At first, the thing that becomes erasmus thinks that it has fallen headlong into a dream.

It is just before dawn when it arrives at the place that connects them all together – the web, the realm, the island. When the darkness of the night and the heat of the stars do not shift and reveal to it its namesake, it realizes that sleep has not carried it here. There are no dying embers of suns or the coldness of forsaken moons, no half-eaten planets lost to some new orbit, though it cannot help but feel as though it is still the black hole on the precipice – still the event horizon, hungry, lost, and waiting.

When the stars lose their place and barrel earthward, he closes his eyes and grins, but it is not sated still. They cascade like shards, the sound and smell of death and ashes, and the aether leaks from his pores in a veil of starless night. He waits until there is nothing but silence. And waits still. The gravity is spellbound, then heavy – it longs to drag him with it, drag it into the graveyard of stars that catch the faint glint of his gold then lapse into darkness, longs to fold him into the wreck yard of sharp and harrowing things, of deathly things to which he belongs.

He is no god. No devil. No savior. The aether is an abomination.

But the universe makes no mistakes.

Dawn pulls refractions over the mangled corpses of still-hot stars, colors bounding weightlessly from their tomb, the embers of constellations still glowing, sparking, then giving in to the cold stillness of death. At first, it is unclear if it is snow or ashes that drift from the sky – dancing, cascading – until a flake settles in the heat of his spine and too, dies.

When he walks, each step that folds itself over a still struggling shard of star crushes it with a gasp or sigh, or the long-gone cry of agony. Aether reaches to them meekly – as though shadows drip from him like a funeral veil, tattered edges separating the pieces left in his wake. They knead and knot, stitch and pull, ripping that final, diseased life from each suffering fragment of wounded heaven. Some cease into dust, mixing with the ash-snow.

Beneath him, the mirrors regress and fade like the light gone from the eyes of a doe, and in the horrific shadow that passes over him: reveal in each surface, the animation of colliding planets, dying suns, collapsing galaxies that against each other knit and burst like a supernova. In some, the sunlight draws a shimmer across broad faces, and when Erasmus passes the reflections shift and ripple and pull apart like multiplying cells. In each, his flesh is not horseflesh but a silhouette full with collapsing solar systems, blackening skies, black holes which collide and swell and break apart and eat and eat and eat.

In some, Erasmus is not the likeness of a boy at all but something awful, something horrific, something with dark eyes and shuddering ribs and a mouth full of grating, grinning, grinding rows of reticulated teeth.

When he stops, the darkness of him spreads beyond his shadow, consuming shards in hopeless images of dying worlds like an unfurling malignancy. At its heart, a mere boy – the image of Erasmus, seeming innocent (but it's the eyes, the eyes tell) and ponderous, waiting for the death of the Novusian sun.

When she arrives, it is as though blood through black waters – the river of him, the ocean of him, entangled and split by this carmine current that rushes. And he, the pall of dark skies and turbulent waves that crash against her. The shadows that trail him spark like fire; raven-hewn tongues of iridescent shade lick across her form, smooth their feline touch across the tightness of her hips and the softness of her thighs, the elegant bow of her shoulders. As each thread is pulled from the outer reaches of mirror-stars they are left pale and wanting, deadened to accept the encroaching warmth of the rising sun with the desperation of a cursed emptiness. they watch like a thousand clouded eyes, lustful for life, for a taste of immortality.

As she moves to him, the dance of her graceful steps are scant to split the reflections in two; but they ache to bear her countenance, and the swell of it reveals its truth only to her. In the spaces where they meet, the celestial darkness of harrowing ungodly things made of dying starlight and meteor pulls into the likeness and unlikeness of him – those shapes which are jagged, full, fanged, hot. When he turns his head to greet her, the smile is amiable, but the mirrors do not lie. In them his image darkens, divides, lips peeled for braided fangs by the hundreds of hungry desolate things, each sharp and bright as a half moon. In few, their tryst is one of tenderness, the softness of passionate admiration, the pleasant twining of wine-reds and bruised violets, accepted in a gracious bouquet. In most, she is devoured by blue-black and teeth, and claw, and scales, and the flood of them is at last red, red, red.

There is no one way in which she is consumed. In the darkest faces hidden from the witness of day, it is in savagery, a profane menagerie of most sacrilegious violence. In all, delight has its every end, and they are lost to the swimming cosmos that bears them. Erasmus knows which is true desire.

He greets her with silent softness that contradicts his barbarous reflections, a meek chivalry exchanged momentarily as she speaks. When her breath stitches warmth across his shoulder, he moves to eclipse her closeness, and a strip of aether crushes a mirror between them that reveals their throats bared and streaming into the blackness of night. She speaks like a dream – or with the woolly-headed softness of a dreamer, lost in the expanse of ecstasy – and always, the lilt of wicked desire. Cheek to cheek in heat-seeking reticence, he searches her eyes for the depth of those dreams, those desires, and curious contempt knots like fire in his core. Your guardian angel when you sin. The pall of glimmering shadow passes over another mirror in which he devours her, piece by aching piece, and presses slowly until it is dust. His grin spreads.

"Restless." He lulls simply, a drifting note malignantly soft amidst the revolving imagery of chaos that surrounds him. His silhouette hounds her like a dark god, the shreds of aether settling in the bow of her back, mingling in the thin reaches between them that howl, blood singing, and possess like pins and needles. When his lips glide across the fullness of her neck they bid warmth to its surface, earnest as prayer. As promise. Firm as demand. "And what draws you here, to me, at such an hour?" he speaks against the most tender curve of her neck, ambrosial and pulsing.