And It Was Beautiful…

One night, I went to sleep,
but something beneath the sheets whispered—
a pull, a quiet unraveling,
like the night had teeth, gnawing at the edges of my reality.

I woke up in a dream,
or maybe I had left the dream behind
and stepped into something older, something waiting.

A garden stretched before me,
but the earth was not earth—
it was ink, shifting, breathing,
and the roses bled into the sky.

Crows sat like sentinels,
their beaks carved from silence,
their wings folded like forgotten letters.

I froze.

Not from fear,
but from the feeling that I had been here before,
that my footsteps had already sunk into this soil,
that something in me had been calling this place home.

And then I saw her.

A figure draped in black,
stitched from the night itself,
standing where the horizon folded in on itself.

Death.

She did not speak.
She did not move.
Yet I felt her watching me,
as if she was reading the spaces between my bones.

I walked forward.

Not because I wanted to.
Not because I was called.
But because the wind behind me
whispered that I had no choice.

The closer I came,
the less the world felt real.
The less I felt real.
Like my body was nothing more than borrowed thread,
loosening at the seams.

She lifted her cloak.

And beneath—
not skull,...