Please also note all work is work in progress. See 'apologia'

A Garden of Bright Images

Somewhere between the night and the day is the dawn. This is the time Aurora lives. As the first shaft of sunlight slips though the attic window over dead wasps and bare boards, her room is transformed. The whitewashed walls radiate light, the slatted bed turns velvet and the grey basket of tired, dried, dusty-looking roses is fresh and scented again. The very fragrance of the dew fills the room and for an instant Aurora is there, beautiful and asleep, locked in a wonderful dreamworld enclosed by roses, with no lock to be circumnavigated by her power.
For Aurora is the key to the kingdom, both powerful and vulnerable, and her imprisonment is meant for her own good.

At the other end of the day is dusk, the time when the dark things wake. Ash disturbed a crow as he left the tomb. He took time to watch it wing away towards the plane trees and sighed softly. He liked this time, there was still a little colour left in the world, the green of the grass, the red of the sunset. He stood and watched with pleasure as the light left and the world grew cold and - somehow - older.
Ash is lean and pale, he rarely feeds the demon he inhabits. It is not the killing that disturbs him, it is the loss of control. Vampires are a mixture of human and beast, and with every murder they perform a little more intelligence burns away. Ash likes his intelligence, which has always been formidable and is now all there is of the man he once was.
But tonight he must eat, or he will soon be rabid, and that he truly reviles. To wake and not know. He sighs softly again and picks his way across the graveyard, avoiding the gaze of marble angels and cruciform shadows of as best he can. He has a victim in mind, and the world will be a better place for the loss. Coldly, intelligently, he reminds himself.

Aurora is dreaming of her garden. Her body may await the dawn to exist, but her mind is as happy with it's roses as it has been all her youth. She handles the plants gently, strokes the velvet petals, breathes in the heavy scent. The sun is warm on her milky skin and the fragrant flowers, white and red on the same bush, are glorious as only living things can be. In the walled garden briar roses of pale pink and white have climbed from tree to tree to form bridges and curtains as they could only do in the story - books that Aurora has never read. Aurora doesn't feel lonely, doesn't feel she is alone. Aurora knows no differently than to think she grew here, a human sister of the flowers, and as quietly content.

Ash drops his prey into the gutter where it belongs, feeling sated and yet more hollow than when he began. The girl, his victim's victim, is huddled rigid with panic in a noisome doorway that wouldn't be adequate shelter from a light breeze. He disdains to look at it as he leaves, neither expects or receives gratitiude and is two streets away by the time the screaming starts.
He returned to his tomb. It was cold and hard and the walls were too close together. But it is his tomb and seems to welcome him in. He curled up in it and slept. An empty sleep, with only one dream as the first sunlight touched his door. A dream of wheels, of iron and concrete and the relief of a warm fire at the end of the day when a person is tired, of the human world he has near forgotten.
To Aurora such dreams are as nightmares - for Aurora too dreams of reality in the few seconds that she lives. Dreams not of her garden but of things like her and a world of those things, of iron wheels and a hard ground and blood. A grey cruel world. Aurora dreads these dreams, these brief snatches of time, and yet finds them strangely compelling. They echo to something in her soul and for a short time after she will wander among her flowers feeling tainted and unfit.

Something is wrong. Ash has woken in an alley and the new day is already closing in. He cannot remember having left his tomb or fallen asleep and his senses still feel drugged. Dimly he realises his prey must have taken something intoxicating. He cannot get home. Instead he trawls roads and alleys looking for an open door. The first he finds is a shop back, receiving deliveries, and he creeps inside. There are people on the lower floors and he slips past their doors gently, determined to find an attic or storehouse and wait till nightfall..
He finds an attic, dusty and bare, and sits below the window, his back to it, to escape the rising light. It is a small window and only a single shaft of light is thrown on the wall opposite. And yet as this feeble beam illuminates the small room he sees roses bloom within it and the figure of a girl - a young woman as still as the dead and dressed in red and white - appear on the thin bed.
Not even the sunlight can keep him from creeping to her side to take her hand. Her skin is as pale as his own and as gorgeously scented as the roses that bloom on her bosom. He draws her hand towards his lips as though to kiss it, but the warmth of her skin is like velvet and dark thoughts flutter.
Aurora is dreaming now of a huge wheel of shaped wood. Wood no longer alive but, she realises, fashioned. Faint and unfamiliar memories, those that often visited her in these dreams, were taking clearer shape under this revelation. Why did she feel as though she had forgotten who she was? Curious, Aurora reached her hand towards the wheel.
Ash has closed his eyes now, letting the sensation fill his head till he cannot think, only feel. His instincts are not those of a human. He must bite, draw blood.
The shock of pain reached Aurora through her dream, she recoiled from the wheel, staring in horror at the wound on her hand, the swelling blood. Instinctively she put her hand to her mouth to clean it. The taste of her own blood is the last thing she knows before she fades out of reality.
As the girl's hand evaporates from his grasp Ash returns to his senses, squealing and recoiling from the sunlight to hide behind the bed where there is shadow. The girl is gone but his head is still full of emotions that frighten him and he resolves that he will not stay here the day - he will wait only until the sun begins to descend again. He could bear it no longer.
Once more in the brightness of her garden Aurora's head is filled with strange thoughts. Her hand still pains her, a red mark left on her wrist. At first she ignores these things and wanders the walks of her garden to calm herself but even this is changed; the roses pure white, heavy and damped with dew as though they wish to weep. She peers at them curiously and for the first time wonders why she's never been harmed by the thorns. Almost frightened now she tries the experiment and finds she cannot hurt herself. Stifled and confused she continues her walk around her world, increasingly convinced that it is not real. Not as real as the blood, or as real as these odd thoughts of the other world that kept speaking to her.
She asks herself why the hedges are so high, and what might lay on the other side that she cannot see. She knows from experience that walking into the hedges is like walking into a pillow and yet she tries again, desperate now to wake. Something in her blood calling her on. She cares not what the cost might be.
The women are pleased, the wheel spins. Aurora wakes.

Ash was just returning to his tomb, tired with avoiding the late evening sun. It feels curious to return home at this time. Small things he had forgotten push themselves on his attention, the cobwebs in the grass or the foot of his doorway with the carved lilies, like grey ghosts or whispers of the real thing. He seated himself among them to watch the sun go down.
Aurora walked softly through the graveyard, careful, as if she were afraid of disturbing someone. Her tread so light that he barely heard her and yet he felt his body shiver in response to the sound. His blood seemed to rise and though he had no heart yet he could hear that too, a dead thing like the earth beneath his feet yet pounding fit to suffocate him.