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         Isuara looked up at the dark sloping roof of the stone-walled room and the silence was finally broken. A horrifying roar escaped her tender white throat. It was a roar that instantly reflected the ire, the agony, the hurt, the hatred and an entire array of emotions that her smudged, watery eyes could not.

         “Nevermore,” she whispered as her soft voice was drowned by the loud crackling from the grated fireplace at the far end of the room. “Nevermore,” she wrote on the thick layer of dust that had long since carpeted the once-grand, rotting floor on which she had been sitting. Had it been hours? Days? Weeks? It did not matter. Not anymore.

         “Nevermore,” she got to her feet quietly, slowly rising to her full height, letting the letter that had been sitting on her lap flutter to the spot where her feet were planted.

         “Nevermore,” she gritted her teeth as she tried to stop fresh tears from rolling down her cheeks, distorting her beautiful face even more with a sorrow that threatened to engulf and drown her in its bottomless pit. Lifting up her pale, trembling hands, she dug her talon-like nails into the mildewed wooden table, pushing them deeper into the rosewood with a pincer-like grip as dragged her nails across the surface, leaving behind a trail of deep lacerations. The breaking nails and the splinters that penetrated the bloodless skin under them mattered no more.

        Chest heaving and breathing heavily, she peered sightlessly into the silver gilded mirror that had managed to stay fixed on the dilapidated stone walls after all these years. Black tears. A running nose. A shapeless mouth. Strewn fiery red hair on milky, immaculate skin. Crack! The glass shattered and the shards fell like confetti. All that remained in its place was her fist, which had now opened up bloody wounds on her delicately crafted knuckles, as they remained glued to the stone wall behind the elegant mirror.

        “.. and.. now.. it shall.. end..” she whispered once more in broken words that her rattled breath managed to form. She dangled the letter over the golden fire in the grate as her blood dripped onto the black ink on the crumbling yellow paper. Gently, almost lovingly, she released her fingers, letting it drop into the hungry fire. Her bloodshot eyes fell upon the last two words scrawled on the parchment, “Love always, Isuara” and she watched silently as what was once a letter slowly went  up in embers.

       “Nevermore.”