Over and over again it had sought reason for the many things others seemed to know uncannily. Of function, of purpose, of things an unnatural, wretched ilk such as it may possibly never come to understand – but oh, the ache to know, among other aches. It had come to each, even those less profitable with knowledge, with simplicity in its throat and starfire in its eyes; tell me, tell me, tell me... Should it have asked for them to show, instead? One particularly disgruntled man shouldering a stand in the Night Markets had scoffed at the request in a way that churned the core of the Erasmus-That-Is like a revolving mechanic of hungry teeth. Go to the library and stop bothering people. the man had retched between gasps, battling a heavy post, and the Erasmus-That-Is could not explain why the manner in which he said so had inspired such a feeling of aversion in him, or the different sort of hunger that rose. But of all the things it didn't know, it had learned that the casual denizens of Novus were not keen to seeing blood, whether it was splattered across the cobblestone streets or washed across his own coat. What difference it made eluded him, but they were especially upsetted by the sight of it dripping from its maw.

The Library, he had said. And the Erasmus-That-Is struggled to know what a library is, and when he asked the man, the man simply laughed but did not answer. It had gone away pondering the thing over and over til the next congregation of passerby, and while they stared at him quizzically, a few of them responded after a moment of contemplation. In the Night Court they have a – Oh no, Delumine probably has every book known to Novus, you might as well go there. And then – oh, how trivial the living are, and the awful things that exist between it and the Nothing, and how he (or it, if we are keeping track) wishes for the latter at each turn. Delumine, Delumine... it lopped over his tongue like a stone he couldn't swallow, and his face had distorted with something akin to anger. And they, seeming concerned but helpful, were quick to point northeast, their gesture cast over the high, jagged peaks of the Arma Mountains. Therein: Delumine, Library. He hadn't felt the same hunger toward their kindness as he had the other's insensitivity, and it was enough to ponder between coordinated thoughts of Delumine, Library, but long after he passed over the ridge of the mountains he felt the emptiness in his stomach and the awful burning that came with it and wondered how bad it might have really been if he had had a taste of at least one of them.

It had gone on similarly between the valley of Denocte and the plane of Delumine, the questions and the answers that varied wildly from helpfulness to concern to downright disapproval. It seemed each could tell something was off about this “Erasmus”, though none of them, from what it could garner, truly knew who he was. (Long after, when it learns how to be Erasmus, it thinks back on this and is thankful his efforts were not thwarted by familiarity.) And when it racked the brains of the Erasmus-That-Was, he struggled to find a semblance of memory that relayed to him some navigation through the forested groves of flowery Delumine, but all he found was ocean, jungles, and sand. There were more questions, countless questions, not enough questions, but each answer pieced together the entity that was a Library and a Delumine. So now he stood in the bowels of both, staring at the tall walls of bookends that stared back at him with the same blankness he was offered from most.

He was thankful to discover that, reaching deep into his skull with frantic tendrils of wonder and near repentance, for how awful the powerless feeling of mortality is, he had found that the Erasmus-That-Was did at times enjoy the occasional book and its tell-tale innards. He didn't have to ask what a book was and didn't even have a word for it until then, but each piece strung together slowly to make of it what it was. How simple things became, when the uncomplicated brain he possessed was so ready to elaborate! Easier than prying the brains of those he had no control over, for most had just stared at him dumbfounded, and many asked him questions instead of providing answers, questions like are you not from here or the worst one he couldn't understand, did you just come out from under a rock, as so far he had not seen any denizens, himself included, who could fit under rocks comfortably.

