Chapter III

What about his heart, she thinks. Is it as soft as hers? Wobbly and frail that sends waves through her body like a drop of water in a lake. Is it as feral as hers? Lashing against her bones like ocean waves in a storm. What about his lips, she thinks suddenly. Soft and sweet like a peach on a hot summer’s day. What about his breath, she thinks. Like the first day of spring perfumed by the soft smell of buds that need to open still, when you learn to breathe again. When Shorena removed herself from his thoughts the sun had descended behind the walls of the keep and the last light of the day turned the sky red. Her mothers words echo between her ears. 
“We are supposedly closer to our ancestors on days such as this”, she said to Shorena when her father died. 
“Dreams, thoughts and feelings will come back to us that were long forgotten otherwise. Better to let them wash over you”, she said. With the advice of her mother Shorena, in her last moments of lonesome quiet, before the other guests would come, stares into the red void and thinks back into the dream she had when her mother and her knights moved north into the mountains towards, what would be, her last fight. The sky was just as red but the forest she was standing in was luscious, green and ancient. A statue stood in the middle of the clearing. Overgrown by moss and vines and flowers. Shorena could not make out any details about that statue, so she moved in closer. But the vines and moss and flowers would not reveal. She tried to brush aside the plants to no avail. She started to scrape and claw at the moss and ripped the flowers off and tore at the vines. Whatever she did, nothing would help. A sense of terror clawed right back at her as her fingers started to bleed, and her nails broke off their beds. Violent shivers shook her insides until she felt like vomiting and when she realized that she needed to stop, she could not do it. The murky terror that had a hold on her polished itself to one realization; that whatever she was clawing at reminded her both of her mother’s face and Tamar’s mural. The urge to be certain grew in her but whenever she uncovered one part, another would cover itself again. Both of them smiled coldly back at her as she clawed at them with bloody fingers. 
As they did for many other occasions the guests poured into the knight’s hall and in a procession of reds and black poured out again into the orchard of the keep. In soft and weighty voices they spoke to each other and some of them looked up even. Into the trees where imperceptibly slow the flowers either fell or were in the midst of turning into hard shells of fruits. The pomegranates would be here soon but for now, they had to wait in the rain of orange petals as they admired the hanging, yellow lilies with their protruding, curly blossoms, or they dared to touch the translucent, soft petals of the mountain roses. As Shorena passes them she nods, emulating the same soft benevolence of Tamar, but she can not help herself as her gaze turns upwards every once in a while to the same trees they were looking up to. However, all she can see are the leaves, black during the night, obscuring the stars behind them.