TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Arceuil

of less than a touch. Now every line was crisp, every movement measured in a rhythm that could not be repeated upon the return to consciousness. His protector had finally come from beyond dreams, beyond sorrow, and beyond mercy to acknowledge the call of the imagination and the call of blood. At one point, where the darkness that preceded and the darkness that would come again were inwoven, when forms and colors finally crossed, the woman stood above the kneeling captive, who was already intimately devoted to a fantasy as cold as dew on stone. He managed to spread his arms, imitating a book that opens, while the letters slowly fell out of it: Lady Laure, whose path was unmarked by any tracks, strode into his dungeon. Although she wore a burial dress and a shroud that covered her head, her magnificent blond hair, stirred by a stream that seemed to come from within, rippled over her shoulders. Although the fine web of black silk fell across her face, her blue eyes glistered, absorbing the slightest light. Although the hue of bereavement was oppressive, the whiteness of her alabaster skin was unsullied, as if to mock the horrors of the tomb, yet in a way that by no means affronted the power of Thanatos. Although she had risen from the deep, damp grave in a velvet ceremonial robe specially embroidered to meld with her slender body, she was a living illumination, around which all things changed order and adapted to a higher force. The love contained in life, contained in words, could not allow Lady Laure to remain beneath the tyranny of death’s sign, wrapped in a morbid shroud: the eyes that had watched her long ago from a cranny, from a lonely vantage point that was abruptly 91