Crisps of dry grey leaves crunch under my metal heels, as I stride along an undulating path, grimly lit by waning moonlight, harshly filtered by gnarled twigs of long-dead yews riven and yawning in the howling wind. The whispers of the night echo the lives of the departed, shimmering spirits immortalized abaft gravestones all around, bathed in sickly starlight. In the hazy distance, a portentous owl caws, shrill and defiant, its moonlike eyes boring into mine and my soul. My dim hearth sputters and wisps, as though doused with icy clamors, cold, clammy, and deathly calm. I pull closer my wits and withers about me, as the mist nestles itself around the young stalks resigned to dimness everlasting. The path stretches on, rocky and rife with treachery, tatter-adorned brambles snagging at my dark cape with the vengeance of undeath. Each plod feels heavier than the last, as though unnourishing moonlight collected in a dragged cauldron. Wherefore I venture through this gloom, my weary wits cannot fathom, though I know the phantom's longing embrace, awaiting.


I chance upon a bridge, a bridge of blackened iron, harshly contorted and spiked, as though challenging whomever durst cross. Even weed and wormwood dare not grow so near the ominous crossing. The dark bridge is scarcely three spans wide, that if two men were to cross abreast, one were sure to slip and dash himself against the jagged onyx stones, thinly veiled by the churning spray, pronged like lamprey teeth awaiting prey. I mutter and scowl as I step onto the rotting wood, which heaved and creaked, upset and unwelcoming. Scoffing and coughing pale wisps of fog, I brisken, setting my eyes on the coda of this vile viaduct, and not the brackish stream below, strangely silent and inviting, despite the whorls of churning murk coalescing and disbanding ad eternum.


Life. Devoid of it is the desolation across the bridge. The scurrying clatters and slithering shadows of the past now lay still, abandoned and abrogated by my crossing. The owl spread its black wings, revealing ghastly holes among its bordured obsidian feathers, and, with a roiling screech, takes off into the distance, with its head turned around, eerie eyes growing smaller yet ever more intensely fixated, holding my stare until they blended into the few stars, smattered across the velvety sky behind. Ahead, the sky is overcast, denser than colluding fates, a dampening pall allowing no light save the pallor of failed aurorae. I tread through the dead brush, snapping ash-coated twigs and trampling thorny undergrowth. With every inch, the scant moonlight fades ever so slightly, ever so surely. A howling wind gales in distant mountains cloaked in impregnable fog, whose craggy crowns see no end in sight, save my own.