The feeling of loss is many things.

It’s the empty echo in your chest as you blankly stare. It’s the roll of your throat as you gag on sobs and muffled keens. It’s the shredded voice that rips through your mouth and bounces across the room.

It’s limp, open hands as they lay palm up on your legs. It’s the bite of your nails as they leave bloody crescent marks on your soft hands as they shake and tremble. It’s the ache of pounding your fists against the wooden table and cement floor.

It’s the way that you know, for loss is full of emptiness, pain, and despair.

Bravery is not being fearless. To be fearless is to be reckless, for when you should fear a storm, a lack of fear would be the end.

Bravery is not ‘gathering courage’ before going if to face the battle.

I have never truly put stock on bravery.

But I feel that it’s not simple.

It’s knowing your afraid but striding towards. It’s determination blended with unwavering certainty and the most important thing. To understand that you are not the only one on the line.

For what would be the consequences? Would you take them all on? Because you are not the only one affected by them.

You would become Atlas. Taking the karma and consequences given, for the ones who believed in you and trusted you.

Bravery is not something to be identified, nor idolized. For those with bravery, know the most of what they should fear.

Trapped. You wander the halls. It’s silent, your steps do not echo. You feel inverted, like you are not in the real world, everything is in shades of grey, like something took the life out of it all.

You steadily pace towards the balcony overlooking the dreary ballroom. It’s big enough that you can’t see the ceiling, only the moonlight through the gaping holes drapes around the room.

You breath in and out, a silvery mist exiting you a cooling lazily upwards. A faint wind stirs the still room. The curtains waved languidly while cobwebs held firm rocking back and forth in the dilapidated area.

You grip the banister. Everything seems to stop before your take a breath in-

CRUNCH

The banister was crumpled from where you grabbed it.

You felt a faint sting in your hand before your sense of touch went back to the numb feeling of static running through you.

You brought your palm up to your face as a strip of moonlight cut through the dark illuminating your eyes and face.

You inspect the pale grey skin that is smeared with black. You know it’s blood.

Your see a glint in the far corner and slowly cocked your head to the left.

There was a mirror, cracked and broken, scattered pieces littering the ground and glinting when viewed in the right lighting.

You slowly stalked towards the lingering reminder. Glass crunched under your feet as you came up to it.

It looked to have been a beauty in the past, it still was, but now where it would have stood proud, framed in ivory and silver, ebony and charcoal, it looked like it was hollowed out. A lingering feeling of melancholy and despondence. Cracks were spread through it from a hole in the top right corner. Warping the reflection.

And you were there, Warped and twisted, how poetic. You were there with your black styled hair and slight stubble on grey skin, with eyes a starless void sunken on the face of something dead.

For that’s what you are. Your torn dress shirt and suit jacket say all. The rips and tears, with black Ichor oozing from them, littered your body like a map of roads. But to follow them, would lead you there.

There! The place, the nowhere, the other, the in between, the gateway, the past, the present, the future, and the before. The place where the void howls and chaos is order, and order chaos. It likes the appearance of a mansion. One with spires of steel and walls of stone.

You drag your finger up, up, up. You trace the mirror, almost able to see a better time. In your mind, the scene behind you was different, full of parties and others talking, and-

...

Them...

You should hate them. They trapped you here. Wandering since the end, and until the beginning. To the left to arrive to the right. Right was wrong and wrong was backwards. Nothing is something, all for you.

I walked through the ruins of Stonehenge. The night was silent and the moon full above my head. A chilly wind blew by, ruffling the leaves from the ground, the crisp sound echoing.

A faint smile graced my face as I glided past the stones. Memories of ceremonies and party’s floated through my mind, before being slowly forgotten.

I breathed a mouthful of the open air as I left.

I was back. I don’t know why. But I am a moth and the ruins are the light. Dragging me, leading me, guiding me, to places where I never see anyone but my shadows.

They have always been there for you, I know it’s true, But they know things, Do you know them too?

You trust them, But should you? They laugh and talk, They speak with you, You tell them everything you do,

But watch them whisper, Out of sight, On this dark and quiet night, And as you sleep in your room, They taunt and scream horrid things to you,

Now they laugh and mock, They have gone amok, They jeer and howl, But that’s all right, They’re not real, ...right?