A bell tolls in soft peels and it echoes like death through bones when it rings and chimes across the court built out of stone.

A bell tolls and the city starts to listen. It opens up ears that are so trained now to the taste of violence on the night. It opens up just to start closing down, each horse listening to the tolling song like lambs listening to the crack of a whip driving them onward (onward, onward to the blade).

A bell tolls and she is there walking in the opposite direction of the lambs, She's bright and bloody and each of her steps seems like the mechanical twitch of an spider hunting. The setting sun shadows should feel cool against her skin as the heat of the day starts to die. But she can hardly feel the wind against her skin or the dust between her teeth.

She can feel nothing but the brightness and the coolness of the reaper (of herself). There is nothing but her steps, the steps of the lambs and the gray stallion walking like a ghost inside his map-skin made of scars. She wants to fill him in with ink and light, black and bright.

There is something in the horror hidden in all those map marks that makes her draw closer to him. She can almost hear the grind of his teeth and the ache of his soul that might be as marked as his form. Surely no lamb has every walked so wearily in such a skin and laid its head willingly upon the altar. She pauses in the street and blinks her eyes so they shine like a lighthouse shines in the sea.

She beckons his ship closer and closer and the rocks around them look bright as blood as she waits. The street spreads out around her like a stomach trapped between the bones of the walls.

For him she would wait forever, if only to know if his scars hold as many celestial secrets as her form does.

Eshek can feel him. She can feel him revolving like a planet in the endless space of her. He is as hot as a star, full of fire and brightness that the black eternity of her wants to swallow. She taps at of the planet of him rolling inside her, she taps at it. She promises and begs.

Come closer. Dig Deeper. And then she steps closer in the real and says in that universe between them, Devour me. There is nothing she hides from him. But there is also nothing for him but death in the mansion of her but--

Pathways of bones pilled high into shrines. Pyres of rot lingering lonely and unlit. Lotus-faces are flowing, flowing down a river. There's smoke painting out words for him, bibles writ in soot and flame.

There's a sea too, a dead sea, a black sea. It's salty and metallic like blood and it feels like oil when Eshek swallows her light like spit. “It is,” she says even as she's still swallowing that spit and light. She shakes her head in a mirror-echo of his. When she drags her hoof across the dirt ants crawl out like small soldiers begging for annihilation. She pauses, blinks and the ants are dust beneath her dragging hoof.

“It is everything.” Could he not feel it? Could he not feel the expanses inside her that have no end but eternity? Could he taste the death and the rot that sits inside her like the sweetest desert made of nightshade? Oh she prays that he could! She prays, and prays, prays.

Can he read in her gaze that she would teach him?

She's still praying in words of moonlight and bloody ink when she reaches out her nose towards him, wondering if he's brave enough to touch her flesh instead of her sea. She waits and her eyes still pour out light like clouds pour out rain and thunder.

And the entire expanse of her is still gaping open like the jaws of a great-snake.

First she takes his love shining at her like a bright star. She lets it wash over her, mournful that the shores on which it finds itself shining are thick as mud and hungry as quicksand. It glows and heats and still all that she is stands as thin horned as a sickle moon and just as bright and shrouded in darkness. To all that light she smiles, and pulls at it like mud pulling at bones. She says, I know you in my bones. I have loved and I still love.

Death loves everything as it holds it and carries all its sorrow down, down, down.

Then she takes his hope and that too she welcomes like a the dead trunk of a tree welcomes the ants and nests full of eggs. It soaks her like a cold rain and she turns belly-up all the dead leaves in her memories towards the drip, drip of his hopeful raindrops.

Death loves water most of all, water enough to build in the deep a city of sea-worms and barnacle crusted statutes.

“You are young.” She says and her voice is silver dripping from the moon, droplets of light that streak through the darkness in holy rays. His memory is shining bright in her and it's almost brighter than the hundred sun running in streaks of brightness through her veins. Eshek smiles and brushes her nose against his cheek and she opens her mind a little wider. Space yawns gap-jawed and boneless in the center of her.

She shows him life, a city of worms living in her dead-sea and of ghosts who have been given life over and over again. Of course life prevails. Eshek wants flowers to bloom in the sunshine of him, she wants bees to hum and thrive in the gardens his love could make.

Death knows that life prevails until it comes.

Death is patient.

Eshek is patient. Eshek is loving. Eshek is hopeful.

The bells are still ringing. Her bones are ringing with the way this stallion has strummed his memories against her like notes of a song she's been waiting to learn. She's alive with the sound of him, as alive as death can ever be-- alive with light and music. “Of course I belong here.” Each of her eyes watches him like the sun watching the crown of the clouds, and she does not say not today.

Instead she says, each day dies, even as it lives it dies..

Eshek is patient.

The sand tastes like gold on her teeth, hard sharp and full of blood. He looks like diamonds. He's slick with grit. Each scar cuts a facet across his skin and Eshek, who is counting them, thinks that there is no other jewel in the world like this one. What other diamond can grow love in the center of it, love enough and full enough to form blood diamonds from darkness?

For Eshek there is no other name for stones now, no other name but gray (and sad, oh so sad). He looks like he could have been dropped down by some beast on the moon-- gray, pitted and soft as dust. She smiles, and moonlight leaks out.

All the air rushing between them feels like nothing against her skin. It is not hot or cold, home or homesickness. It is nothing but wind on which sand runs, and runs, until the world looks dirty and fouled. She hates the sand, she hates the gold and the wealth. All she wants is diamonds, slick and cut. Blood and shine. Blood and shine.

That's all death is in the end, blood and shine. Red skin with light pouring out from every crevice like a rainstorm of redemption.

“Don't.” She says, but what she is saying is: don't pretend you are not a stone, don't pretend that all you are is alive. But what keeps pouring out from her in shine, shine, shine are words that sound like: “Do not ask me questions when you already know what I will say. You have always known.” Religion lies writ in the cracks of her teeth, and across the char scrawled across her bones like suffering is scrawled across him like a honeycomb. She thinks he will understand all the things she means to say.

Eshek blinks. Light goes out. Light goes on. The sun rises and sets in the pits of her face.

A god blinks.

A god turns away.

The sand still tastes like gold on her teeth. A god still wants diamonds.

A god is gone, into Solterra. Solterra who is fat and bloated with sorrow.