Obscurity, The Twenty-Ninth Chapter
In which the mercenary hunts the Comte.
e last read The Twenty-Eighth Chapter, in which a rose wilted. If you have recently joined us, start with The Prologue.

Rémy carried that deceased woman to the chapel where she was laid in a wooden box washed with white paint and poured over with peonies. How Séverine desired to crumple to the ground, to be held and loved and supported by the Earth solely for her existence upon it. Only that ground that held her could love her and adore her, and for that she envied the corpse her fate.
Séverine’s soul ached that the woman should die. She prayed the rosary over in her mind and on her breath as she admired those cheeks as rosy as apples and stroked that hair as lovely as silk. There would be none to mourn that most beautiful soul, for nothing was known of her and there were none to claim her. Séverine beheld those perfect fingertips as though they were hers to mourn and kissed those perfect eyelids as though they were hers to close.
There were rumors that a number of men had reached a similar fate. They were discovered in some secreted location nearby, naked in the embrace of love yet veiled with the shroud of death. The church would not honor those fine young men for the sake of their behavior, nor would their mothers claim them for the sake of their impropriety.
Their bodies were laid in a heap of one another’s arms, interred in some undisclosed and unimportant location, the truth of their love lost to moralist minds who had neither experienced a thing so profound, nor were free enough to enjoy it. Those disapproving minds adhered only to what they had been taught and never what they thought, and thus they deserved to be mourned for their miserable lives. For they outlived their children, perhaps, but they had the added misfortune of under living them.
This fate rested heavily on Séverine’s mind. How she longed then, as only adults can do, for her childhood. For a time when she would play outdoors all day and fall asleep in the meadow. When her father would carry her to her bed, unlacing each of her shoes as she slept. How many days since then, she wondered, had she gone to bed of her own volition and unlaced her shoes by an act of her own will?
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