+++
author = "Steffen Blake"
title = "Death's Breath"
date = "2021-09-25"
+++

There was a certain feeling I recall. I have no single word to describe it however, a deep romantic nostalgia mixed with a bittersweet fear. Not necessarily the heart pounding moment when you are working up the courage to ask a certain someone out, no, more like the moments of deflating frustration and anxiety when you give shortly after and pass on your chance rather than take it. You walk away still madly trying to grab at the last dregs of effort at the pit of your heart to turn around and just ask them that question you so deeply wish to.

But in the end you leave and regret it your entire life.

Now imagine if for a brief glimpse, before you started that journey of courage, you could see your soon to come failure already sealed in fate. Imagine the sensation of your heart dropping to the pit of your stomach as the entire upcoming years of regret are baked together into a single unified moment of anguish, frustration, anxiety, and madness.

That would drive a man wild, would it not?

Such emotion is what I recall as I stared across the table at the figure before me as we were engulfed in that dreamscape. Ivory walls rose up on all our sides and were crested with emblazoned stone glyphics and beset with yawning gargoyles who leered overhead, their maws projecting  flickering shadows to the overhead arches in the soft glows of flickering lamps that hang from their frozen paws.

A cathedral of sorts, I suppose, with us at the center of its crossroad's apex where those looming halls came to meet.

I think her name was Ashleigh. But it had to be pronounced in a whispered tongue, to do otherwise would anger her, this was something my mind was certain of. I knew already at this moment as well that two other women resided, somewhere, in this pale scape. I somehow was already familiar with them, and as Ashleigh smiled a toothy grin at me, I had the impression that it was of the utmost importance I find my companions before something very dire would occur. She readjusted her pink ruffled dress she wore and rested her chin on her hand, elbow crooked to the table as the young woman carefully drug her finger across the table.

A clock chimed now at 11 o'clock. I had an hour, at best. Pushing my chair back (to a protesting screech on the floor) and curtly excusing myself, I snatched my iron lantern from the table and proceeded to make myself scarce, pausing only to retrieve my jacket from a small gargoyle's outstretched paw.

I had to hurry, this was the impression above all else I am certain of now, looking back on those faint memories. The halls were cold and my breath was opaque in the icy clutch of night. For a moment I paused mid-hall to peer through a looming keep window down into the baileys below. The gardens were breathtaking under the silver moon's light in the sky, but as a cloud passed overhead and bathed all in darkness I pulled my jacket tighter. I had no time for gawking.

Through that keep and halls I ran for I do not recall how long, but eventually I came unto a flight up a rocky stairwell. My pace quickened and I scrambled my way up, my breath now haggard and labored. At the top I came out a large inset door, and it took all my strength to force it open. The room within was once perhaps a place of great splendor, but long since unused. Silken bedsheets long mottled away to time and soaked in dust befit an ancient bed, its bronze clawed feet now tarnished with age.

But this was not what my eyes fell to, no, my voice caught in my throat and I had to turn away, hand to my mouth to cut back a guttural cry from deep within.

At the center of this room in a heap was a woman. Her dress was soaking crimson with blood as it freshly pooled around her waist and across that white marble floor. I fell to my knees and grabbed at her hand. Oh my Camellia, such a beautiful flower now stained red! What had happened to her? The warmth was completely gone from her hand and no pulse was to be found. She was without a shadow of a doubt...

Dead.

Was I already too late? Had I not taken so long to arrive, could I have saved her? I could not say. My blood stained hands were now sticky and I had no way to clean them. I believe I wept, the next moments are a blur, but I recall staggering up to my feet and backing away as I barely kept my bowels from heaving, then turning to leave in search of my other companion.

As I stepped towards the door, however, I heard something. It was quiet, barely audible, and yet its familiarness sent an icy chill through my spine as I felt my entire body lock up against my will, totally frozen.

"No..." the voice croaked out in a hoarse whisper. Slowly I turned to look back at Camellia's corpse, my lantern cautiously raised above my shoulder as my pupils tightened.

Her face was raised, Camellia's gaze raised to meet mine. But there was no life left in those eyes, that I was certain. All had been drained from her and what remained was... something else entirely. Like staring deep into a pair of mawing pits her gaze was naught but two cold onyx pearls, and despite a total lack of direction from them I was completely certain she was staring right back at me.

She raised a blood soaked arm out towards me and I stumbled back. "Don't leave me" she croaked out once again, then began coughing and spluttering up a vile black bile. The room smelled of rot and the stench assaulted my senses beyond reason. Camellia planted her outstretched hand on the ground, the sticky blood making a soft '*splat*' that I recall vividly now even as I recant those events. And then she began to drag her body forward across the floor towards me as black bile continued to pour forth from her gaping mouth.

I let out a yelp, totally unable to maintain my wits. I threw open that oak door with all my might and leapt to the stairs, taking them two, then three, at a time. As I rounded the bottom of those steps and ran out into the hall I cast one final glance backwards.

