[P] this black terror and turmoil

[Eshek]

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. eshek “a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”

@Raum

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 


Knock
 
And the air echoes with the cry of hoof and wood.
 
Knock
 
And the world slows to hear the echoing beat.
 
Knock
 
And Solterra begins to tremble.
 
The doors creak open, whining on their hinges and dragging through the dusty earth. They do not wish to open unto plague, but these are monstrous times. The world has begun to turn so differently now.
 
The poison king stands before the gates as if he has been awaiting her. In silence he drinks Eshek in and wonders what binds her together. Is it the eternity of universes strung together like the silk of an ancient web? Or is it something worse: the dreadful magic of a goddess who reaches beyond comprehension? In her gaze he beholds death – has it come for him at last? Is she his reaper brought forth from the forges of existence and sent out to reap the sinful?
 
Her eyes are the silver glow of metal: sun metal, moon metal, metals flung far, far into space. Is her stare enough to conduct the sparks of his own electric eyes? The echoes of Eshek’s last knock finally fall away to nothingness and only the idle clink of metal breaks the silence as soldiers shift, uneasy.
 
The girl is a god among men and Raum stands bold before her judgement. He did not balk before his own god, why should he cower now? Death is upon him and it is him. All of Novus now resounds with his misdeeds. Raum and death are one and Acton’s blood made it so.
 
Did Acton send her? Did she shed her chains and slip the bonds of Purgatory to find him here? Eternity laughs, universes burn bright, bright, bright. She moves and she is little more than the cloud of dust that stirs at the foot of the gate.
 
“If you have come for my soul you shall remain hungry.” For oh his soul is a long lost thing. Inside him is a swallowing chasm. Its maw is large and black, its appetite insatiable.
 
“Or,” The silver Crow hums, his voice a satin thing, doused in gasoline and dripping poison like acid. “Is it vengeance you wish to taste?” Slowly that skull tilts, his blue eyes bright as sparks and deep at the drowning sea. He studies the girl corvid and fearless, for what do crows fear when the sky is theirs?

---

@Eshek

[Eshek]

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. eshek “a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”

@Raum

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 


She smiles and light shines wicked and bright from between her teeth. It is lighthouse bright; a herald of salvation and doom.
 
Your soul could not fill me.
 
And the light of her is lightning. It is strobe light that flashes as her lips forge each word from starlight and space. Within that light Raum does not flinch. He glints like a blade thirsting for blood, waiting, waiting for vengeance as blood slips like whispers down its body. Drip, drip falls the blood, chiming with the beat of his clockwork heart.
 
Her words are a mockery, her smile a claw that reaches out beyond existence and death. Raum feels the claw of her smile scratching along the silver of his skin. Ah they grate and scream like great weapons meeting in battle, sharp upon sharp, steel upon steel. Sparks will fly and heads will roll and still the king stands unmoved, unaffected as she moves to him in light and horror.
 
She laughs with the sound of grating metal, of a tornado drawing breath. Raum turns his head to better watch her and the black of his eyes are the parts of her skin that hold the light in. His eyes are the black underground chasms, of vacuum holes deep in space where not even light can reach.
 
Still her laugh echoes, splitting his ears, his skin. She hungers, like a monster famished. She sets greedy eyes upon him, upon the deer, upon the heights of his citadel. Yet none would sate her, her taste is a thing far more refined, far more demanding. He sees that monster as  she sets her eyes on him, she sees the dark of her lighthouse space, of the beast that roils in the dark, it’s teeth vacant of flesh and blood. Oh it wants, it wants.
 
Untouchable, aloof, with a blue of ice and deep sea blue, Raum holds her gaze. Her light turns his blue into a tsunami and from within its rising wall a leviathan’s shadow looms. Legion lands, a valkyrie’s cry rippling from his parted beak. It breathes through pointed fangs and poison splatters like dew upon the ground.
 
The basilisk’s head turns toward the girl of light and death and his skull tilts. Does the light filter through the scarf about his eyes? Is it light enough to bathe his gaze within?
 
