mouths wide shut
Nothing ever grows there; nothing so much as a poorly weed may sprout.
A lightning bolt splits the sky with a scream. The girl runs, runs through the trees and suffers the scratches of the skeletal branches and the furred pines, watches as the world spins and turns and cracks on its axis. She can hear the barking behind her, of sniffing Houndoom and their furious masters braying for her blood.
They find her with blood trailing from the corners of her otherwise pristine lips; hands folded, swathed in the tickling cattails of the pond, mud seeping into her dress.
It is tradition that the dead are never buried; instead, they are cremated, their ashes stored in lovely family urns. The soil is hard and not kind to the dead.
But there are more reasons why not.
There used to be bonfire dances. Women, kicking their black skirts high, neighing like the galloping Rapidash of the far plains and barking like young Houndour, reckless and wild. Men and burning torches that blazed blue at midnight. All the campfires are tainted now, smothered by ash as fine as water but as thick as the stench of decay.
Those were the nights when the grass was green, when the soil yielded. Of course, it was always a fair transaction.
The Tower is from Before. Long Before the dances, obviously. It is ancient, archaic, endowed with something more than the surrounding buildings can attest to in their dreary states of mortal stupor. The gossiping wives say it was made from one of the bones of God, taken from the hands of the Divine and hollowed out until it aged and became this solid stone structure, all whispering incense and clotted earth. That is why They don't touch it, don't come for it on their black steeds, calling for the townspeople and their riches.
The Tower does not sleep.
(From a child's lips: "I don't believe in ghosts")
Blood has not been spilled in years. When it is done again for the first time in a century, it seeps into the etched cracks, the thick wrinkles in the petrification. The winds howl, and the land shakes in protest. The killers leave, grinning like sharks with crimson stains on their white gloves and charcoal-colored suits.
Elsewhere, a baby cries. A mother is absent. Stranger things have happened; it will not be the last.
A breath, and it rumbles to life once more.