Temperance struggled miserably through the final grief-choked pestilence-wracked, hope-stealing years of her life, clinging to the hopeful idealization of release and purpose and joy found in the promise of life's most mundane bonds, because that was all she had--
(If you are just clever enough, if you are just sincere enough, if you dream hard enough, you may transform the frighteningly opaque & unpredictable, often violent or draining, constructs of your life from a transference of shackles into a threshold toward freedom.)
If you weave the chains bound to all girls of your time, and indeed many others, carefully enough, you can make of them a wreath or a garland and you can crawl through it and the world beyond may be charmed into not hurting you. You dream it.
(You dream something, you will something, you make 'will' real. She was a barely-nineteen-year-old-girl mired in faith which would be considered delusional, even insane, by modern secular standards, and it was all she had.)
An uncertain, very cloistered, thoughtful, ferociously creative and strange girl, stepping through the threshold into womanhood, and she was cut down, just like that, exhausted from years of running from hopelessness and total submission of the spirit to the chains built by and woven through Christendom--
(Dreaming, dreaming, and dreaming so hard that her dreams would save her. And she died. In an awful, drawn-out way, just like that.)
She died, and she shook off death after three days and three nights, but to shake those chains, like a hand shedding skin and breaking bone to pass through tightened manacle, she lost everything which would have ever permitted her to have even a chance of brushing her fingertips along the reality of those dreams. What came back was Temperance, but it was not human.
(If you strip a mind and a body of its inherent nature, but do not succeed in destroying it, you must accept that what comes back may be, to the standards of all who have not been so-stripped, so violated & deprived, hideously, hideously alien & vilely malformed.)
And now there is a walking corpse, and it will not lie down and submit to death, and it hauls its dreams along with a great, grief-filled roaring like the song of a dark star, and that howling dark has a great gravity, and it tears through the world like a dredge, like a trawl, and it hauls up what once fiercely was but can no longer be, and it electrifies that rot and detritus until it remembers what it was and alloys into old shapes.
(It does not do this because it wants to-- It does this because that is what it is.)
The great perversion of animation which drives the corpse|girl|demon onward catches at all of these things, too, and these things, too, become grotesquely animated, even if they have been decayed and gone for years upon years upon heavy, sedimentary years...
(It will not stop. It cannot stop dreaming. It has dark, dark dreams. It wants so badly to be beautiful and alive. It is so hungry.)
The shadow is so cold and it has grown so terribly, terribly heavy over the centuries. It hollows out and consumes what is to drive forward what was and what so badly wants to be.
(The shadow remembers how to dance and its remembers how to sing. The shadow can be beautiful and the shadow remembers fiercely and obscenely how to love with all that it is.)
And the shadow devours. And the shadow dreams so deeply of being anything but a devourer.
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