ECLOGUE Before She Was the Soul By Cheyanne Cheney
Slipping in and out of bodies Before the psst at midnight, Meridiana drifted through Rome like any other shade. The city was alive. Marble gleamed, markets buzzed, prayers burned on every stupid altar, but she walked unseen.
At first, the whispers were harmless. Priests murmuring in temples. Poets reciting in taverns. Meridiana, like smoke at the edges of torchlight, not fully there, not fully gone, but you remembered the sound. A low psst. The whispers didn't scare. They changed. She was less a ghost. More a parasite of destiny. Every time she passed, fate burned, history fractured. The cryptic hunters of Rome priests, figures, even poets, tried to trap her in a verse or cage her in rituals. None succeeded. A soft, sensitive little angel with a heart made of delicate glass. Yet every time prayer cracked deeper, she kneeled before the altar, trembling, not from purity but from the weight of a gaze she could not escape. She wept, not with sorrow, but with hunger. No hymn could cleanse her. Her glass heart rang a holy sound, a curse in disguise. Dive. Watching.
Watching. Breathing. The crucifix waiting for her to kneel lower. I don't know.
But the soul slips. And keeps slipping out of my body. So here I am, writing this. Visions. No hero sails. No city is born. The seas churn not with prophecy but with screams. Aeneas, hollow eyed, wanders through broken temples.
Statues of gods bleed tar. They mock him. They never breathed existence. The Sibyl's cave is deeper now, you idiot. Not a passage to Hades. Torches don't light. Fate does not build Rome. It builds nothing. It builds nothing. The Sibyl's voice cracks. She's mid-incarnation. The bone walls of Hades drip blood. When suddenly, silence.
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