Indistinct Majesty

To Our Loves

With Her Best Blood

Of Worms & Epitaphs

One Shade the More

Once, in a Kingdom far beyond the slanting willows and trickling brooks of the West, there lived a young girl by the name of Evangeline, a renowned beauty to all those who spied her, with pearly white skin and hair as black as the starless skies. She lived alone in a great mansion high in the mountains, where the ravens cried and the clouds kissed the hilltops with fiery passion.

Evangeline was happy there in her palace in the hills, in her Hidden Paradise far from the prying eyes and whispering tongues of the valleys. But still, she was not content. Every morning, as the sun stabbed through lace curtains into her silk-swathed boudior, she would rest her head upon her hands and stare deep into the silvery eyes of her bedside mirror, always dreaming of the day when she might achieve true beauty. She would sit and cry, bemoan that her nose were too long, or her eyes too sharp, or that her skin were not fair enough. Each and every day, no matter how she occupied her time, the same biting thoughts returned to her and tightened a silver noose around the throat of her dreams. And slowly, day by day, Evangeline found she could not ignore the voices any longer. She would sit in her room, the curtains drawn for fear the sun should stain her porcelain skin, and weep great, salty tears across her silken sheets. No matter how hard she tried, she could not shake the image of perfection from her mind.

It was many years before the mansion in the hills was discovered, hidden away in wreaths of scudding cloud, as if the very mountain was holding the palace its prisoner. Inside, all was bare and forsaken, stripped clean by decades of neglect and disuse. But in a small room at the very top of the tallest tower, there lay a porcelain doll propped against the wall, its glassy eyes cracked and dull, its smooth cheeks as white as the winter snow.

To Kiss the Sky

Of Musk-Rose Blooms

Darkness & Distance

I

The narrative of Lydia F. Marshall

1907

The forest is dark. Pools of glimmering white boket in the darkest ebony oceans that swirl and billow around me. My feet brush the sodden ground, stark white against the ink-black turf, my hands fumbling like dying butterflies around my twisted knot of ebony hair. My eyes cannot adjust, cannot focus to the darkness around me, all a blur of light and dark, a chessboard punctuating my vision like the erratic pinpricks of a broken sewing machine.

I can hear the river. It is a great gasping rush of air, a dying animal breathing out its last on the cold wet turf. I reach forward in the darkness and try to find a handhold in the black velvet curtains around me. How cold, how dark is my mind in these surroundings, how infinitely trapped within the walls my fair hands have themselves constructed? My breathing is sharp and fast, and I can feel my heart like a hundred tiny watch hammers beating against my chest.

Sorrow Doom’d to Fade

Hush’d the Winds