Sixteenth Thought

Mist clings to the air anticipation. The clouds slow to a stop. The grass is still. The trees silence their rustling.They can feel it, it's coming. Small animals scurry into their burrows. A shadow approaches, making its way across the forest floor. A traveling nothing, it breathes in the life around it. Leaves ripp off branches, stained in their own blood and fall to the ground. Touching all around it, without touching anything it all, it continues with the vortex of falling color as company. Animals burrow themselves away to find safety, deeper and deeper they dig, they can see the taint in the earth, towards the surface where the shadow glides.
Flowers wither away, their bright pink and yellow flames snuffed out. The oak rattles her branches in an empty threat. Robbed of her youth she is gnarled, and wasted away, but still leers at the void with all she has to give. Approaching the center of the wood, the emptiness shifts restlessly, waiting. Like a smudge of coal on paper its edges are undefined and blend with it's surroundings. The wind picks up and from within a hollowed out tree appears one of the Fae. She is eternally shifting, better seen when looked out of the corner of ones eye. With copper skin and and swollen belly the Queen of the forest stands erect, dignified. Without the slightest warning, it begins. Her verdant hair trailing behind her she lunges forward at the menacing blotch of nothingness. They circle and come at each other in a desperate dance, the shadowless person, and the person-less shadow. Merely streaks in the chilly air, the fight is marked by silence. The surviving plants watch in trepidation, while the birds flee to the south. The silence is broken with the finishing blow, and both fall dead to the ground. A white substance gushes forward, and crystallizes, as the shadow disappears, covering the forest in it's blood. The forest, relieved, goes to sleep, to well needed rest, confident the Queens unborn heir will spring from her dead belly in the months to come.