It was quiet.
The courtyard was heavy with the smell of metallic blood, expunged oxygen evaporating into the air, thickening and turning his lungs into jelly. It felt like punches travelling up his nostrils, boxing their way through his nasal cavity and expanding into that tiny space, so that his brain swelled like the inhaling breath of a great vulture, something which feasted on the smell of death and pain which had laid itself so profoundly onto this place.

Between his hands a single, mutilated head stared back at him, its eyes two empty, black sockets where nothing had ever existed.
Flash. A window to summer grass. Two windows. Glimmering emeralds with just a single beauty-spot of blackness hidden deep within them, drenched by the beauty of the jewel itself, fine lines etching a complex pattern out from this center of the dark.
Flash. It was dark. The windows were gone. But he had seen them, and seen what they contained. What they once had been. They had once filled the same head he was holding in his hands.

The head’s mouth was wide open, lower lip hanging in apathy against the blood-stricken ground, and everything it had once said had disappeared, poured out from its broken form in a stream of filth, which was the true form of what it had always said. It was quiet. He had silenced it. He searched once again the deep recesses of his mind, searched for what once had been there, and found nothing. His mind was empty. Lonely. Quiet.

He turned his gaze from the dark eyes of the bloody, decapitated head and looked onto one of the puddles of blood next to him. His blood. It glistened like a mirror, defiant of the pain that had caused it to flow out from its warm body and defile this place, and in it he saw his reflection. Two eyes, green like an emerald in the summer’s warmth, stared back at him, with only a single beauty-spot of blackness in the middle of them, drenched by the beauty of the jewels themselves. He looked at his reflection, of what was him, and looked at what he was holding in his hand, seeing the exact same sight being reflected onto his green eyes.

“You are dead” he said, his words echoing in the cavity of the head’s empty mouth, throwing the statement back at him, but changing neither its meaning nor its truth.
“You are dead” he repeated. “I killed you.”
But as the echo faded away from the dark opening, they changed, fluxed, turning into a version more closer to the actual truth, and still miles from it.
“You are dead. I killed me.”
And then it was quiet.

He threw the head sideways, bumping into the great pools of blood upon the ground, and stood up. His wounds burned with pain, and his body felt ready to fall from the loss of body fluids, but he stood up and started to walk. He walked without meaning, without goal, and without echoing voices of a great, black mouth and the stare of emerald eyes inside of his own head. He walked in silence, away from the place where the blood had been spilled, his blood, and his blood. He walked, and his steps were absolutely quiet, making no noises upon the blood-drenched floor, and leaving no footprints in the blood of the mind.

It was quiet.