Leaves lay open on the desk, the bark crackling like old sinew. Thin and bruised with the weight of ink, inky, sickly, river flowing into whorls, the markings that breathed in dim light.

Hoof hovered over casting a shadow on the parchment, afraid, to touch for to long, disturb the trickling heave.

As the stones could leach into the fur, sticky and unkempt, woven together, leave imprints that could never wash away in the golden river.

Stark and bold, a demand rather than an invitation. Beneath it, diagrams sketched with a maddening precision, the dust in a circle inside circles, angles intersecting in ways that suggested impossible geometrics.

Mercury.

The base distillate, distill.

The purple one murmurs.

Her voice a whisper of wind through cathedral hell.

Same purple hooves trace a line of text, letters crawling down in a spiral, beneath her touch those words did not still still, agitated from her touch.

Shimmering.

Reshaping themselves, making way, meaning fracturing into refrains.

Tumbled like stones, hollow. Uneven.

A breath warm against the page, ink it swelled, pulse. pulse. pulse.

Elixir.

Self dissolvation.

Dismember.

Text blurred in a gaze.

This act of reading was an intrusion.

The page refused that kind of comprehension.

It hissed, it could not place.

A line leapt from the page, glint of steel.

Colorless. Fabulous. Blurred.

The Seventh Seal has been opened.

Something deep. Twisted, a struggle for a moment, it reached down a struck a chord strung between the ribs. She heard the sea outside, so far away but insistent, its roar rising.
Falling. Echo chambers.
Cryptic rhythm. Plagued text.

Another diagram.

Next.

Figure.

Fragmented. Head severed. Torso opened. Inside rendered in exquisite. Agonizing detail.

Those organs, not right, shimmering, morphing, reshaping.

Staring.

The heart, firstly red and fleshly, secondly crystalline, edges sharp and glittering. Lungs turned to coiled serpents, an ouroboric loop swallowing itself.

Alembic body. Furnace.

Smudged, faltered scribe.

Unspool.

Union of opposites.

Alchemical wedding.

Chasing endlessly for.

Tremulous.

Triangle.

Pierce.

Corner.

Cost of names.

Thread and ash.

Will you pay. Question mark.

Shadows defied the angles of the library.

Somewhere distant.

The sound of a Church-bell chimes.

Voices.

Shrill and indistinct. Rose and fell.

"Do you feel it?"

"What?"

Set in motion.

Fate.

"The book, its asking us"

A maw opened up. Reforming, shifting tides. On the leaves.

And I ask my lovers, "Do you know
Where the desert roses bloom and grow?"
And I ask my lovers, "Do you know
Where the desert roses bloom and grow?"
And I ask my lovers, "Do you know
Where the desert roses bloom and grow?"

Author's Note