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There has never been- and will only be in the last great death- a real concept of silence. It simply does not exist.
A heart will beat to flood the ears with blood in which to sense that false silence. Air will move. Feet will make contact with other things to continue the push ever onwards. Something will cause the illusion to snap.
Still, Tina believes she’s gotten as close as she can be to the real thing.
All around her the impossibility of silence lingers like a deep regret. It hangs on the windless atmosphere, brought to stillness. Silence imposes itself onto storefronts and restaurants so utterly abandoned they cannot build dust.
There are no spiders to make cobwebs. The meat in the butcher rots solely in fungi and lichen, as all the maggots have gone and took the buzz of the flies with them. The people have long since committed their homes and livelihoods to nought, having left their belongings where they lay. Not a bird chirps, or a cricket sings. There are none left to do so.
Tina stumbles through the empty city with a heart that has forgotten how to be afraid. A heart pulled b the gravitational tug of a princess past.
As she creeps closer to the stalwart citadel at the center of the city, the castle, and perhaps even the country itself, her mission renews its dire straits. The importance of her work strung along each climbing, thorn sharp vine of rose bush. The smallest vines about the size of her wrist, the largest twice her height or more.
Tina can’t help but pause. Giving a good, long, meditative look to all the rosebuds larger than her entire face. Perfect shades of pink and red. Unblemished and untarnished.
All the brairs link in chains to spread, like mold or disease, out from the tower piercing the horizon above her. Tina has to break into the heart of this dull expanse, and dig the bush out by the roots.
For Tina was a wanderer. She left home, returning all but once or twice a year and paying for her absence in trinkets and stories. Family members died, children were born, marriages were held. She was there for none of them. Banished by a love she could not afford to keep.
So when the curse came down like lightning, Tina was spared. She was nowhere near the crash site. Thus, her duty is to undo what has been done. Break the spell she was wrongly exempted from. She has to save her homeland from whatever wrath it has incurred.
No one with the knowledge is around to explain what happened. An entire city simply fell off the map one day, and all their neighbors had nothing but gossip and glimpses of these beautiful roses to gather testimony.
Soldiers came. When they died, the surrounding powers sent sorcerers. Then mercenaries. Then, a white flag was planted.
They all died at the gate. Or, that is what is told. It’s more like each enterprising savior was lost in action and presumed dust.
But Tina? She is equipped for the task simply by her failure to be ensnared by it. She’s from here. She knows what to do. She knows who’s calling her because she recognizes the invisible threads of longing tying her to a girl she even allowed to see.
Tina is a local. She knows to always turn left at Tomson’s Bakery because the spinster at the end of the street will always insist on playing cards if you pass. She knows the shortcut on top of old Ms Tempski’s house that saves you a whole two blocks. Turn right at the Thomas Brother’s grocery store. Take the bridge named after King Tyrone. If present, thank Timothy at the draw bridge.
If she had it left in her, Tina would be taken aback by the fact Timothy is no longer at the drawbridge. Instead she walks on.
It takes some time, but eventually her feet land between giant stalks of thorny roses choking out the ground beneath the castle. The shadows of the afternoon paradoxically making the plants thrive.
Entire top half of the grand, ornate gateway has been snapped in half by rose veins wider than she is tall. The discarded wood laying in thin splinters on the ground, the only sign of movement she’s seen so far.
Tina yanks at the faded handles with her full might. Until, finally, the old wooden doors pop open with a large, rusty crack. When her eyes adjust to the shifting light, Tina nearly jumps out of her skin. She screams before the sound gets knocked out of her by her fall.
As she crawls backward on her hands, away from where she feel, she sees hallways are cluttered with humans and animals stacked to the ceilings. The entire entry way is choked with row after row of bodies, sloping to create one thin strip of walk space in the middle.
Every citizen, every insect, all the livestock and pets, all have convened here. Summoned by something arcane and wicked.
The ones at the bottom of the pile are dead but can’t rot, she notices with utter horror. The deep lividity gives away who was crushed and who could, if the curse was broken, wake up. Tina continues screaming. Nothing, not even the birds, are awake to hear.
