Page 1 of Threads Of Madly Whispers

Prologue

Wild Rose

A Symphony of Silence

Life is so beautifully ruinous and macabre.The rain falls gently, a kind of sobriety washing over me as if it were a quiet prayer whispered by the heavens themselves. It is a balm to the wild thrum of chaos that pulses through my veins, a hymn that speaks directly to the aching parts of my soul. Each drop is a silent word, a song that calms the restless spirit within, and for a fleeting moment, there ispeace.

The ashes of those long gone, the remnants of their final breaths, gather like a dark shawl around my legs—dust and dirt from the weight of the world, from theburdenof history. But I carry on, undeterred. Even in the face of the tenebrosity that encircles me like a shroud, even as the air thickens with malice and foreboding, I march forward. Nothing—no shadow, no storm—can halt me.

Above, the sky hangs menacingly, a smoldering sea of grey that pulses with the echoes of a world forgotten. It is an omen of stillness, of inevitable decay. Yet, in this verystillness, in the grasp of its somber embrace, I feel a curious solace, the kind that can only be found in places where the earth itself is a tomb. A graveyard, perhaps. A resting place where time no longer holds sway and life itself is abandoned in favor of eternal quiet.

The clouds churn like a beast in fury,dark and violent, each thunderous roar mirroring the turmoil within me. They rage with a force that is as familiar as it is terrible—a wrath that claims me as its pawn. Their relentless cries, like a symphony of anguish, reverberate through me. It is a deafening, brutish cacophony, flooding my senses with its ferocity. A torrent that surges within me. An unyielding wave that drowns my joy, my fleeting sense of purpose, until I am left gasping for air in a world spun entirely from delirium.

The anarchy tears at my being and unravels my thoughts, my morality, and my flesh. What remains is nothing more than a storm-wracked soul, fragmented and adrift, caught between the struggles that pull me apart and the quiet spaces that beckon me to rest. A person undone, a creation unmade and left to wander in the wake of my undoing.

I cannot control it, and I do not think I ever want to. It’s the only emotion I carry anymore. The only thing that keeps me tethered to what it feels to be human.

The rain is grim, and with each drop that wets my flesh, my legs lift and bend to the non-existent tune around me. My steps are messy, uncoordinated, and unbound. My heart is bruised, yet at this moment, everything fades into obscurity.

My body twists and turns to the chorus the thunder swallows me in. I twirl and spin in the darkened night. The rain soaks me, yet the fervor that smolders within becomes rather addicting, like a poison I envy to kill me. My toesbarely hit the ground before I am up again, throwing myself around like a delicate feather, and the feeling it gives me leaves me high. Like ‘Mary Jane’,I cannot stop sniffing.

I dance for the dead, and I do not stop. Ballet is themadrigalto my soul and the psalm of my life. It’s my rumination, my flair, my impulse. It’sme.

From a young age, I knew ballet would ignite a fierce passion within me. To some, it’s nothing, but to me, it’s a seed I’ve nurtured through the bitterest of times. In a world where art is stripped bare and wretchedly forced to lick the blood of its wounds. I see light dipped in darkness, and its grace like that of a black rose withthornsto spill crimson. And so I danced then, and I dance now. I twirl my night away, I sway my woes to dust, I whirl the mania to nihility, and I even gyrate to the past I lost.

They say fed rapscallions act less deviant than starved saints. I once wore my wings like an angel, but now I am simply motherless and fatherless. Veiled in dark waves that recede. A void I eagerly let capture the broken pieces of me.

Dying is not hard. It is living that succumbs me to tasting the bitterness in my eyes. Broken glass can never be the same, and try as you may to mend the shards, you will simply be left strewn across a field of your own storm.

Grand Jete.

What I am doing is rather disrespectful to those deceased, yet somehow I think they would treasure it.Treasuremy precision and passion. My body glides, darting, and rising. The rhythm it ripples by is unknown to me, almost as if it has a mind of its own.

A cloak of shadow wraps tightly around my unrest, its threads woven from harrowing frustration. The thought of Ballet Mistress Anoushka’s scorn hangs like a dark mist, stirring the storm within. Each wave of anger swells, fed by thefear of her disapproval, until it threatens to consume all of me.

The surrounding silence is thick and suffocating, yet somehow alluring. My legs move in a lyrical pitter-patter, splashing into a muddy puddle, where my reflection flickers faintly in the ghostly gleam of the moon. I am soaked through, my hair clinging to my face like a second skin, and my feet sinking into the mud, cold and unrelenting.

A haze envelops me, a disorienting cocoon of thought, where everything seems muffled—distant, except for the sound that breaks through, cutting into the quiet like a whisper. I almost ignore it, the way one might disregard a dream that refuses to be remembered, but something about it pulls at me and forces me to stop.

The rain, which had been pounding so fiercely just moments ago, seems to lull as if nature itself holds its breath. But my heart? It races, beating so fast I can barely hear anything else. The sound loiters. A crack, like the snapping of a twig, followed by the rustle of something—or someone—moving through the shadows.

I stand still, heart hammering in my chest, as the world seems to pause with me, the rain slowing to a hushed tone while the darkness deepens. My breath catches, and I can feel it, the pressure of something unseen closing in, the very air around me, heavy with an unspoken tension.

“Who’s there….show yourself?”

My eyes dart across the landscape, frantic, seeking any sign of movement. But all I see are rows upon rows of tombstones, their cold, stoic faces staring back at me. They stand in solemn silence, flanked by a dense grove of trees whose branches twist and claw at the sky like skeletal fingers. Among them, a few broken ceramic statues, their once-detailed forms now weathered and sinking into the earth.

For a long, drawn-out moment, time seems to stretch, and my pulse quickens. Then, like a murmur in the dark, I sense it—a shadow, subtle but unmistakable, shifting behind aHellenisticsculpture, one that is jagged and ancient, as though it has been waiting and watching for me.

I cannot see them clearly, but I feel them. The hairs on the back of my neck rise, with each inch of skin crawling with the eerie sensation of eyes locked upon me.Cold, predatory eyes. And with them, an overwhelming unease—twisted and sickly—leaves a foul taste on my tongue—thick and sour—like something long dead. And I can feel them cloaked in darkness, hidden just beyond my sight.

In their gaze, I am nothing but prey. A fragile deer caught frozen in the blinding light of headlights—exposed, vulnerable, and utterly defenseless. Naked to their eyes, stripped of any illusion of safety. The weight of theirhidden presencepresses down on me, strangling and terrifying. I can not run. I can not hide. I can only stand.

It’s such a peculiar discovery. When your nightmares envelop around you like vines, digging into your fears until there is nothing left to scare you. Until you become friends with the demons thathideunder your bed. The person hidden away from my eyes might be an evil that stealthily hunts, and I could very much be the lamp his carnivorous teeth want to sink into. And in these gnarly woods, my life could very well turn to dust.

But when you are already in the depths of despair, you are nothing but a walking corpse waiting to perish.

So when caution should be my choice of action, I throw it to the wind. I get no response, and neither do I seek for it.

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