Still he stood before this grand altar of knowledge and its spiraled cases staring back at him with expectancy, and he thought about how awful it was that he was unsure of where even to start. The mid-day sun coursed through the grand windows and spiraling ivy and cast a gold-green glare across the vast hall and its quiet inhabitants. There was much he did not understand beyond the ancient knowledge of cosmic dream and the celestial workings of being everything that was so tiring and now, worthless. It did not matter that it knew how to make rocks sing for it, or that it knew of glassy plates that looked like ice and burned hotter than fire. These things did not matter here. All he had was a few weak dreams of lilting shadows that dripped from his countenance like cobwebs and their occasional cooperation in forming gestures and fluttering forms. This was what god-dust had been reduced to, but he would make something of it, he resolved. "where do i begin?" he muses softly, and is sparked by delight toward how deliciously absurd it feels, as was an element of the mortals he encountered, to ask questions to thin air. The Erasmus brain answered weakly instead, and he chimed silently to letters A, B, C, D... and when their likeness materialized in his head, he saw their shapes and felt the way they should feel in the bed of his tongue, clicking against the back of his teeth. And there - oh, marvelous! Each spine was marked with the letters that came to him idly, and he saw each was organized in order by the group of letters at the base, marked beneath Author.

There, A, B, C, each shelf followed accordingly, and he came to see that he stood before the shelves that started for the letter C. But the novels were boundless and their innards a mystery. It thought of all the things it wished to know, and oh, the ache was endless. For a moment a feeling came over it, and it did not know how to process it or what entirely it was, but it came to learn with time that it was a feeling of defeat and had it known then, would have been overcome with the feeling of anger, for the infancy of something intangible being placed in the mortal coil is one turbulent thing after another. But then he paused when the memories of Erasmus-That-Was came to select a familiar binding that alighted to him like an epiphany. And on it read, Flora and Fauna of Solterra by Zarusc Cereti with its beautiful gold lettering, and like the relief of remembering an old friend, he eased it from its place and sat it on a nearby table, pages fluttering decidedly to page 64, The Sacred Datura. But he knew before it knew what was on the page, and he remembered the caricature of the ink-drawn flora and its broad leaves, and his mind's eye slipped across the mark of skull and crossbones and knew exactly what it meant. And oh, its wonder was tickled, that the Erasmus-That-Was took a liking to death so cunningly, as the Aether grins and remembers what both life and death tastes like, and knows which is much, much sweeter.

Erasmus feels him before he approaches, the way its skin crawls and Aether hums in his ears, dulled with the consistency of its use. He feels the way eyes prickle his skin when they fall upon him, and he – it – thinks it loves the sensation, of coyly ignoring when others are watching, while he revels in the way his pores twitch and his hackles raise. This isn't in the usual way however, as most looked to him with a frightful curiosity, as most witnessed the odd ways in which Erasmus was not the Erasmus that he should be. They noticed that peculiar way his gait – at times graceful and powerful, other times hitched as though he must remember the ways in which it is graceful and powerful and not overtly gliding like a haunt – could not choose its pattern. Or the way in which his gestures bore a strange weight to them, as if he were testing each one for appropriateness, and the way that when he grinned it seemed displaced. The way it was hot, sharp, and made wholly sinister in that it did not, could not, touch the vast void that hollowed endlessly in his roving gaze. There is no mirth in it, no matter how broad his lips may stretch and how straight his teeth may rest, often forgetting the way the Erasmus-That-Was chose to hide his dagger-sharp fangs.

Yet this grin, it could argue, may have been more genuine than the others that came before, others which were put on to pacify those who came in greeting. It was the only proper way he had learned to greet: with manners, with poise, and without blood drip, drip, dripping from the uneven crook of his lower lip. This one was not bid to impress the commoners, and certainly not to draw in the interest of the library's quiet guests. Aether marveled in the prospect of ruination, as it was the last thing that it could remember of itself – swallowing worlds, stars, and time, the serpent who devoured its own tail. No, that small caricature meant more than death, its haphazard sketch of a cracked skull and knotted leg bones crossed behind; the Aether knew there was more to death than was finite, but had Erasmus? Did he know of the way in which worlds ate up death and made of it, life? Of the way civilizations crumbled to permit the rampant windings of nature? Of the ways in which worlds, voyager planets, collided with one another and made themselves anew?

