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The lights were orange, and Marissa’s proboscis felt heavy in her mouth. Still, images flashed before here eyes, as if the sickness was bringing her one final muse.
No one was around to listen, but if Marissa was to go down, she wanted to sing one last song—one of life and death and peace and war. One of darkness and light and illness and health. A song for the ages—even if the age was long past and the kingdom was dead.
So she took a breath, readying her weary thorax for one last performance. Calling upon memories and knowledge, she began her final song.
Her magnum opus, even if no one was around to hear it.
“The farmer’s wife cooks at the window,
In that small cottage under the willow…
Over the river,
So freezing,
So cold…”
Marissa’s parents were from outside of Hallownest. They had immigrated there for a better life. Her father was indeed a farmer, her mother opting to stay home to take care of her many children.
“In that white house, up on the hill
Where a bug saw a way out, and took it he did.
A family moved in, and I don’t think they know…”
There was no white house in Marissa’s childhood memories, but the images granted to her by the sickness showed her a magnificent palace with a dead king limp on his throne. As for a family… the shadows there writhed.
“And the Lifeblood, it drips just like blood on the leaves,
And the blood on the Goam drips like dew from its teeth,
And the dew in the field falls like petals so sweet
And the petals, they fall and turn brown
At my feet…”
Marissa took another breath, thicker than the last. The orange tint of the lights reminded her of the autumn harvest in her birth country, though she could barely remember it.
“And the rhythms of autumn wash over me…”
A tear slid down her face as she hummed, preparing for her next verse.
“When I return from the city to home,
I pass by the churchyard—he’s standing alone…
That elderly bug whose wife I did know…”
Did she know someone like that? It was hard to think. Marissa focused on the song, coming so easily to her despite never writing it.
“Her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother too,
All sleep side by side beneath the green dew.
That elderly bug thinks that he’ll join them soon…”
Marissa would see her parents in the afterlife, surely. She would soon join them, just like the bug in her song. It was a comforting fact, and one of the reasons she no longer fought the sickness taking hold in her body.
“And the berries, they fall like the knights and their sons,
And the lances, they all miss the Fool when he runs,
And he passes the Shamans who all speak in tongues,
And their little warm hearts beat in fear…
Like a drum…”
Marissa coughed, a sticky warmth coating her throat. But she had to finish the song before she died. Her magnum opus… it must be completed.
She pitched her voice up, sang louder in vain.
“And the night, it draws in like the claw that will fall,
With its scythen black curtain, make tombs of us all.
And the sun’s little visits are starting to shorten,
The village, it lives through the rhythms of autumn!”
Marissa could almost see what she was singing of. Was that what was waiting for her? So reminiscent of home… she wanted to go home. She was running low on air, but she persisted nonetheless.
“And the creatures die at the hand of those who kill,
And the leaves will decay by the winter’s dead chill,
And some will pass on by their own desperate will—
Just like that bug in the white house on the hill!”
Marissa’s breath escaped her, and she collapsed. She couldn’t breathe in anymore, and in her final moments she heard her own voice echo the refrains of her song, each one overlapping the others in a beautifully melancholy melody.
The choruses died out.
As she pulled away from her body, stuck hovering above it in a non-corporeal form, Marissa, even in death, kept singing.
“And the rhythms of autumn wash over me…”
There was no afterlife waiting. Though the orange light brought a final muse, it also brought her death—and the death of so many others. Though she was disillusioned, Marissa still thought her final song was a masterpiece, so she completed her magnum opus post mortem.
“And the rhythms of autumn wash over me.”