writing a picture

i've always wondered about how literature and art are two sides of the same coin. like someone painting a picture of a man and his heart in a passage of words, or a painter telling a shadowed story through brushstrokes. i'm neither a writer nor a painter, but i'm about to give writing a picture my best shot........



In a place far away in time and distance, there are mountains. the air is cold and the wind makes your cloak flutter and flap, and the slanting rain promises a storm; already your skin is cold, almost numb, your fingers in the half-curved clutching gesture that imitates how you tried to strangle him when he told you that he was the traitor, hair billowing yet trapped by your hood, the pain beating at your temples. Your neck is bare, but the whiplash marks from the war make a zigzag pattern,as though the wind would rip your skin off. the mountains loom around you, ice-laden sentinels of the massive grey sky that stretches from the distant shadowy horizon of the steppe-lands to beyond the great mountains that held the fortress of the empire, the central stronghold, as cold and unyielding as you wanted to be before you started living again. you stand there on the edge of a cliff, body battered by the rising arctic wind, eyes glazed over by the sleet and the cruelty that never fades,even after years of being someone other than you. someone with friends and warmth and a heart, not the cold monster you became in the end, when the war was almost lost because of his treachery. treachery that you ordered punished with execution by garrotting, because the sword is too good for blood-deserters. a man who died by your command, by the wish of your vengeance, and after years of trying to reclaim what regret you once had, you feel a stirring of compassion for a soul beyond your control, and you know that one day you might be human again. the war is won, and your people are safe; the enemy was driven into the sea, and you can step behind the throne and breathe out your viciousness where it can hurt no-one; you can luxuriate in feeling forgiveness; you can taste what it means to have a soul.

trisha