Before it could tap into the mind that was, it is reminded of eyes. It turns then, just as the man approaches and engages: “-must be reading one hell of a story.” It forgets to continue the grin, empty-eyes narrowed and his lips twisted with contemplation, and he looks back to the inky datura. Is it a story? This account of its milk-white blooms that spiral open with the dawn, thick foliage that packs itself with water so that the plant may survive its time in the scorching heat of the Solterran sun. A story of a creature which has developed to live by cultivating its own method of death, its own venom stored in the beautiful blooms which may, to the half-starved, long parched straggler of the vast desert, seem an appealing treat at the most inopportune time. It is a story, an old one at that – and it thinks, oh it thinks, that it is one of many it may enjoy.

"Quite," he conceded, allowing that not-so-complacent grin to dement his otherwise dark features. It stretches his lips across his teeth – perhaps too tightly against his double-setted fangs – and catches crookedly to dimple in the eastern corner, but as old it does not spread its warmth to those stolen eyes. They peer and pry, deep waning moons abed a sea of starless night. His voice is eon distant, lofted with a charisma that drapes itself in unknown celestial quarters; between them, it stills itself in reality, and persists with baritone smoothness: "Standing for comparison. There are plenty others, I am sure." His tone loses itself to wonder as his black hole gazing eyes drift to the oak-hewn arms bearing countless novels, and should have, as his guest had, considered it just as much a marvel. But he does not know the nature of libraries or the dominion of histories or yet the patronage of kingdoms. One thing they do share, however, between he and the golden beast, is the inkling that knowledge is the greatest power.

Its intentions unravel before it. It knows the taste of a dying universe. The smell of sulphuric mountains awash with the celestial backflow of a swelling red giant. Is this one just as beautiful, when buckled beneath milky starlight and a hungry sun? Do Novusian bodies break apart as wonderfully (and laboriously) as they are put together? Does the gold of his pelt wither beneath the erosion of death and time, or tan gloriously like ore burnished by daylight? Do his bones look like the ones shewn by the description of the poisonous but alluring Datura? Are they worthy of illustration, the same fine detail as what is used in the sweeping grace of curled petals or the short, sharp penstrokes of his veins the same as those in the broad leaves?

It is the lurching hunger in his core that brings him back from prying memories of art and death in the grasp of Erasmus's mind. It is a deep and winding quarter of complementary tones, but he finds his eyes scrape up, up the tight bindings of the man's musculature before him, and loosens his thoughts of golden bones drying in the sand and sun beneath the spiraling flowers of the blooming Datura. There is something hardened and cruel in the lines that mark the man's face, something the aether sees when it looks into the reflection of Erasmus that looks back at it with those cold, deadened eyes. There is the same toughened, scarred flesh, the swept hair that falls as unequally into place as it is decidedly so; as cultivated as it is unkempt – something feral, something rough. It wonders if this golden creature with cyan eyes knows where to begin in this store of wisdom, how wolf-boys with hungry eyes yearn to be more.

"and what stories do you seek?" predatory tones emit, still distant, still wandering, as if a dream lost in the web of a nightmare.

when vercingtorix approaches, the thing that is erasmus reaches to it like a storm embracing the sea – beneath its skin, shuddering bones, a belly that swarms with a black pit of hungry snakes. it does not move but o! it craves, it eats, as it knows to do, the empty spaces between them that hounds with silence and cold. it aches to trace the winding path between them, to swallow up the heat that pervades – to drink, and drink, and when erasmus looks to the golden thing with an empire in his eyes, is it not as one looks fondly to art? it leans ever so slightly, never noticeably, like the heatseeking serpent that it is, recoiling beneath its skin and testing fangs with its tongue. it does not know of the ways in which predators, when prowling the nuance of power and prestige, look to each other in such ways. but it learns.

