Snippets and Scenelets

The Day Death Played for Me (Piano in the Garden)

This initially started out for a piece for a fanfiction concerning Reaper, the reader, and Soldier, but as I played the song over and over, it changed into something different. Still trying to figure out Segador and had a huge breakthrough today, but there's still a lot I don't know. But here is the scene I fell in love with and I hope you do as well. I can't make music to save my life, or draw fashion, so I must rely on others for this. but to give an idea of the sound and feel, I found this song online and these photos and while it is not what I hear in my head, it is as close as I will get I'm afraid. I hope you all enjoy!

The dress is from Lyrota on Deviantart: https://lyrota.deviantart.com/art/Persephone-front-and-back-351845535

The mask is from medieval bridal fashions: http://www.medievalbridalfashions.com/customgallery.htm

Backstory: Aroura doesn't remember who she was. Her first memory is standing beside a hospital bed, looking down at a body that was hooked up too many machines, her body was her own. No one spoke to Aroura or seemed to see her until a man in black appeared at her side with a book and quill. His face hidden behind a white, unblemished mask with black eye holes—he told her that she was in a predicament. Heaven and Hell both wanted her soul, balanced perfectly in between by her actions in the living world. But Aroura could not choose, she did not want to ascend without her memories, and no one willingly would select hell--even if granted a seat of power. So instead she stayed with Segador, the man in black, the king in Limbo, Death himself. While his brothers, Heaven and Hell's Kings, pester her for a change of scenery as memories slowly come back to her.

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Aroura pulled on the long dress, gathering several folds of the cream-colored, silky material in her hands so that her bare feet were free to move about the cool dark stones underneath them. The last sigh of summer wafted through the dying garden as a soft breeze that tickled her skin into prickling the hairs. Though the dress was long, it was very thin and did little to stop the light chill that seemed to always hang around the mansion. Nor did the small wire mask on her face, she touched it gently and sighed to herself, unsure of its purpose as it did nothing to hide her facial features.

However, it was not uncomfortable, just enough to warrant a shiver and remind her to move about once more. She paused by a bush that was clinging to life, the leaves a soft but dull green and the pale blue hydrangea's petals wilting and turning white and grey as life was choked from them. Aroura reached out and touched the flowers beside the bush, unable to name the long-stemmed plant past 'lily', but even at her gentle touch the stem snapped from its brittle form, and the flower fell to the cold, damp earth under it.

Aroura pulled her hand back, shocked at how everything in the garden seemed to stand still as if frozen in death or its dying phases unless touched. She stood and gathered the long dress back in her hands, following the path of the soft, dark stone that cut a path through the sizeable dying garden.

Despite several plants clinging to its last breath of life, the courtyard garden seemed dead and cold, a graveyard to a time a millennia past. While the garden was contained within the white stone walls, just out of her reach, it seemed like a world of its own-suspended in its own space and time. The stones were cold to the bottom of her feet, but it did not add to the chill against her; rounded and smooth, the stones were spaced perfectly apart for her stride. She watched her feet, swinging out from under the folds of the dress, her toenails still painted a faint pink. Then she stopped, looking down at her nails, they had been shaped and carefully painted not by her own hand.

Hands with only the slightest hint of warmth had held her feet gingerly while they worked and painted them as carefully as one would a masterpiece to hang in a gallery. The dark stones under her made her skin seem dingy and blanched, the pink the last breath of life like the petals of the dying flowers around her before fading out into the white and grey. Her eyes traced the stones, the rounded edges inches from her toes, then off to the next stone to the right. The dying grass brown and sparse between the stones cut low and immaculately so that it did not overtake the rocks. Further and further her eye traveled along until her eyes lifted upward.