A Chronical of Life and Death

There was warmth here and comfort, and Christall had a vague notion that she was not alone, that the Poor Soul was with her, and she held onto the awareness of this and an awareness of who she was for a little while before it leeched away from her like a dream on waking, and she became firmly and finally embroiled in the now, which was of course constantly changing, shrinking around her then emptying outwards, becoming cold and hostile, and lungs she had now, little lungs filling with cold fresh air, filling, screaming, pumping, she writhed on huge hands that held her gently, soothing her, and was moved to breast and Mother-Protection, a sanctuary which was her for an age until she grew bold and moved away on little legs growing ever stronger, taking her on her own wild adventures through early childhood, when, with shocking violence, she was taken away from those who loved her by an accident and placed in an orphanage, there to grow with blemishes and scars into adolescence, clever and suffused with talents but also wreathed in pain, and leaving here as soon as she could she leapt into life with abandon and passed through many strange and wonderful and terrible things until the fire cooled a little and love took her for the first time and carried her reeling against the harsher currents but with purpose until she begat and begat and begat a third and final time whence love was ripped from her once more, and she found solace in her middle years in her children until they too left, and she was once more alone but for a few friends who touched her surface as she touched theirs, in a vague, removed way, but which nevertheless helped and made some times joyous and others simply bearable, (and coming towards her suddenly were the shoes, the trainers, laced with gold, looking so strangely familiar that she suddenly wondered if there was perhaps a God or at any rate a god, something more than she had ever thought possible, so strong and strange was the feeling of recognition at the moment when he found them, but then they too receded into the past along with the rest of her spent life and were gone and the feeling of connection passed), but these friends gradually moved away, or passed away, or found others to whom their souls passed in favour of her, and she reached a point when her hair was silver when she realised her whole life was characterised by loneliness and loss, and so devoted her remaining years to poring over old books which described strange rituals and heathen rites, in the hope that she might find some crack in reality into which she could fit a lever and thus prise for herself a piece of creation that she could form around her existence to make herself more attractive to others, and in so doing secure their love for always and ever, so that she might never be alone again; and finding such spells in obscure abundance, she indulged in them fanatically, and sometimes felt as if they were almost working, and sometimes felt as if there was something else within her, a half-remembered presence of other, and this gave her the hope she needed to pursue her endeavors with renewed vigour, until, finally she died whilst in the midst of one such ritual, old and desiccated, the unintended victim of an arcane rite of frightfully complex, vaguely hopeful, and magnificently erroneous conceit.