The Auroral Anapest

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Tonight, to indulge that circuit, materialized an alluringly baleful sight, Mirahlae; for she was now that sky. Her cassock forked cracks that fanned out from the folds covering her breast. Her arms unfurled to welcome an event inexplicably set in Earth's celestial courses as an inexhaustible hearth-stone. It was also a curse to remind us all that, to walk with an intent to fly is just as much a vision eternal, unfitted to temporal rhyme, as 'tis a book of actions with a spine held oft by a promise of the sure potential for one to run out of time.

I felt remorse for what I'd done, or perhaps it was yugen, when I saw the spectral anthropomorphs funnel in reverse from the open tapers that hung in flares toward the ends of Mirahlae's sleeves. They were the dead of a lesser pedigree. Their appearance was translucent and they shimmered like the back-lit silhouette of cumulo-cirrus indigos. You know, those irregular cylinders of water vapor that cross the moon in staggers when the wind dies. The form of these lesser dead most often resembled large bunnies.

I watched the dance while they swung out, and then around, swirling taut at Mirahlae's feet. In their ascent, the dead circled 'round her form like a tornado as the brim of their trajectory widened. Finally, in a violent whiplash, they slung themselves away to take their place in the clouds. Those clouds advanced in-kind, and lock-stepped the intense dispatch of dreams left unfulfilled by the dead that entered them- and it sounded just like it. Gathering in a halo about the lady, these blighted mists of the sky fan-kicked their driving currents in feather-steps. The brontide therefrom wailed with a crescendo to resurrect all morendo: a heart-splitting roar of thunder that followed riveting spikes of bolted lightning, no less prompt in their manifest, and breaching the thermosphere as though to open Pandora's chest.

This is the Auroral Anapest.

"I didn't know, I didn't know," I quietly muttered, stifling the yawning cave forming beneath my throat.

"..and if you did," asked a terse and plateaued voice.

"It would have been vastly less miserable to acknowledge at this moment in time," I flatly stated, "Foreknowledge would have erased its relevance ahead of any ensuing present tense."

"Ah, so you'd have done the same thing; you're just whining," another voice cackled.

I didn't answer, neither did I concern myself further with the talking flora at my feet. Flowers, their talk is vexing. They think they see everything; flapping their petals- they're either intolerably pleasant or impishly conniving. Egads, the the seeds! The seeds! Ceaseless scurrying lest you actually slit their throats and plant them in the dirt. Though that doesn't quite solve much. They have to be watered. Before long, they sprout and develop the audacity to speak freely.

Continuing my 'leisurely' vigil from atop a distant, rocky outcrop that was vaunted above the town below, I found myself wishing 'twere I that would die. I thumbed the bow guarding the crown on a pocket watch that holds as much of me, as I hold in it. I depressed its crown as I took it out the pocket of my waistcoat. The hunter's case was open, and a choir of numbers sang to me from behind the acrylic crystal composing them.

*click*

It was time to go.

"Mirahlae," I sputtered....but I couldn't yet finish the words to trail her name.

Now a forlorn fulcrum, my role is to arbitrarily shift the metronome of others here-or-there along the pendulum of each their respective destinies. That is, unless I choreograph a way to make a shipwreck of Life, and thereby provide all with a means to mutiny, so that they may write their own story. But there are so many left to snuff out who stop this from becoming a reality.

Pivoting from the precipice at which I stood to rewind memories ahead of the next itinerary, I thought I heard Mirahlae say:

"...remember me."