isolt griffin

I'm more alive than I've ever been

Maybe she could just float away.

Maybe, if she gave all of her effort and all of what meager strength remained in her withered body over to it, maybe she could simply and peacefully leave it all below her. Perhaps if she desired it vigorously enough it would be possible for her to see her daughter, and her brother, again. Maybe if she only wanted it desperately enough, all that had been lost would be returned to her. If only it had been solely a matter of desire.

But it wasn't. It never had been.

Another sleepless day, another restless handful of hours spent staring into the vaulted ceiling of their bedroom and waging a hopeless battle against the demons squatting like rabid vermin inside the husk that had once been her body. Demons that busied their impish selves with sowing the poisonous seeds of doubt, of shame, into the otherwise salted loam of her stilled heart. Cerulean eyes, rimmed in the sobering crimson of the sleepless, shift to her husband who lay peacefully at her side. She considers him for a generous few moments as if to commit to memory the strength in the lines of his jaw, the rich ebony of his hair. He was one of the greatest men that she had ever known, in this life and the one that had come before. He would have made a generous, loving, and protective father; he would have given himself over to it as wholly and selflessly as he had as her husband. He deserved so much more than the withered woman that she had become, the failed mother that she was.

Slowly does she lift herself from their bed, taking the greatest care not to disturb her slumbering lover, padding noiselessly across their bedroom to retrieve the sealed envelope from the hiding place she had chosen beneath the folded garments of their bureau. It was plain, inconspicuous, Damon's name gracing the front of it in Isolt's neat, precise hand. She had placed it there nearly a week ago now after having written the letter within nearly a dozen times over; it had proven nearly impossible a task to impart upon this man she loved so dearly exactly how she felt, how entirely she had succumbed to the contrition that gnawed away at her like a cancerous plague. She knew full well that it would prove impossible for him to understand the darkness that had coiled its barbed vines about her... but she had to leave him something, some explanation for her actions.

The heat of the morning's infant sunrise teased at the pallor of her skin even as she entered the foyer, a clandestine hand extended as if in welcome to beckon her forth into the timeless peace that was promised just beyond her front door. Carefully she places the envelope upon the table that rests beside their door, offering a somber moment of abject silence before placing atop it one of her most cherished possessions: her wedding band. The sole item that had, until now, protected her against the sun's ravishing heat. But it is this heat, and the demise it promises, that she seeks so forthrightly now. Perhaps, she considers, once the heavenly orb had reduced her to ash she would be free. Perhaps then she could float away.

And so, chancing a final look up the stairs and towards the closed door beyond which her husband slumbered peaceful and unaware, Isolt coiled her fingers about the twin doorknobs of the double doors, swinging them ajar in a single, swift motion. The embrace of the searing heat was instant and severe, and yet it did not deter the redheaded vampire from stepping out and into the daylit ether.