Barrow Fields empyreal.

e m p y r e a l.

there was a promise of a fresh winter morning in that blushing amber sky. gulls wheeled and cawed and caterwauled in frank complaint, chirruping at a solitary menace. she sits like a feathered gargoyle, all crooked teeth and abhorrent blue eyes, tongue lapping hot, red and wicked. the air is prickly; rolling briney off the sea with the smell of salt and sea lions hot on the heels of molten pyrite clouds. it was whiskery; the coming whisper of day blooms into view with a frightful chill and a breeze just blustery enough to wrench that wintery hide from her jittery bones. the moor was a rabble of heather, violet, hugged by rocks and shivering trees, bedraggled and withering in the wind; naked, like the gale had stripped the things of their clothes. 

the dawn was a chorus of colour and sound, giggling and mad. 

she was the savior, the vulture; a queen, in all but mind and manner. grimacing and crude, her wraithlike body seemed perpetually tangled in a knot of disquiet that murmured in its aberration. a rattle shook her throat when she spoke to herself, a shake knocked her shoulders when she was still, reddish saliva coddled her sword-like mouth when she winced her goatish grin. she was a stranger here; but stranger still was she. there was no beauty in the savage body of this creature; a ghost muddled by grief, strangled by an ominous call. 

she is clearly weary, this birdish woman. her skin is the supple colour of off kilt chalk, muddled with a twinge of a greyish sickness. an earl grey sensibility peppers the way she sits, but her head is low and crowned in molten iron, her lips a mountbatten pink, yawning with clattering yellow teeth. her legs wobble, lamed by exertion; the road was long, the way was bloody. savior is among them now; and so is she.