it thinks of the way in which wolves revolve, kings in their own minds. gods in their hearts. their shoulders are hunched, their heads low, tails high. one pants, the other growls.

erasmus grins again, all teeth, all sharpness.

it cannot help the way those hungry black snakes twist in his belly like begging, writhing against his core with tedious bide. it cannot help the way, when the shining creature stretches, its eyes linger over the softest parts of his neck. it forgets where it is for a moment, in this cathedral. this church. this holy place of oak boughs and opiate prayer, and for a moment the leaves that drift heavenly from the ceiling look more like ash than rebirth. it waits. it waits. inside, it howls.

solterra. it rolls off the man's lips, and erasmus drinks it. his eyes drift back to the inky caricature of flourished datura, and he searches for reason. he remembers a carton of wines in the bowels of a stone temple, and the way their dark contents shift like death when the bottles clink softly together. because why not, answers some small, distant reflection of the erasmus that was, the boyish parts of him that remain only in memory and flicker in and out. because death is inevitable, and the world waits for none. page 43. erasmus flicks the paper back, and wild rue springs from its page. psychoactive. hallucinations. the illustration is mounded blackness peppered by pale star blooms. centered beneath the dotted sketch of its seeds, another skull waits. solterra is a hellscape for a hungry deserter, but death dreams in its wake.

the story of us all.

is that not also what the thing that becomes erasmus seeks? and the thing that what erasmus, though his delvings into botany were admirable, never aspired for such depths. but it craved knowledge like a starving creature. it looked to vercingtorix with expectance, need. stories, yes, stories of solterra and golden boys with ruin in their eyes. stories of denocte and its sea-dragons and jewel-crested dreamers. it rises in his throat. it forgets hunger, predatory fury, and the way it buckles against itself like a rattling snake. tell me, tell me, tell me.

but it is brief. because the wolf in the man's eyes is circling again, and erasmus is grinning again, and he dreams of sharp things rising from oak altars and spindling, poisonous flowers. its dreams do not come. oh, how awful, that they do not come. the aether hums discontentedly, and it swallows itself in his throat like a muffled sigh. his teeth feel so tight against his lips. his tongue presses the spaces between.

is he, too, waiting? waiting for the stories of us all? the stories of erasmus? of a boy-wolf lost in the tragedies of lunatics and fanatics? of shamans and their vague whisperings that not even they understand? of gods who rendered themselves to nothing, and what comes from their dust? of dying worlds, of bursting stars, of being endlessly hungry and knowing the meaning of eternity? of stealing flesh as though it were a suit, and finding where it fits in the spaces between memories like trying on new shoes?

it relents nothing. there is more coming. but it also wants to know of golden things with sharp horns and sea eyes.

something hungry lurches in erasmus's eyes when the man speaks again. does he see it? does he know it? even the thing that is erasmus does not know. maybe he can tell. he is singing of poisons like he knows erasmus, and his grin becomes darker. perhaps, somewhere deep in the dark pit of his eyes, something that looks like a spark of amusement jumps between the dancing crescent-moons. they wax, and the grin crooks itself in the east again. "so did he." quiet, quiet, near-whisper, his tones emit like menace but the Solterran book shuts with a volume that muffles the he, so it is unclear whether the thing says he or i or they or even the concluding way it may even sound like of course. it sees the way they are strung together then, and the aether thing is merely a star caught looming in the canvas of their shared skies.

before there are more questions, he presses past vercingtorix. the motion is not aggressive, not fleeing, not challenging, but simply is, and it does revel in the way his flesh, friction'd against the man's, sparks with a carnal delight. is it not sensual, when you bring the glass of wine to your mouth, and caress the silvery rim with your lips? he knows of the things that wait beneath his flesh. those warm, flavorful, pulsing things. how it spills like wine. it cannot help itself. "and what is, the story of us all? where do you begin, then?" erasmus's eyes rove over the A section as a shadow of a quivering branch draws a line across their spines in the golden light poured through the windows. the hot glow washes across his form, the night-webbing across his spine, starfire of his core, the glistening cracks of gold etched into his shoulders. his shadow swells against the wall of books and he looks back to vercingtorix expectantly, patiently, for what the man knows of stories beyond the classification of poisons. does he too know of wolf-boys and their unendurable hunger for the cruel world at their doorsteps? does he too taste like metal, and salt, and arrogance? "where do I begin?" it echoes.

