Devil's Ivy

With deft hands, and the self-same, self-aggrandizing, impersonal, mannerism that typified one to be in the medical profession, Cynder observed, through drug behazed-and deceptive eyes, the man whose true christening she knew not, but had in silence given him the moniker of Serpent, due to the fact that he was obstinately of some Asian origin, for the eyes that graced his visage possessed the subtle, graceful, feline upsweep, typical of the Asians, and arguably one of their most defining and striking features of their race. The eyes were somewhat slanted, and whether it occurred by misfortune at birth, or self-infliction, the flesh upon his eyelids was slightly raised in perfect semi-circles, resembling scales of a serpent that possessed venom most potent. Cynder stirred slightly as he ran an idle, autumn-scented finger across her locks, lifting gossamer, sweat be soaked strands of her hair from her forehead, which had previously clung to her furrowed brow like the tattered web of a sullen dream spider.

Serpent produced, from the open, honest face of burnished silver tea service tray, a tourniquet. It had clearly been previously put to use, as the once lustrous, opaque surface, once a pallid alabaster, had yellowed slightly, rather like the hue book pages turn when beset by a colony of mildew and stale air, and flecked with crimson, as if an exasperated artist had flung his paintbrush down across the length of the room in sudden rage, and the bristles had given the tourniquet a butterfly kiss. With the brusque manner of a doctor more interested in seeing to the health of his wallet, rather than that of his patients, he encircled Cynder's forearm with the aged tourniquet, tying it off just above the midnight shadow that had become her arm from severe bruising. Tiny crimson pinpricks, like banked coals flaring briefly to life, were spaced here and there, as though they were red marbles cast wantonly from a giants hand, to spin in lazy circles and at last come to a halt where they may.

The tiny pinpricks had a green tinge about them, and with each subtle flex of her arm, they oozed and wept jade afresh. Serpent once more turned to the tea service tray, and produced a vial filled with a rich hue of amber, a thin coat of fabric placed over its neck and secured with an aging cork. Titling the vial at an angle that might have been considered a questioning head tilt, were it human, he inserted a clean syringe into the cloth, titling the vial a tad more, his thumb firmly compressing the top of the syringe until it had withdrawn all of the vials contents it could in good faith hold. That minor task completed and as swiftly forgotten as a dream upon waking, he eased his hold on the top slightly, allowing a healthy stream of liquid to spurt erratically airborne in an ominous manner. It was then that he drew closer to Cynder, who sat in a dental-like chair, hands cuffed to the leather arms. If he took note of how her heart rate increased so dramatically that it caused her shirt to undulate, and the EKG monitors to squeal sputtering protest, lines arching in madcap peaks and spirals, he chose not to notice.

He took even less note of the barely perceptible, denying headshake he received from Cynder as he eased a peculiar looking writing utensil in her hand, blown of glass, with an almost decorative sphere at the top. Yet it, like most of the instruments to be found in this particular laboratory, possessed a far more sinister purpose. Serpent laid ten clean pieces of paper upon the small metal table beside Cynder, whose cuffs just barely achieved the minute space between the chair and the table. It was then that he deftly inserted the syringe into her arm, despite her bared teeth and the flames that danced within her eyes. Serpent allowed himself a mental congratulatory pat on the back as he watched the amber liquid ebb away into her bloodstream. Cynder inhaled sharply, her breathing laborious and agony filled. Her head spasmed in a violent upward arc, and her gaze lost its clarity as her eyes rolled leisurely back, like tourists suddenly bored of one room of a historical feature suddenly moving on to the next.

The flames fair sang with their freedom, they capered in the void breath of the wind, coloring the air with their brief of hoary smoke as they erupted from her fingertips and outreached palms, like fallow gold and crimson vengeful hawks. Flames, once smoldering sullenly within her eyes, burst forth from their confinement, and soon the flames within her eyes hastened into reality, and leapt upward in a lissome, graceful dance, to join the other liberated conflagrations. The gossamer bauble at the zenith of the pen, thought to be mere direction by anyone with an unkeen eye, swiftly filled with smoke, and then flame. Only then did Cynder begin to write, willess as a being brought back from the slumber of death into the realm of the living, and foreign words were birthed onto the pristine, virgin papers, their wedding gowns flames, their offspring a veil of smoke as the words burned themselves onto the paper.

