Crimson Tears

Red roses bloom inside grotesque corpses and wrap emerald leaves like exquisite nooses 'round their targets' necks. Twirling and dancing through the air, snatching innocents as they go, the roses blanket the room in a tapestry of death.

At the center of the deadly mass stands a small, frail girl. Red eyes in a blank face stare ahead at nothing as she watches her roses surround terror-stricken victims in a thorny embrace that sends velvet petals fluttering around their feet.

The last screams die away as the final body falls with a slight scratch of thorns against the polished floor. Only silence is left. The girl makes her way through the mass of deformed bodies and traces one slender finger across a skull, lips pursed thoughtfully. Then she turns and walks out of the room, swaying softly as if in a dream-like state; the roses twist impatiently, looking for more prey, but follow their master eagerly.

She stumbles unseeingly through each of the rooms, leaving undead monstrosities followed by an eerie silence. When she comes to the final room of the large mansion, she finds no-one but a small child cooing in her crib, the nurse already dead on the floor beside her. The woman's mouth is frozen in a silent scream, and her deformed, claw-like hands reach up to the infant; to protect her or kill her, the girl cannot tell and cannot care.

The roses hover above the small child, who reaches one tiny white hand to the red reapers of death with a look of blue-eyed innocence. The girl touches the baby's chin, lightly tracing a shape on the soft skin. The child cries softly at the touch and the girl recoils away from the crib. Now the flowers move in for their kill and wrap around the howling child, slowly squeezing the breath, the life, out of small lungs. Crimson blossoms form on the pale body, and the grisly process continues until the howling stops and the child lies dead in her bloodstained crib, innocent features now twisted into a horrible grimace, hollow eye-sockets staring wide at the pitiless executioner that watched a young life extinguished with nothing more than a bat of an eyelash.

She emerges from the mansion into the crisp night air and gazes up at the moon. The trance is broken. The roses hurry back inside their master as she drops to her knees, an inhuman scream of agony and pain echoing across the silent valley as she catches sight of the redness that coats her small hands. Tears sting her cheeks, and mix with the blood of the slaughtered as they fall to the soft grass. The girl tears at the ground until her fingernails bleed before turning to her own body, digging bloody lines on her cheeks. Only to see them quickly heal, sending her into another round of hysteria.

The light of the cold moon shines down on a grief-stricken form paralyzed with pain, tormented by memories and screams, sobbing as she curls up in a tight ball. Her eyes fill with tears for the innocent, for their executioner, for the accused. Alone. Unwanted. Unloved.

The words force themselves into her thoughts, her being, destroying it piece by piece, as it wraps invisible thorns around her bleeding heart and slowly crushes it. Pain. Mental agony—as the images of her victims engrave themselves in her mind, ending on the child whose death came so quickly—so sharp it becomes physical, as guilt laces itself around her body, pricking it like her roses' sharp thorns. Left in pieces on the wet grass, she finds her dream world haunted by nightmares and memories as she cries herself to sleep wrapped in a cover of stinging tears and innocent blood; covered by a blanket of crimson tears.