Love Among the Ruins

Excerpt:
The branches of the forest invoked the sky with the supplications of their thousand hands. Black, tumultuous, terrible, the wilds billowed under the moon, stifled with the night, silent as a windless sea. Winter, like a pale Semiramis of gigantic mould, stood with her coronet touching the steely sky. A mighty company of stars stared frost-bright from the heavens.
A pillar of fire shone red amid the chaos of the woods. Like a great torch, a blazing tower hurled spears of light into the gloom. Shadows, vast and fantastic, struggled like Titans striving with Destiny in the silence of the night. Their substanceless limbs leapt and writhed through the gnarled alleys of the forest. Overhead, the moon looked down with thin and silver lethargy on the havoc kindled by the hand of man.
In a glade, all golden with the breath of the fire, blackened battlements waved a pennon of vermilion flame above the woods. Smoke, in eddying and gilded clouds, rolled heavenwards to be silvered into snow by the light of the moon. The grass of the glade shone a dusky, yet brilliant green; the tower's windows were red as rubies on a pall of sables. About its base, cottages were burning like faggots piled about a martyr's loins.
Tragedy had touched the place with her ruddy hand. There had been savage deeds done in the silence of the woods. Hirelings, a rough pack of mercenaries in the service of the Lord Flavian of Gambrevault, had stolen upon the tower of Rual of Cambremont, slain him before his own gate, and put his sons to the sword. A feud had inspired the event, a rotten shred of enmity woven on Stephen's Eve in a tavern scuffle. The burning tower with its cracking walls bore witness to the extravagant malice of a rugged age.
Death, that flinty summoner, salves but the dead, yet wounds the living. It is sport with him to pile woe upon the shoulders of the weak, to crown with thorns the brows of those who mourn. Double-handed are his blessings--a balm for those who sleep, an iron scourge for the living. The quick bow down before his feet; only the dead fear him no more in the marble philosophy of silence.