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Lafrenze sings, Lafrenze prays.
Lafrenze closes her ears to the cries of the dead, lest she be drowned in their thirst for life.
Lafrenze is the final guardian of the gate to Hades, but even she knows not of its secrets.
-
One of these secrets unknown surfaced in midsummer night, when the moon was full and tinged the air of the forest with the colour of lapis lazuli. It was the summer after Alte-Rose had left her for the world beyond, and Lafrenze had long ceased to speak or sing, performing her duties only as a routine. It was hot, it was humid, the cicadas called to each other in thin chirps that formed an undercurrent of noise in Lafrenze’s ears — then as she tramped through the bush to the clearing, it was all gone.
In its wake was a breathless, perspiring maiden that shivered in the sudden cold and silence.
With caution, she proceeded onwards to the clearing — her clearing — as her slender arm pushing aside stray branches and waving off the insects that normally would have swarmed in her line of sight – but tonight they were quiescent (absent, really), and her action merely from force of habit. Azure light filtered through the foliage, and ripples played across the underside of leaves.
Why would there be ripples? Lafrenze didn’t know, the gate had never shown inclination to being any more than just a simple clearing, albeit starkly barren compared to the lush greenery that encircled it.
Nevertheless, she pushed on forward, until she emerged in front of the gate proper. The air felt heavy and damp, making each breath a laborious chore. Eerie azure light illuminated the perfect circle that even the surrounding trees bowed away from, and the two unexpected figures in the centre of it.
Lafrenze had never met anyone apart from Alte-Rose and the dead spirits in the forest, but somehow when this one stranger, a sickly pale man in an elaborate suit that seemed to be woven from the night itself, turned to her with his bone-white baton in hand and a mockery of a smile upon his lips, all caution fled from her and she took a step forward.
She could have sworn that she saw the fluid movement of water eddying back and forth, when she glanced out of the corner of her eyes. Strange, but infinitely less so than this man conducting his ritual, with a girl in an elaborate red and black mask that hid her expression perfectly. The dead girl’s – Lafrenze was sure of this much – red, red mouth moved soundlessly and her golden hair drifted aimlessly, almost as if she was caught in moving water. Her elaborate pink dress was woven with an intricacy fit for the nobles, the likes of which Lafrenze had never known in the forest, and just below the hem a pair of feet visibly swayed a handbreadth above the bare earth.
And if she strained, Lafrenze could have sworn that she heard the strains of a melody sung in a clear soprano, an incongruously cheerful refrain that slipped in and out of her hearing no matter how she tried to catch it.
“My apologies, Fräulein,” the mysterious man – dead, she would have thought him to be dead – said, with his smile patronizing and his baton raised high. “We will only be intruding on your hospitality for a while longer.”
Lafrenze stopped her approach. Even now, when she thinks back upon it, she cannot understand why. Her long-disused voice creaked and wavered in her uncertainty. “Who are you?”
Mocking and cruel, the man graced her with an elegant flick of his baton. “Merely a conductor of stories. Rest assured, Fräulein, we will be soon gone.”
The dismissal was clear and harsh — Lafrenze turned obediently and allowed her feet to take her away from there. She glanced back once, willing her head to turn and her eyes to focus; the only acknowledgement she received was a mere flicker of a glance in her direction before the man returned to whatever he was doing with his masked, singing puppet.
The cruelly mocking smile remains, always does. Lafrenze never saw him again, but the pale perfect smile lingers at the back of her mind, steadily digging its bony fingers into the annals of her memory and leaving an inexplicable sheen of cold sweat on her brow whenever it fought its way to the forefront.
-
Why the events of that night came to her again as she shivered alone at the open gate to Hades, with crimson blooming across her white frock and a curse upon her lips, that is not something she understands either.
But somehow, despite the starkness of the contrast, that was what she thought of when the young boy — dead, dead of course — with white hair and red eyes emerged from the depths of the open gate, laid his small hand on her shoulder and asked, simply, “Fräulein, are you alright?”