The Moor

So he awoke from sleep, a heavy slumber of dirt crusting his eyes and cursing joints which had not cracked in many, many years. Staggering like a drunken infant, then back down to his knees in the thick darkness he slamed his head upon the ground shaking dank dreams and clouds from his head. Back on his feet to the heavy door where he placed both palms upon the cool stone and felt it merely give way like sweeping aside a curtain. Now there was nothing keeping him from the cool April air.

As he stepped foot upon the soft soil, the wind of a fathomless void closing whipped at his rags. Until now, he had shared the same aura as the stone and dead trees which had encompassed the coffin of his sleep. But now, the night had become his day and it was a short trip back to Eden.

The Moor glared skyward, towards the unfulfilled promises of a heaven he had once heard championed by old men long ago in his youth. How pitiful, he thought, that he would know more about death than they ever would, despite their obsessive lives wasted to the cause. The moon returned his downward gaze,  speaking rebirth, confirming what felt like destiny. The threshold he had somehow crossed, the jagged line between blank death and the sobriety of the mortals, a barrier few had crossed before, stood at his back as he wept without realizing it.

Twas mere destiny.

Wiping the hard spit from his mouth with the back of his hand, The Moor shakily found his footing as each step sank into the graveyard mud. Crisp winds whipped into his ragged clothes, once considered the best for a burial but now rotted through and crumbling. Clutching his aching chest, a thought raced through his head, not unlike a child hood rhyme.

"So here you are, now find your way back home."

The words echoed through his bones, from the back of his knees into his crotch and up his spine like a bitter orgasm. A somniferous wind passed through the jagged teeth and tilted tombstones, dead flowers shuffling slightly and through the breeze.

Wbat was this?

Years passed in stony sleep, and suddenly awoken and brought back to this land which had cursed him to an early death. Torn from the warm breathes and embrace--

Ripped from the embrace.

"Carina."

Carina.

The word cracked his skull like a hammer. Whatever flowed through his collapsed veins surged with new vigor like sun rushing through morning blinds. His hair tinged from an unwordly grey to a vibrant brown, pale necrotic skin gaining pallor and a rustle in his chest.

His first breath.

His second breath.

A second chance to walk among the living. The old tales were true, the bloody films he saw as a youth--bad dreams and feelings of being watched.

Sometimes death can not hold. Sometimes whispers become screams.

"Carina." The Moor whispered, recoiling at the sound of his own voice. The sound of death speaking in a foreign land, a place where it was not welcomed. A gated area where the dead were supposed to lay and rest in peace, not speak names tainted with memories.

White clusters of pain encircled the words as they left his mouth.

"I shouldn't be here." A sob racked his chest like the cracking of autumn branches. "I was dead. I should not be here. But Carina. I came back. Somehow I have come back and--and Carina is the reason why I've come."

He did not notice the dead leaves falling from his mouth as he spoke.

As the night fell and withered away to the dawn of the morning rise, The Moor retreated towards the forest, wrapping himself among the branches of the trees. From the shadows, he saw the blaze in the eastern sky--and the glow withered his desires like the wind snuffing a flame. The gnarled branches embraced him, the pine needles his blanket, as the forest became his home.