she rose from the soil, a body half-blooming, half-decayed. bones hollow, yet still cradling the scarlet petals that refused to die. each flower drank not water, but memory-whispering of lives once lived, of breaths once taken. her gaze was neither of the living nor the dead, but of one bound eternally between. the flowers crowned her with a beauty so cruel it burned; they fed on her silence, on her eternal stillness. and so she remained, an eternal bride of decay, wrapped in blossoms that bloom only at the threshold of death