estelle
Where did you go
when you left this planet?
S
he had never thought about what happened when she died. Whatever she had been expecting, this was not it. Estelle never expected to feel so much. The way her heart felt to her ribs like bark upon a tree. Each breath was raw with friction, each breath was like a frigid winter raged inside her body. Frost crept its fingers along her skin. When she was dying, the pain of its touch had turned her beautifully numb. But now, in.. what? Death? Her nerves had reawoken. There is something that charges in her veins whilst the frost creeps. She can hear the crackle of it in her ears. It is the sound of running, like wild horses, their footfalls landing with the crackle of static.Yet Estelle is not the only thing strange in death. The world is, entirely, other. It is not as the talks of mortals ever suggested. There is no sorrow here, nor repentance nor even joy. There is only chaos. The world trembles and the ground reaches up with bolts of lightning, up, up to the sky that crackles and undulates like waves. Clouds crash against each other and each is struck through with silver moonlight. The sky rages and the rising lightning spreads like a web across the sky.
The earth is slick glass and atop it crimson snow blows by pushed by a wind that breathes in time with her struggling heart. One breath, another, another.. Each pause in between is as if she has held her breath. The snow pushes along like the blood. It is cold to her feet.
There is no green here, there is no trace of an earth she has ever known. All of this place is chaos and desolation. There is no sign of life, there is nothing but the light of ascending rods of lightning…
Somewhere Estelle’s heart had stopped and before it started a great magic twisted in her veins and pushed, pushed her through a gauze veil and out into a strange limbo, a curious dreamworld. A stallion looms out of the darkness. His skin reminds her of what the world should be, dark brown, familiar. “Where are we?” She asks him as lightning suddenly bolts for the sky from beside her. It captures the silver of her skin and the frost that branches across her torso, feathered like frost and alive like electricity.
“Who are you?’
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