Enchanting discounts await your spirit

The Mournning Cloak

1 min read

You flew straight into her face, startling, almost urgent
As if we were meant to look, and only at you
Then you settled, delicate and deliberate
On a fallen log like an altar we hadn’t noticed before.

Your wings, dark sugar and amber light
Like melted chocolate and toffee in the sun
Rich, soft, impossible not to crave
We followed without question, without thought.

A gentle diversion,
Or something more sacred?
A cloak drawn quietly over our eyes.

You held us there in your stillness
In that small pocket of wonder
While the world, just meters away
Tore itself open.

We did not hear the rupture
We did not see the breaking
We were kept,
Cradled in a moment untouched by horror.

And when we returned
They were no longer the same
Their voices trembled with something we never had to carry
So our hands became steady for them
Our presence, a balm.

You protected us
So we could protect them.

Mourning Cloak:
Your name already knew.

I want to call it coincidence
To tuck it neatly into reason
To say the world is only what it shows us.

But then you appear
Timed too perfectly
Too gently,
Too precisely.

And I remember her.

I remember what she loved.
I remember how she lingers.

So I choose this
A world where wings can intervene
Where grief and beauty arrive hand in hand
Where something unseen
Still reaches for us.

Because if horror can exist so close
So sudden, so real
Then why not magic too?

Who knew the sacred could stand
So near the unbearable?

I did.
I do.

-Selene Veil