Each inhalation of blessed air tasted acrid and sulfurous on her tongue, the flames rolling down her classic peaches and cream complexion like gold and crimson raindrops cascading down a gutter, while casting secrets within the embrace of shadows on the walls into sharp relief, their own shapes indistinct, always metamorphisising into something of, yet not quite, reality, between the drawing of one breath and the next. Then, just as fleeting as a somber downpour in the summer season, the flames withdrew like a reluctant butterfly enfolding itself back into the familiar confines of its cocoon, back within the slip of the girl, leaving only the languid dance of smoke and the acrid tang of memories to occupy the quarters of despair. Just as visible, yet latent, was the sudden crest of exhaustion that loomed over Cynder, and she bore resigned witness to the darkness that rose on feet as light as hunting cat's to drag her down.

Cynder woke to hushed voices and vague black shapes hovering all round. Full awareness slipped away from her quick as an elusive eel. Only short snatches of dialogue pierced her comprehension, brief and as aching tangible as white noise on the radio. The one thing that was as clear as exclamation points being pressed into her line of sight and into her ears was the tiny catapult of suicidal amber liquid as it danced its way into the atmosphere. It's birth was not celebrated or met with any vague emotion, other than fear and a sudden, all consuming rage, the same kind of forgetful destruction that flames create, burning within her mind.

So it was that Cynder only just managed to force the wicked-looking sycthe shape of her writing untensil into the slender keyhole of the restraining handcuffs. After several minutes that even the most dim observer could surmise she couldn't really afford to spare to the sands of time, and many deft, subtle wists of her finger tips and wrist, the satisfying snicket, though inaudbile, of inner mechanisms releasing. Baring her teeth the feral grimace of a ware beast of the woods, she brought her left wrist forward, plunging the blown-glass pen into the white lab coat, unfettered by wrinkles or stains, that Serpent so much to miam or kill, but merely a weary, desperate, mind's last-ditch effort to aucualize small fragments of thought into a reckless delay tactic. It worked, momentarily. For Serpent was momentarily taken aback, and even more so when Cynder bypassed him in a speclacular sprint, that brought her perilously near to the glass shelves that held the precious vials of amber liquid.

Between the drawing of one breath and the next, Cynder had seized hold of the splintered end of a once serviceable broom handle, and, expending far more engery than she, in reality, had, she swung the broom handle into the lustrus gleam of the shelves, which gleamed as pallidly and as slick as the gums of some primordial beast startled in mid-yawn. The arc of the handle was much like the sideways caper of a baseball bat, held by an all-star batter in the last few minutes of a championship game. The glass bent and wavered, rather like a pond's water's upon being troubled by an autumn breeze, and then cracked and gave sway with a horrendous shriek. The vivals themselves served as percussion in the symphony of shattering dreams and cracking glass. Then, as though elated with newly granted freedom, the amber slunk down the ledge of the broken shelves, as swiftly as a bereated cur.

Cynder was so caught up in her beserker-like, manical elation at the cause of her woe ebbing away, she was never aware of Serpent coming up behind her, nor felt the brief buzz of the eletrical current of the shocker as he brought it down with irrated fury and finality. "We all have to make sacrifces," he commented dryly, as her caught her swiftly deflating form, until she lay half supine in his embrace. Mentally, Cynder recoiled as her own phrase she so often used to justify her actions were so callously tossed back to her. Then, just as her muscles relaxed completely and her mind took leave of rhyme or reason, a single thought flew with the greatest urgency to anyone who may inclined to listen; Jade.

Several miles away, just as the old grandfather clock faithfully tolled the hour to weary hearts and ears, Jade, lost in dream shadows- the space between when one hovers between realms with a single foot placed on the threshold of wakefulness and dreams, in hopes of catching even a single thought fragment from his errant and lost sibling, Cynder, he became aware of an urgent nudge from within, as though another's thoughts rapped for sactuary on the chamber door of his mind. With the deft ease of a languid dragon awakening at the scuff of a knight's iron feet on the barren shale of his cave, Jade gave an idle prod of the thought with a mental finger smelling of summer and a vague undertone of woodsmoke. The results were similar as if he'd stuck a wet finger into an electric outlet. A thrill borne of shock and joy and fretfulness raced up and down his spine, as if his emotions were currently using it to play an Xeniphone.