Raum watches as the beast steps closer to the stranger, talon’s scraping upon the stone as Eshek’s gaze had upon Raum’s skin. The beast rumbles a hiss, his serpent’s tongue rising, tasting metal and destruction.
 
“I have so much more.” Raum hums, his voice a murmur, barely audible over the rattle of Legion’s breath. The king watches as the monster edges closer, listening, listening to the laugh of wicked light made flesh.
 
There is no hospitable smile, no warming eyes to welcome this new creature. Raum was not made for hospitality and yet, “Tell me what might satiate your hunger.”
 
And at last he moves, pouring like ink toward Legion and the girl he watches through the dark of his blindfold. His steps are leonine grace. He moves until he stands before Eshek, the heat of lava upon his skin, the light of a thousand suns illuminating the sharp silver of his body.
 
“Welcome to Solterra.” His welcome rises as steam between them.

---

@Eshek

[Eshek]

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. eshek “a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”

@Raum

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

She walks toward his monster and oh how Legion bristles. Lower and lower his head drifts for even blindfolded, he knows what fallen gods sound like. Around him is still ash, still the stone of a thousand animals he has turned to stonedust. His belly is full of bones that taste of nothing but stone and earth.
 
His stomach is the ocean that turns stone smooth as pebbles. She touches his wing, as soft as satin, yet the basilisk reacts as if worlds were colliding. Raum wonders of the sound of grinding stone, of earth crumpling into earth and ripples of energy running out, out, out in a great tsunami of death.
 
Legions maw is parted, his beak gleams black as the places of Eshek the light cannot touch. He is the black to her light and oh how his nape twists. The monster coils like a serpent and strikes, the point of his beak, sharp as a scythe, reaching out to cut the soft of her muzzle.
 
Oh it is only dark behind the monster’s blindfold, yet already he wonders if he might see the glow of Eshek’s blood runing white, or if pestilence will spill from her open veins and infect like a plague of locusts, spilling out in their multitudes and scattering to hide. His master believes it might be all three and still Raum does not tremble.
 
She talks of eating, of filling her stomach full of basilisk bones and venom. Raum does not blink, not even when he sees her swallowing his monster. No basilisk would ever be enough, within Eshek is a universe that starves for all eternity.
 
Solterra’s king, mortal, fragile, fallible before this girl of gods and monsters, settles back. A hind leg rests and he watches her as if she were a just another peddler amidst a sea of them: nondescript, plain, unremarkable… Yet he knows her, she knows her yawn would swallow him whole, already he hears the cracking of Legion’s bones, already he knows how his beast’s heart is racing. Ah, Legion can feel the creep of death breathing fetid and keen upon his scaled flesh. Yet Legion is no rabbit to tremble before the lights of Eshek’s eyes. He is no beast to lie down like a lamb and spill his blood upon her altar. Legion screams at Eshek, he splits the night and though he screams at the goddess, Raum knows the fury is for him…
 
He would indeed feed his monster to this god-girl if she might be of better service to him.
 
“Do you think you could eat him before he turns you to stone?” The silver king asks, soft as moonlight, dangerous as darkness. His eyes are trailing this girl, marking every dip and press of her flesh, where it stretches to cover her godhood, making her mortal. But oh mortality stretches, oh it is thin, thin skin pulled too tight over bony divinity.
 
“You would make a beautiful statue.” And it might be a joke, were his lips not the lines of daggers, if they did not have a Ghosts’s blood haunting their black, black grimace.
 
Slowly he steps toward her, with eyes full of pestilence and light. There is no part of his gaze that is not filled with her. “And if you managed to eat him before he turns your insides into rock, what then might you think to devour. This land is full only of little things – what are ants to a creature that preys upon dragons?”
 
And oh Raum is close, close feeling her teeth, blunt as bones, upon his skin. Here her light is heat, scolding, burning, consuming his skin, his soul. Is she worth the ash he would become?

---

@Eshek, ah that was fun to write <3

[Eshek]

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. eshek “a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”

@Raum