• "O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
    Alone and palely loitering?
    The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
    And no birds sing." -- John Keats.

    She is a goddess, but not one of tame and gentle love; she is the lion's roar, reeking of petrichor and old blood, her body of clay and mud interspersed with the bones of the forest, and from her false skin protrude the fallen souls of the conquered.

    Her love is wolf teeth in gentle flesh, rending and scarring and forceful. The wild is in her, this bone and dirt woman, with her hair like spun gold. She can be caged, and though she cages herself in a marble prison, she will be out and upon you at the slightest chance.

    {[ Oh brave knight, are you troubled?
    Won't you rest your weary head within my arms? ]}

    She dances, the gentle destroyer, ripping worlds to pieces. Her heart is a field where nothing can grow, making her as the moon: silver, cold, unlivable.

    She is the merciless goddess with her lovers in tow, a million corpses and ghosts dancing in an endless loop;

    La Belle Dame Sans Merci and her princes, her kings, her paupers and thieves.

    She waits, however, for the pale and worn-down knight she lost so very long ago.