately, there were not much other female creatures left in town for possible, austere reproduction, only goggled-eyed, rosy babies and toddlers, young premature girls scraping barely at the grasp of womanhood and certainly the elderly women, useless and warped and reduced by time to wrinkling shells, weeping for their daughter's and grand-nieces, praying to have them be welcomed comprehensively in heavenly afterlife. So letting her co-exist, that wretched devil's child, absent of her mother and incapable loss it would seize should prove to be punishment enough, the complete opposite of mercy they might be able to offer, so they settled on this instead.

Her father was a rare healer in this rough landscape remote of civilization, a decent practitioner he used to be in his other life, but after his wife's passing rather focused on other aspects of the earthly life, averting the treatments with his patients, hanging up on his perfused talents instantly and completely.

Oh, how at large they planned and revelled in the thought of being a lone, perfect family of three, a trifecta of churning, obliterating ardour, him and his wife, but that ought to matter now scarcely, for the dream burst like a blister of disease and he had woken up at last to this devastating nightmare, that would never end, for as long as he lived.