There she was, dragging her body down the stairs. The steps were soaked in her blood all the way down and she slowly lifted her gaze to once again meet me with that obsidian gaze.

"Don't... don't leave me here to die" she whispered. Oh my dearest Camellia, how could I even have the heart to tell you... you already have.

Running down those halls now my heart was beating like a madness, and a fever had gripped my core like a sickness. I heard a clock chime at thirty past and I knew time was drawing shorter. But this time I knew where I had to go. Down, down into the depths of that castle.

That is where I would find Julia.

Her room sat nestled at the back of the lower halls, deep in the farthest corner. But as I drew nearer to that place it became evident something had occurred, or, was occuring. The darkness was tight and had a stranglehold on my lantern, as if some malevolent force had formed a grip around the very light itself. The walls pulled in closer and the great portraits of Julia that normally adorned these walls now seemed... changed. Perhaps a trick of the shadows?

But with each turn and portal I passed it became apparent it was no trick. Her face had become stretched, twisted, contorted by the dark shadows. Her body now pulled and disfigured into something disproportionate and inhuman. The darkness cast just enough doubt on the images though for me to be unsure of what I was even perceiving.

And at last the door to Julia's room stood before me. Or, what remained of it. The hardwood oaken handles had rotted away and the steel reinforcements all but rusted away. Cautiously I stepped through the debris to survey the room, earnestly searching for my companion.

She was nowhere to be seen, but her room had been completely and utterly transfigured, as if twisted and warped by some ancient magicks. I slowly raised my lantern and cast my gaze about. Great vine-like branches had taken over the room, worming their way into every piece of furniture and infesting every crack and crevice. The vines were nearly as thick as my arm in places and were adorned with sickly yellow blossoming fruits.

My gaze followed their trails and soon it became apparent that the festering vegetation had a common source of origin, a closet door at the back of the room. Pulling together what once of courage was left, I shakily approached that door with an outstretched hand. The moment I placed it on that doorknob I heard it, her voice. Like a silver chime it went off in my head, sweet and harmonious. For a moment all doubt washed away in my mind, for I knew Julia was alive!

"Come in, please, we have been waiting so long for you!" it spoke to me. With gleeful abandon I threw open that door. Glee instantly petrified into stone cold fear as my lantern alighted what was inside.

I believe it truly was Julia, somewhere in there. But whatever was left of her had long since been transformed into... something else. Something completely and utterly beyond human comprehension. Like a cocoon of flesh it pulsed at the center of that closet, nearly seven feet in height. As if the nightmare of a maddened god, it rhythmically wavered. It had no mouth and a thousand limbs with a million fingers in my mind. And there, just off the center, for just a moment I made contact with those crystal blue eyes of what I was certain was the upper half of a human face. It was sunken into that mound of flesh and bone, protruding like a cancerous tumor. We made eye contact for a moment and her nostrils flared, as if to attempt to cry an impossible scream. "Kill me!" those eyes pleaded.

"Oh please come closer, it has been so long" that voice whispered once again in my mind. But now I know the truth. Julia was long gone and I had once again failed my companion. 

But Julia's true eyes, those bright blue sapphires, they told a different story. "Kill me, oh please! And flee! Never to return!" they cried out to me.

I felt something brush against my leg and with a yelp I jumped back. In my distraction the vines had come to grip closer at my feet, almost as if to constrict me. It became apparent I only had two options at this moment. I could throw away my only source of light and pray that whatever this thing was, the purification of flames would be enough to end Julia's suffering, but at the cost of my own life. Or... I could flee.

And the fact I am able to regale you with this tail now I suppose is testament to which of those choices I made, dear listener. I was a coward, and I fled as if the hounds of hell were on my very heels. In a way, to this day, I think they were.

The halls now had become twisted, and that hellscape of a castle had become a prison of my own design. I remember breathlessly running through corridor after corridor as shadows lengthened and my lantern began to sputter out.

I took a moment to catch my breath, sitting at the crux of the joint of two halls. My lantern was on its last dregs now and was beginning to go out. As a clock on the wall across from me chimed up to midnight I knew I had run out of time.

And just like that the lights went out and I was bathed in that seeping, cloying darkness. I tried to suppress my ragged breathing and stilled myself to be as quiet as a mouse. But the thing about when a prey is stalked, is the huntress only reveals herself when she knows there is no escape.

I heard them before anything else. First, that wet '*slap*', followed by the creasing drag of a corpse across the floor. And the soft creaking and groaning of wood and stone as something of immense strength bespoke itself across the hall from the other direction.

"Please, don't leave us" they crooned in my mind as they drew closer. I tightly hugged the lantern to my chest, as if its extinguished flame could somehow offer me some vestige of hope. I felt something brush against my thigh, and the fetid smell of death's breath against my cheek.

I knew at that moment that my fate was to die.

And then, just like that, I awoke in my bed. Drenched in sweat and completely out of breath, as if I had been holding it for quite some time now. I think that was what awoke me, in retrospect, and perhaps... saved my life.