as he waits for an answer, the aether hums the song of dying suns, and for the slightest moment, the grin spreads to his eyes. 

it is not kind and it is not unkind. but oh, it tells something terrible.

The aether has never questioned or consecrated the acknowledgment of gods and kings, and Erasmus, forever an agnostic creature, had never had the humility to accept their dominion. Two halves of a contemptible beast formed a whole of unruly consequence – a creature of wilderness, of instinct, of appetite. Each fiber wound the flesh with mannerisms of what could be described as otherness, of otherworldliness, of elsewise and contrary, unsettling and strange to the decisive eye. Whether it was the lacking genuine expressions or the misplaced gestures, or the feline smoothness of movements that could ever only be explained to glide, as if by phantasmic persuasion, exotically and horrifically beautiful. Their terror was in the lack of control that seemed so inexplicably effortless – as if each gesture, step, and twitch was by graceful accident.

Yet, they were not perfect. And in those imperfections were the most dissuading of all comfort in the matter that they were wholly predatory, almost reptilian, which set him apart. The flicker of half moon eyes, the flash of fang, the roll of reticulated spine which, uncurling from the shoulder, bore with it a languishing softness that honed all moments of sharpness. What is a god or king that is not such power, sharpness, wildness, and flaw? And yet, could be a thing so godless?

There is no part of him that bows when Vercingtorix does speak like a God, though the tight grin in its curve may bear a shadow of closeness. It is too cutting, too kneading against his lips, too revealing of its cruelty and too uncivilized to mimic the courtesy of such a gesture. It does not know it then because it is a thing that only knows hunger, but such is the unraveling of arrogance, of restless abandon, of an unwillingness to yield. And there is more, so much more, but it does not know enough to pursue the depths of what is left in the shadow of one emotion drawn to the next – it only knows that it curls meekly at his chest, in his gut, and threatens a growl at the pit of his throat.


Erasmus looks to Vercingtorix through slitted pupils like daggers raised, half-lidded speculation, the thick curve of his neck drawn back taut against his shoulders. With me, curls around a many unspoken words left unconfirmed while his eyes persuaded their way around the rest of the library, though were not kept to any particular thing. Erasmus watched, undeterred, shadows curling along the length of his spine, gathered like webs beneath the frays of his mane. Waiting patiently, pondering what stayed in the space that followed “with me” or continued on restlessly, where one may end and another may begin.

With me, he says, as though the propriety of Novus and the purpose for which he was willed here could be explained by one story alone.

For a moment it thinks, no, it does not begin with you, with a golden boy, a vagabond, a handsome creature who speaks with the ethos of a forgotten king. But why couldn't it then, why couldn't the beginning of anything begin with pretty young vagrants with eyes as open and proud as the sea? So he says nothing for a length of time, nothing but to observe in the grace of silence. 

At least, if you would like it to be the beginning of something.

There is more left unsaid, or there is more that he cannot help but insinuate that follows and pervades what has been spoken, and he doubts his own intuitions humbly. But when he waits for more, nothing comes but the quiet of the library, full and still, hanging between them with the promise of something. Something more, something else, something less, but something nonetheless, patiently regarding one response or another. “I would,” he purrs after a time, the sound resonant and deep like a wolfish whisper from the bottom of a dark well. Like a voice from the other side of a confessional veil. Like a breath unearthed from the depths of a woodland tomb. His expression darkened, grin loosened from the taut edges of his curving lips, though still carved by the same predatory sharpness as ever before.