There is the clap of thunder beneath, the grating rile of it above, and beyond – all that quakes in its glory.

There is little time for thinking but he does; and in thinking, its device finds the curiosity of grand mythos – here, little Erasmus, prone to greater things than godly trinkets or falling in to the glass black night, or being swallowed by a god too motherly to be vicious, thinks for a moment that his blood may boil with a meaning deeper than roots or the volatility of man. For, while all cascades about – the end, the end! His only end is the unraveling of the island and the way the sand flies from beneath his feet, the way the serpent reaches her wild sea-soaked jaws for his throat and his crown breaks against her fangs. His horns graze the lining of her muzzle, powdering him with fine grains of sand that shine transparent in the undying light above – and the relic changes, changes, its golden mingling in red and shifting ever so delicately that he thinks again for a moment, on the deceptions of gods. Erasmus does not see the great mother snake curl into her earth, upturn with shimmering scales of jungle emerald and pale-white sands, upheave the brine and volcanic ash from whence its tomb has exhumed. He does not see his competitors, too near that he could feel their warmth beat against his flesh like a pulse.

There is only the changing of the relic he does not understand, and the quivering bridge beyond it.

And then there is the hum. 

It returns with devastating frenzy, and he thinks for a moment that his skull would split with the weight. But its device is changing with the relic – first it is the unbearable drone, the dredging thing that claws up the walls of his mind and tear down without discernible rhythm but the constance; like the sound of eternity. Then there is a pulse, and in that pulse a growing beat that persuades the thought of song; but it is something old, something forgotten, like a chant on the desert vagrants' tongues when they sang of a world before a world. He almost stops to admire it, and there is a ripple in the way his body moves – an alteration to his machinations, a shift that treads from the final notes of his spine to the creeping ladder of his neck. It is not the thunderous poundings of a furious gait flown over the ramparts – it is a dance, a graceful feralty, this desperate tempo. This ravenous waltz. He leaps the fallen boughs of desecrated trees, bows beneath the rising spines that press like cathedral halls – and o, there is no prayer in their sanctity, no gracious tone lifted to the Novusian gods that look to him and smile warily, a smile fitted with teeth too sharp for invitation.

No, he prays to things older than gods, in a dance that is older than prayer. 

Something changes in him, in the final yards that rest between he and the relic. Something about his softened angles, his roughhewn boyish nature too like the naiveties of youth on the rush of their vitality – whether it was magic of the island or not, wound to his flesh, those arching spires reaching to click against his horns and brush gingerly against his skin. The shadows, incited by the furor of his heart's vicious pulsings, rushed those without secondary thought – grating things that leeched from him all his softness, all his tender likeness that terrified him once before in his reflection. The awful smallness of mortality. The horror of failure, the terrible things that crept in between. Oh, how the shade leapt and nestled, and oh, how he sharpened to the shine of the relic as the sun quivered in the sky and beat, and beat, and sweltered against those unending shadows. But how they glean in feeding upon the magic of the island, how its pulsings do engrave its song into the mettle of their will ; seething night pursed beneath the weight of the golden sun! Oh, how the tendrils of smoke lilt against his flesh to the sway of the dance, to the crescendo of its song! And then, and then – – 

Erasmus did not expect to pluck the silvery thing from its place upon its driftwood pedestal. He did not, in fact, expect to feel the way it pulsed in his grasp, too much like a vein full in the rut of conquest. And so too much like a vein, he drinks it in. The hum subsides and in it is an awful silence, but he cannot hear it. He does not see the shadows that congregate, those seekers who are blotted from the pale sands one by one as the island quakes and roars. If he would, he may consider the nature of the island's rage. Was its fury owned to a blasphemer, to a heretic prince who was undeserving of its treasure? To a boy who was no longer a boy, but a pretty stone whose skin was flecked in golden serpent scales, teeth too sharp to be tender? A creature who, when he observed the milky way that light passed through the stone, did not think to thank its god? To honor this blessing, to bow to Tempus? This thing that, in its quivering light that wandered like fractured quartz veins, did not at all look anything like the traces of time to an animal carved from pagan rites? Oh, may it quake. It rolled in his grasp, even as he did not consider these things. Even as he turned his back on the Novusian gods, scowling and thundering above and below and all in between, and his spine was bathed in the fever of a blaring sun. Was there not someone more worthy? 

Yes, there was. But it was his.

And so, as the old song fell to the crumblings of a many forgotten temples, and the island quaked with all its forgotten hungers, Erasmus tucked the precious stone into his satchel and looked out over the ocean that seized with walls of frothing waves. Without another thought to the way the jungle swept into nothingness or the smoking volcano collapsed in itself, or the way shark fins disappeared lowly into the cold blue leagues, or the way a peculiar wash of light traced the veining waves too like the hot press of not-moonlight, he turned his back on the sea.

finite.