It’s death without a stench. Time without decay to match. It’s silence, as close to reality as it can be made, pure and true.
Tina’s heart has relearned fear by now. It has remembered terror, and is already accustomed to its brutal grip. But she knows what she has to do. She can hear the memory of her forbidden lover beat within her heart.
Crying now, seeing faces of familiar strangers, Tina shakily stands up. She dusts the dirt off her clothes, swipes her sleeve over her dripping nose with a sob.
Tina walks forward. Shimming sideways through the impossibly still hallway of undead. Radiating a sickening heat and suffocating chill, where life and death meet. The impossibility of it all curls together like smoke and clogs the air.
The long hallway, with walls plastered in people and thick veins of roses, is only accessible by the thinnest path of flooring. Tina bravely, sobbing and afraid, scoots between the terrible mass of meat.
Odd limbs poke against her own. Stray nails and teeth scratch her as she passes. Tina can hardly breathe. Part of her doesn’t want to.
Eventually, the long hallway of horrors gives way to a throne room of a grander terror. The heart of the curse, the epicenter of imposed silence.
The throne room is filled with people up to the ceiling. The corpses on the bottom twisted, purple, and bloating where they aren’t pressed flat. The sleepers on the top are coated in dust. To fill the gaps between individuals lies animals of all sizes. Every pet, every piece of livestock, every wild thing. Small children lay haunted next to deer where the curse compelled them to throw their flesh down.
At the apex of the mountain, untouched by the mass of bodies below as if sheltered by an invisible force, is the girl Tina once had the honor to hold. Hands and claws reach up toward her but coming inches away from the hem of her elaborate gown.
The princess on the throne has remained so still her arms are coated in patterns of seasonal sun burns, so accurate they could be used as a calendar of the years she spent this way. Her eyes sealed shut with sleeping crust, her mouth lightly parted open leaving her lips chapped to scabs and teeth yellow and rotten.
Her dress has languished with enough time to cement it solid and still, the red fabric sunfaded and thin. Her wavy brown hair thick with oil, gluing her golden crown to her head. The roses grow out of her temples like antlers that reach out with a weight that would kill her if she moved.
If she wasn’t so overgrown with signs of life Tina would presume her dead. Everyone else has been maintained to an extent, but the princess in her golden chair has spoiled in her sleep.
Princess Hannah Rose’s chest moves ever so lightly as she breathes. Upon noticing the impossible movement, Tina takes a step back.
The absurdity of the sight creates a beauty never to be replicated or replaced. This scene will only ever exist in Tina’s eyes and live solely in her memory. Nothing could ever capture the bizarre, gross beauty of Hannah and her unconscious mountain range of flesh and total stillness. Not an army of painters or a legion of authors.
It’s a horror beyond the workings of humanity. This scare belongs solely to magic, unruly and inevitable. Humans will all fail.
Tina steps forward, toeing away limbs in various stages. She, up turning her nose, begins her ascent through the pile.
Tina is forced to crawl through the wreckage of bodies. She has no choice but to press through the sound of smaller things snapping beneath her, bones and claws. Flesh squishes down from her weight. There is no sound other than her own to match the pain.
In a distant life, before curses and distance, were two girls. Young and looking for ways to develop scars and crooked noses.
Hannah was the rebellious princess looking for an escape, and Tina was the wanderer searching for the same. They spent their teenage years as the capital cities most unrespected cartographers. Together they mapped out every nook and cranny and labeled them all with pretentious names as was humorous to them at the time.
They were each other’s first kiss and greatest secret. When the queen found out, Tina had to flee.
She still remembers Hannah’s face when she was forced to say goodbye. The tears, the wrinkles in her nose where she scrunched up her face, the skin on her knuckles splitting as she held her skirt that tightly.
Tina remembers so vividly how Hannah tasted like flowers and sweat, like a daydream tied into a human body. As she pulls her weight further up the pile of bodies, that taste lingers like a phantom on her tongue.
Finally, with great excursion and a greater pain, Tina ascends to the threshold of Hannah’s ring of untouched rotting.
Tina steps over sunburned hands reaching out to grasp their acursed heiress. She steps as close to Hannah as anyone has been in several years.
