Eligos thou shalt feast; They bloom like lilies from the sand, his golden drops of hot blood. They rise like soldiers born to war, like starving children, and they look like nothing the eye can catch or the mind can hold. Formless, ever-changing, still they shape teeth and claws and put these to their purpose. The monster doesn’t see the way those teeth and claws crumble back to dust once they meet her own blood. He only sees the way they drape over her like a cloak and they way she still charges him, heedless. He sees the lightning that carves her face in a pattern he longs to repeat. And he sees the crooked spiral of her horn and the gape of her mouth as though she is the eater - Again they meet in the darkness. She is the first to find the throat and his eyes widen at the shock of it, claws scrabbling at her shoulders and her neck and her sides even as she bears him down, down into the cold sand. The Nerbuyian thrashes in her grip, his scaled and sinuous body drawing arcane patters in the sand, but the unicorn does not give. Blood and spit fleck his mouth and fur as he learns what it is to feel pain, to taste the thing that formed him. He hisses and snarls until he can no longer breathe. He sinks his claws deeper into the ripe-red skin of her. He flexes them as the arc of her tail carves a mark into him and his beasts of sand and blood vanish like smoke, and his vision darkens even as the world softens to the morning-colors of blue and silver and pink. At last the baleful eye of the sun crests the dunes to shed its light upon them, and all the world is cast in a gold as rich as his blood. And dying Eligos opens his mouth to beg - Mercy. @Thana |