She comes on a draught of cool air with winter hanging like sharp tipped icicles between the molecules of wind. Darkness hums between the cells of the autumn chill and the bright blood sheen of her skin. Each inch of blackness that pools like ink the the harsh lines of her cheeks whithers and dies when she opens her eyes and light pours out like frost. 

She blinks, slow and aimless, and white-light from the center of the sun makes strange all the bits of sand rising in her wake in great clouds of dust. Every granule of sand seems to creep and float like flies freezing in the air. And through that strobe of her eyes, as they blink, blink, blink back the grit of a hundred universes, she moves closer and closer to the gates. 

The stone feels hot beneath her when she pauses and lays her cheek against the red-limestone in a queer caress. It whispers to her of fire, of hate and she can taste ash in the grout holding each stone to the next.  It coos to her (like a lamb) of holiness and light duller than the bright universe churning inside her belly. 

This wall makes that universe (and all the others) churn like a whirlpool in the deep in the bottom of creation. It rolls around and around itself and she hums to the pulse of it. It sounds not unlike a heartbeat thrumming and clanging in her bones. Her lips tingle and her teeth ache in her smile like forty swollen, ivory bee-stings. 

She walks along the wall for what seems like miles. It stretches out before her like a spine and her shoulder brushes it with each step like a contracted muscle. In the places where the darkness gathers deeper, and where  it tastes more like snow, she lingers. There each spider and fly crawl out to meet her and they all linger together, in the light of her,  for a single blink of her eyes. Still she continues moving-- shoulder to stone, light to darkness, frost to adoration. 

Finally the gates break up that spine of wall and she smiles at the old, knotted wood and the rust lingering in the places where the hinges are peeking through like bones through a wound.  Her left hoof strikes out at that knotted, ancient wood. 

She knocks. 

Knock, knock, knock.

The gates open only to reveal the cold waste of the king's body. She has no care for the soldiers shifting in their wake as deer quiver below the scent of a wolf. There is naught to her but blood-red and bone-white, blue and glow. To behold it she thinks of a pyre of bones, of rot. She thinks he looks like a hundred other things roiling wildly in the endlessness of her.

There are always mad-men in history, always villains. There are always things to be devoured and saved. There are always things to be remade and to be made dead.

A partial religion is growing between them and between the deer shifting and haunted. It rises is waves and it ebbs and flows against all the raging hollowness in her. She shifts and her bones do not creak as dead bones should. She moves like light behind a cloud, soundless and bright (like hope in the dark, like a prayer dripping out from bent, bloody knees).

Would it take a blade to make him pray?

Light leaks out from her teeth when she starts to shape brightness into words. She folds it like stripped skin from a prize of war. Each sound she makes is a promise of some grotesque violence that she's almost forgotten. It feels good to remember. It feels like waking up. “Your soul could not fill me.” Her smile is bright, and it reflects his eyes like glass even as it devours enough of their electric shine to make them dull.

And if she knew he thought his soul long and buried she would have stepped closer and lifted her head like a blade. She would have said, open up, I will find it for you. Then she would have cracked him open like a fruit and stretched out every part and left in him to dry out in the sun.

It is better then, that she didn't know he thought it lost. Better that she thought only that his soul could never fill her. Not much can, not when she's swallowed universes again and again like stones sinking in the sea (the sea of her).

“Souls and vengeance.” She laughs and it sounds like heaven, like a flaming sword could be pulled from the spaces between her teeth. She laughs and it sounds like magma singing a the center of the earth, singing and rising, singing and rising. Rising, rising, rising. Her laughter rises a little when she walks through the gates through all those deer quaking in her brightness.

”Is that all you have to eat?” She says when she turns towards the capital and the red-stone. Something rails, hollow and hungry, at the walls of her stomach when she pauses and looks back at him-- waiting.

She is always waiting, waiting, waiting.

There is in her something terrestrial and ominous starting to open up. It's in the black brightness of her marrow and it pushes at her ribs with talons and tentacles. Between the planets and dark space of her it looms, a supernova made of horrific adoration for each and every bone-white inch of the king. He walks beside her and she walks beside him and it walks somewhere in the place between.