Hannah breathes so shallowly that Tina is sure the curse is deflating her lungs. Only magic is keeping her alive now. The magic that silenced the whole city.
The briars branching out of Hannah’s head seem to contort in the presence of another moving thing, as if recoiling from the sound of Tina’s very existence.
“Hannah?” she says.
Her voice, though small, shocks the outstretched green arms of the curse. The great green turns brown, struggling to affix itself back to rightness. It tries to outgrow the vibrations of the sound waves. It begins to fail.
She has climbed the mountain. Tina will break the silence.
“Hannah!” Tina screams, watching the roses wilt at the sound, “Han, you have to wake up. You need to wake up!”
Hannah does not stir. Even as the vines continue to twist as Tina continues to scream, the spoiled fruit formally named as princess lies still.
Tina notices that, off to the side of the throne, the decorative swords on the wall have been consumed by the roses. Except, one handle still sticks out.
She smiles at the beautiful dull hilt of this unusual Excalibur. This will set the kingdom free. This will cut Hannah away from the parasitic growth blooming from her temples.
With much struggle, the climb begins. She scrambles up the browning thorns. She winces as they slice her skin, carelessly bleeding over the plant life as she races toward the sword embedded inside.
It is only on the apex of the thorns does Tina truly get to appreciate the shear amount of people in this room. It seems impossible. She is watching it exist in the realm of possibility.
The sword, unable to rust in the total stillness, does not break the trend as Tina clambers up to it. She yanks, and she yanks. It takes a good ten minutes of sweaty labor to rip apart enough stem to set the metal free. It takes another five minutes to get back onto the dias without breaking her ankles.
Hannah’s chest moves with the delicacy of something too fragile to have a rib cage. Tina wonders if sitting here too long has done irreversible damage to her body. She wonders if Hannah will ever be ok, if the kingdom can recover.
Tina raises her sword as her body trembles with blood, sweat, and the various marks of struggle.
With the mighty arc of an untrained swordsman, Tina beheads the roses one by one. Severing both ginormous branches from Hannah’s head with a modest amount of incompetence. At least she didn’t nick Han.
The deflated roses crumble into dried up plant matter. Filling what seems to be the whole world in the scent of rotting flowers.
Tina looks to Hannah for signs of victory. The sleeping princess doesn’t move.
Instead, the cacophony of stirring life fills Tina’s throat with bile. She twists around to see the sleepers awake to the worst waking nightmare.
Animals cry out in pain, in confusion, in anger. People scream and children weep. Voices upon voices piling ontop of the pile. It sounds like hell. It is hell. Collective heartbeats race like the drums of devils marching into war.
In the rush to escape the mountain of bodies, bones shatter. Confusion reigns as those in the middle of the mass cry out in agony. The sounds echo in from the hallways of the castle too, probably being elevated on the wind from here to the distant sea.
Tina wouldn’t even know how to begin extraction. Rescuing these people seems an insurmountable obstacle. She wouldn’t know how to organize aid, or even find a doctor among the mass.
Tina looks back towards Hannah to find her eyes half open, the physical weight of the crust built upon them too much to bare.
“Hannah! Hannah, wake up. It’s me. It’s Tina,” she rambles, wiping the sleeping muck from the freshly awakened princess.
Hannah doesn’t even look at her. Instead, she gazes past with eyes glazed over from exhaustion at the fleshy pile of screaming just over Tina’s shoulder. Her face doesn’t even flinch, her mind too far from her body to even process the sight.
She is so out of it where this probably feels like an extra layer of whatever dream she has been trapped in for all this time.
Tina’s eyes prick with renewed tears, and the irritation of crying all this time has made the sensation like the pin pricks of needles.
Hannah, a zombie coated in her own sleepful filth, reaches out to weakly grasp Tina’s hand with wildly overgrown nails. Tina grasps it firmly.
The silence, as false as it ever was, hangs like a noose between them as hapless civilians squirm out of the throne room.
Those not squished by the weight or trampled by man or beast have all left now. Leaving corpses at last allowed to rot. Flies move in. Tina never thought she’d view that as salvation.