It came during darkness. In the late hours of the night, asleep, warm under my thick sheets. The darkness was thick, and cold. But I lay warm. The pounding of the wind upon my window, and whipping waves of rain scattering across the panes kept me wrapped like a babe in my safety. The deafening hiss and roar of the storm outside was nearing unbearable. But my tolerance was strong. My will, my fate. I would not go so easily.

All along, pounding at the gates of my spirit’s safe house, preaching at me the peril of being in its wake. To lie still was to give way to my fears. To move was to challenge it. I pulled tighter under my blankets and tried humming to myself. The louder the wind. I tried rocking. The louder the rain. The pounding was now so fierce, I thought it would surely overcome me. It was sure to break the glass with a touch more of its strength.

Absolute horror. Its black lines poured slowly down the walls of my eyelids, and formed pools at my soul. Terror wrapped her beautiful arms around me, stilling me. Undulating waves of blissful pain wrapped their vines round those of fear, and together they mingled deep into my mind. My mind. Where it was still quiet. Where it was still warm.

Then she spoke. And her words were that of a honey suckle, whose scent is so light as to be lost in the thought of a passing child. To breeze her intentions into my fate, like a stone whose surface is scarred with the words of a prophet. Her words were to become my reality. Only I had to listen. The pounding rain and roaring wind was at its climax now. And it was no more than a pin drop, betwixt the time that ticked through her words, as I lie motionless on my fears.

My interment like parchment, crisp with time, was peeled away from its core, as it came to life. Whisps of tiny light buzzed around her speak, and her words, like dew, glistened as they formed droplets along the base of my sanity. And a silent running water laid rest her volumes, as she spoke them along my peace. My understanding was my undoing. And as the rain and wind was dampered to a gradient nothingness, I was left only with the emotion. The peace her words had spoken had now whispered away into the night everything I had believed in. Everything I was to become. And everything I would ever be.

Her will my fate. My pulse my pleasure. For now I had listened. And the storm was no more. Within it, my peace, like the warmth from a smothering coal, was blowing in with the linen that curtained my chamber window. And as the fire eases away to no more than a crackle in a memory, my warmth sunk away. The last drop of dew still hung maddeningly close to the edge of my awareness. And then it fell.

All the birds could come out now. The storm was over.