This body is too simple a thing for all the things churning and tangling around and around like snakes and comets through her veins. Her eyes are too plain for all the yawning crevices looming where her mind should be. Each of her teeth is too flat and marble hard for all flavors she wants to make them ache with. Her bones, oh her bones, they are too hollow and mortal feeling in this cage of flesh.

Eshek already wants to erupt and this world is still new dirt on her tongue and new sod stuck in her hooves.

The stone castle looms ahead and she cannot help but see it as nothing more than a mighty throne on which the unworthy perch like crows. She wants to unhinge her jaw and scrape her teeth along the stone to see what sound it might deem to sing. Surely the dust rising like mist at her unholy hooves might carry the sound and amplify it like snow. She smiles at the thought and that dead organ inside her ribs stutters and starts again. This time it sings a new song, a song of sand, and blood, and suffering.

Only the shadow of the basilisk brings her eyes from that old and cracked throne reaching towards the sun. The beast's clacking jaw sounds like an ode to her and the hiss it speaks with only words created for her and her alone. She turns towards the monster and each pop of her spine rings out like the crack, crack, crack of a whip hungry for blood.

Eshek turns from the throne and the ghost and makes her way towards the beast. The feathers feel like nothing as she brushes her nose like a kiss against a wing that has arched too close to her. “And what if I said I wanted your monster?” She looks back at the bone king and her lips are barely able to keep each flat, marble tooth from feeling flesh grind between them like grass and dirt.

“Would you still want to satiate my hunger?” Her head swings back towards the blindfolded predator. And the sound her hooves and the mist of dust make seems to say, in a language not made for horses, I understand, I understand.

Gods are not made to be tamed.

They are made to consume.

This is how luminescence is made.

It's poured from the moon, and from the core of the sun. It's collected like honey from a hive full of dead bees with wings torn down to dust. It's made molten from the heat of the everything, every inch of skin, every drop of life running hot and thick through the veins of monsters. It's pulled out from all the places shadows are too afraid to cross.

Every star in the world, every moon, every sun must die to make it. Everything. Must. Die.

And it's luminescence that pours out when the basilisk draws his beak across the tender flesh of a god-cage. Drops of her fall like the first desert rain of summer. She watches herself fall across the dirt and she watches the beast flail at the end of his fragile tether. Each drop of her that's falling, falling, falling is another dead star, another dead moon, another dead sun. Each drop of her is dead.

She is the mother of ghosts.

Eshek smiles. It is sharp and blinding. It is hungry.

He comes closer.

That is always the first mistake of a mortal man, to walk by dead thing and think life is some sort of shield. It is the second mortal mistake of men to think that beasts are made to be tamed into a weapon. It is the final mistake to think that anything made of dead stars, and moon, and suns, cares about any of that.

“You think of hunger like a wolf thinks of a crippled lamb. You think like something that will die.” Her teeth are leaking light. Her nose is leaking light. She drags both across his cheek and she doubts he understands what it means to be anointed by luminescence. Another mistake. “And you will die. But you know that don't you?” She doesn't laugh, she doesn't need to when every planet inside her bones is reaching out like a sea against the shoreline of her corpse.

Eshek wants to feast upon his eyes and lay them across the dirt so that he might see clearly. Then, maybe, she will feast upon every mad thing that lives inside his body. And she will still be hungry.

“And when you are dead, I will be the stone upon which you pray out all your sins until you are mute and sore with all of it. All the ants will pray upon me until that's all the world is-- ants and bone, dead kings and dead monsters.” Her lips are everything already dead and her voice is everything that wants to be dead. The curl of her throat lays bared before him and her spine lays curled and waiting like a snake beneath his beast.

She waits like a lamb. She waits.

All of her light remains trained on him. All of it.

“So tell me more of what you know about stone, little king. Tell me more.” Luminescence speaks through her. Luminescence always wants to be remade, and reformed, and reincarnated.  

Always.