Northern Portuguese Gothic
There's a small church at the top of the hill. The walls are carved with monsters and gods that don't come in the bible. A shepherd tells you how the church was build. He says it's old, finished when his grandmother was still a child. You know the church is over 800 years old and yet you still believe him.
The demons come out at the sound of bagpipes and drums. The village cheers them. Children want to be them. Young women dance to the hollow sound of their bells and throw ash at them. You stare at one in the eyes and see nothing and you know the face behind that scary mask may not be human.
More bagpipes and drums and men and women dance for war wearing skirts and flowers in their head. The drums beat to the sound of your heart and you feel like you're dying.
The poet that sung the stories of your people caved in and changed his name to the name of the flowers that bloom in the granite mountains like cobwebs. You trip on their roots and scrape your knees. But it's all right. You've been scraping your knees on granite since you learned to walk and you know how to pick yourself up.
There's a town who must slain a dragon or else their crops will die this year, but they're cheering for her. The crops will die if she doesn't, but all she wants is her moon-shaped earrings. You look for the dragon but now he is the monster under your bed, holding his severed head that it's lit from the inside by the spear of a celtic warrior.
You follow the river to the ocean. The river is so narrow that, when the fog lifts, you can sing to the other shore. The river is narrow because it carved its path on granite like a wound and its waters are dark like the abyss of his depth.
You know who the foreigners are because they get lost in the fog. The locals have eyes like snakes and navigate the fog like clippers on high waters, always running. Always working. Faster. You have an entire country to keep afloat while the rest of the country mocks you for running on granite.
You gave your country a language. They twisted it into something new and now say you're too stupid to speak it properly.
You reach the city by the ocean. The city is a wounded beast, with gashes bleeding granite and iron like a prison, that lashes out to protect her children. You love her fiercely and you don't know why, but she's your family and you'll defend her with your dying breath.
There's a graveyard at the heart of the city. There are graveyards on the edge of the city. The graveyards are old, hundreds and hundreds of years old, but not as old as the city and her children, and when you walk up the hills stepping on cobblestones (granite on granite, they say, like that would make any sense), you know you're really stepping on the bones of your ancestors.
When the country was starving you gave them meat. You would have give them the meat on your bones if you could, but you gave them all you had and were left with what not even the starving would want. You were proud of your feat, turned into a name and held it high and claimed it yours. Only to have it thrown back at you as an insult.
And to think you never knew what an insult was before, because you took the ugliest words in your language and turned into punctuation, greetings among old friends, love letters you scream at the top of your lungs.
Ice cold drops from the white raging waves of the ocean hit your skin and you breathe deep. You can breathe easily because of the fog and wonder if the ice caps melt and the end of the world comes, you'll survive because you've been breathing underwater since the day you were born.
There's an old fisherman's widow on the beach resting her weary body against the viking ship her sons died in.
She tells you the end of the world is that way, but you still walk to the ocean anyway, even if you know how the river named after water (despite sounding like it's made of gold) carved the old mountain. Even if you've heard all those old-wives tales that tell you what water does to stone.
But the ocean is unforgivable.
