Embrace

In silence he waits, inhabiting your dreams of old, muttering things yet untold.

Feet dragging across the forest floor, dead leaves and twigs rustling, cracking. The snapping of brittle bones upon a barren battlefield.

Turning in the eternal gloom, the shadows you see transient, fluid.

Like Sprites, they dance. Melding into the skeletal trees, threading the carpeted sea of brown before vanishing into the lengthening shadows.

Ephemeral these thoughts are, hard to fathom, harder to control.

But they are not what you sense, he remains hidden, watching and waiting.

Then when in weariness, you lie insensate, the dry dead foliage embracing one with haste; he emerges from the shadows, caressing your forehead with a kiss.

'Up.' he breathes. Your body resists but he grips you hard and will not desist.

With a reedy sigh that echoes the rustle of tumbling leaves, one is released from the earthy grave.

Embracing you, he coaxes you forward. Step by step. Shadows flee and silence descends, a suffocating blanket, deafening in its entirety.

Must we go in flames? In bouts of fitful ire, raging against the dying light?

When Oblivion be such painless release, the vacuous mind devoid of clouding shadows?

But for now, on you plod, the crackling of downtrodden undergrowth drowning out his muttered observations, the flitting shadows blinding one from his faint silhouette.

So patiently he waits, watching and waiting.