Shadow Tales - Rain Down Your Pain

The fairies tore the room apart with their screams in a desperate attempt to satisfy their need to be heard. They may as well have been silent, for all the good it did them, but silence was not their way…

Much more vocal, more ear-splitting, and more heart-breaking were his screams. He screamed, not because he needed to be heard, but because he couldn’t hold all the pain that filled his heart to the breaking point. It was release, and there was nothing sweet about it. Instead, all the doubt, all the loneliness, all the misplaced trust inside of him came gushing out of him, like blood from a wound he couldn’t keep shut. His cry rushed to embrace the rafters, bouncing off the walls, like children full of sugar. The pain left him, only to be replaced by new, deeper, suffering…the scar tissue never given a chance to form.

Today could be beautiful, in spite of all the pain, if only he knew that she lived. He should have known, because her heart still beat within his chest, but it had been his for so long without his knowing, he couldn’t be expected to remember that the heart that was keeping him alive was not his own. Hearts are such strange things…they work, only in order to survive and when they find someone they value more than life, they simply give themselves over to the task of providing life for someone else, shifting from one shell to another, over the bridge that is formed by two souls in love. His heart, her heart, it was indistinguishable by now, really only two pieces of the same two-piece puzzle. He screamed, but not because he was in pain that no man had ever experienced before. He screamed because he had no way of knowing that she was free of pain…and the faint chance that she was tore him apart.

The fairies knew enough to answer his question…and more…but for once they were silent.

His captors had chained him to the wall, much more crudely than Fate had linked him to her. The invisible bonds he had so willingly embraced were something he would carry with him, gladly, forever. The cheap, rust, man-made shackles that coldly held him in the dark were intended only to be with him until death.

The chains, seeming to have a life of their own for a brief second, tightened around him, constricting his chest and depriving him of the oxygen he needed, almost as much as he needed to be with her. But he was used to going without air, she took his breath away the first time he saw her, and she continued to do so smiling whenever his words went the same way as his air intake.
He wouldn’t say he knew what love was…but he did, whether he thought so or not. Every thought he had for her was love, and love was the only thing that kept him alive in his current predicament. Love was also what was causing him so much pain…

…or it could have been the fairies pulling at his chains…