DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
The sough of the wind chattered the branches, carrying a memory. His name? His story? His love? For a love he must have had once. So said the ring encircling his finger, which encircled the roots of the forest bed, which was his bed, among the snow and moss and earth.
Who was that love? The memory carried by the wind was too high, too agile, too fickle, too unwilling to reveal its secrets, content in eluding him, until it bored of that and the forest was silent again.
That silence did not leave a space for his mind to discover what the wind had teased. It only enlisted a weight upon his eyelids to bring him to slumber.
He closed his eyes, for it was all he could do. His dreams were dark. A starless sky. A cave. A well. At the bottom of that well shone a coin, golden like the metal on his finger, what imagery stamped upon it too fine to decipher. He swam through the pitch and reached out what he imagined was his hand, for he could not see it either, waiting for his fingers to occlude the coin and then the sensation of its surface to manifest. Such a small thing could buy so much. He felt his mouth salivating at the thought of the feast it could yield. Mutton and bread and cheese washed down by sweet mead, which he would slam down on the table to demand more, more, more. And there would be a woman. His love? No, for she was laden in bruises makeup couldn’t cover, though cover it she tried, even angling her body in such a way to favor her unblemished side to the firelight.
This coin could buy flesh, and he wasn’t a choosy man, not yet, not until he found his love. Tonight was not for love, and he hungered for what love was not. He took her hand and stood, and with a turn of her head she showed him a hoop in her ear, polished to the coin’s luster. He reached for it, but could not grasp it, instead pulled stumbling up the stairs by the woman, who deposited him in a room as dark as a cave.
Blind as he was, he probed the darkness for a hint of wall or anything. Nothing he felt, but something he saw. The elusive color tuned to the sound of the wind. He lunged for it and found a shuttered window where a golden orb gleamed. The coin, he thought at first, but his fingers went through as if it were a ring. A knothole, he found, splinters as well, and through that knothole shone the sun. He threw open the window to find anything but the sun. Darkness is what he saw, but at its core lay that coin, that permanent fixture of his madness, still out of reach.
Still, he reached. He crawled. Hands and knees pressed against stone, cut into them. Jagged and fierce, it rent his flesh, yet still he pressed on, his eye on the prize, because love could wound him more than stone.
Walls rose, so he stood, blood trickling into his boots, which gripped the stone well enough, rooted him, nearly. Careful steps he took, gaze flicking to the ground as if he could see it, until he heard the hammer and clink and eventual clatter of what could only be iron to stone.
Something did occlude the coin then. Something hunched and ragged with a crude swathe of ink set over its shoulder only to blur before he could make sense of it. A creature, a trial, to prove his worthiness of what he knew he had already won. His finger lay absent of that, but of course it did, him having yet to conquer what stood before him, seething with its weapon ready to feed on something more substantial than teeth of rock.
He charged forward with a bellow, his only weapon, and the creature did stir, did take notice, but lash out at him it did not. It eclipsed what could only be the cave’s entrance, as if to steal his prize, to never attain what mystery the wind sang.
A gasp broke through his shout as his hands took hold, and another glimmer hovered in the dark, a ring encircling a finger, catching what little light remained, and it would be his. He let his hands do the work, bringing this creature to its end before its blade found him. When his strength was spent, he looked again to be sure he had won, and there, staring back was a tooth in a maw with no others because he had taken them with his fist, silver as the moon in a starless sky.
He saw just that, then the moon itself faded away, and he was left with the sough of the wind tuned to a chime hanging from the eave of a cottage of a dead man at the edge of a lake near a forest with twisted roots that whispered through undulating soil like maggots just below the surface, feeding on the rotten flesh hidden by the skin of the earth.
He followed the whispers, as he had followed so many things, first at the bottom of a well, then in a chamber of lust, through a cave with a beast that was but a toothless man who had perished from his touch.
When his eyes opened he wanted to close them again, for he knew now why he was here. His ring was no ring to represent his love, for he had none. The forest told him what the wind had not, whispering his deeds now that he was close enough to hear them, consumed by the roots to the waist. For he was not a man of love, the ring a trinket taken from a man who had loved.
He closed his eyes, for it was all he could do.
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