i can go and feel unknown ; : oneshot

[ghosty]

CHRYSANTHEMUM

You did not feel the rustle of the wind which slowly blew the leaves around where you sat; instead, the pages of the book take you to where you did not know where the wind did not blow. You didn't hate the wind, no, but it's an ignorance which only merely infuriated you. But you didn't notice it today, for the book  was a sponge, drawing all your attention into and, squeezing it into it's pages. 

(You were a princess, in a desert. Sand for the miles around you, and you were alone, alone except with the ghost white steed which you stole in the middle of the night from your Papa. You did not remember why you stole it, but it was important, and your knight was waiting. You knew it, no matter what anyone told you.

"Gold-smoked hair and a smile," was the only thing you whispered, and the white toothed smile you recognized, but not your own, beamed. There was a castle morphing from the skyline, and yet, you felt regret; the slow regretful back-tracking, back to the-)

Back to the world which you hated as your own. You felt the urge to explore, despite the fences around the districts you called your own was a cage, slowly tightening around the wings of a bird yet to take flight. The book ended before the thoughts wandered down a well-worn path. A sigh leaked from behind your lips, and the barely past midday sun twinkles about where you sat.

You were a bird, perched in tree - as natural in a place like this is. Yes, you knew it was a forest-- not the ethereal kind which you oh so adored in the fairy tales which you desired. The ones covered in thick pale fog below the full moon, wolves howling, echoing all around. Open, wild, free. This, was completely different no matter how you tried to process it. 

(Nightmares of birds in cages struck you now; you know the pain, dreams of taking flight quelled through nothing more than metal vices pulling tighter, tighter and tighter- they strangle until you are blue and dying, until the warming cold arms of death, where-)

Where you'd finally be free away from everything which holds you back. Nightmares used to terrify you, but no longer- they liberate. After all, nightmares is the hell which you most fear. And fear, well that is the highest emotion. Most raw. And it's the one you most yearn. Death, that was what scared you most, yet you sat among the trees where wind could push and you'd fall and land inside the arms of the man in black, inside the carriage of the headless horseman. Into the maw of the unknown. 

(The games, the ones which you were forced to watch. They were the nightmares you truly feared. But they were freedom to you. They were the stories which were true and could see. You remembered one, a mythical green place which your stories seem to point to. That was nothing but a dream to you.

It was a  manifestation towards somewhere where you dreamed that a knight would appear and take you away to an adventure, to a place you've never been. There was a difference though, between that of your stories, and that of the arena- one, well, was sugar-dusted in rose petals; the other, splattered with rich crimson, like-)

Like the evening sky, just to drop into night. When the stars just start to appear against the slowly darkening backdrop. Twinkling as they go; and you, you wished to be free, just like they are. Up above where nothing can even interrupt or where they don't notice. The tree you're perched in is the nearest that you have ever got to them, and oh did you so want to go up there and lay among them.

People have always called you a dreamer, and how right where they. Yet nightmares, they're the ones which stick with you-

(If the green land was a paradise; then the games just passed, well, that was a hell if ever you saw one. Fear was what you felt, and only fear. Nightmares laid out in front of a screen, where the doomed fought for the end. Nightmares were meant to be fake, in a place where nothing could ever really happen, right? Wrong, it's the place-)

It's the place where the worst truths come to pass, and you- well, you feared the truth the most. Books that you read held only fiction; where nothing was ever going to happen. Still you wished it was. Nightmares, they were the thing that you needed to experience, and you, well, it wasn't a hell or a nightmare you were in.

A cage was what you were locked in, and you wished for nothing more than a key, a path to escape, and a steed that could carry you for miles away from anyone.

But most of all, what you wanted was a knight, gleaming armor and all. 

(From down the wind, you heard Papa's voice, "Princess? Where are you, my princess?" You sigh.)

And what is a princess without a knight? 

A disappointment.