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It Leaves No More...

Courtesy VideoBlocks

Summer, steamy and alive, a mere distant passion now. Long lit shadows and cool winds crossed the abandoned part of the cemetery—the pauper's grave at Perilous Point. Scraggly, long-armed elm and oak trees, two-hundred years old if a day, bawled away amber and ochre leaves, all skeletonized they were from their life's sap long gone, all emaciated and dehydrated and all done. Autumn's rape of summer. It is a deadly time of year.

Pauper's grave was home to pirates and henchmen and rapists and thieves, the dregs of society civilized beings felt compelled to deliver unto God but quick chose to forget here on earth. Faith had not hastened their heavenly transport, for their souls lingered, wandered, and paced back and forth, waiting for the season when their soul-charred celebrations could begin.

"All Hallows Eve," they whispered, "at last, it is here. We dance for Heaven's homeless. We make merry for those of us who had black blood course through our veins. For the wretched and the feared, and the utterly forgotten. For those who wreaked death upon others; we reposit everlasting life upon them!"

As if in God's answer, the wind flew and the thunder clapped, and the blue sky, once radiant and full of joy, tore away in terror of the blackened and bruised and voluminous and voracious and menacing clouds.

With each crack, a ghostly skeleton would cheer. With the barrelling thunder, scurrying incantations would snicker low and giggle quiet. Fear they rarely had, but for their Creator.

Leaves flew and fluttered, tormented and aghast. Their spiny shells folded into one another and soon amassed. A swirling vortex of autumn hues, clusters then bushels then tons in their combined weight became a mighty ball as big and as spine-chilling as the decrepit cemetery itself. The ball rolled silent, save for a roiling, rustling growl. The innocent trees made those innocent leaves and those leaves would seek vengeance in a just verdict for those merciless men.

Otherworldly cries, screams, wails, and caterwauling cannonaded through the spindly trees and listing headstones, every soulless skeleton fearing its end.

No being could out run those leaves. A mashing of wicked thoughts and a crunching of brittle bones echoed throughout the cemetery, reaching all the way to the rocky cliffs and the sea below, the sonorous tidal waves smothering the final death throes.

Each leafy judge mashed every soulless subhuman far below ground, all the way back to the brackish bowels of Hell... at least for another year.