 There is something cryptic unfolding in her as she walks. Each alleyway, and booth, and bonfire are more folds in that nameless, tangled thing unwrapping in her like a spool of wire. It branches out like a dead tree and tickles all the bones and pools of light churning like comets under her skin. The branches scrape, grow and the roots sink themselves into her legs.
The sleepless and the desperate move around her like ants, small bundles of life that work, work and die. She is light between them and some look at her and whisper 'star'. And she smiles back and the light oozing like gore from her lips seems to say yes in a silent, throbbing chant. There are two moons in her eyes, moons that swallowed every sun and star in the sky until they were bright instead of stone.
Necromancy lives in the sheen of her eyes, dead things made alive again by eating, and swallowing, and consuming.
That cryptic unfolding thing in her bones quivers, and turns its holy gaze, when the edge of a blade flashes in the darkness like a bone in the starlight. She turns and the darkness dies in that space between her eyes where there has ever only been light.
She closes her eyes, the darkness lives.
The tap, tap, tap of hooves on stone lead her onward through the alleys. She can hear the words of the stallion, hear the sigh of the blade when it slips, hungry and wanting through the darkness. She can hear to the cry of bone and flesh slipping together like two worms in the dirt.
The cryptic prophecy in her is unfolded now, and it's gaping and hollow. It swallows up the sound blood and flesh make and soon she's swallowing the blackness when she opens her eyes.
Death unfolds before her like a prayer, an ritual offering to that hollow, gaping brightness inside of her.
She smiles, more light pours out until the blood at her hooves is as bright as a ruby at high noon. The bodies look stark against the blackness and the brightness. They look like art above an altar. “Are you smart, then?” She says. But the way she says 'then', when it drips out in words made of light, makes the space in the silence sound like kneel.
Each drop of blood from his nose slows when she blinks, blinks, blinks and casts the darkness into strobe-light instead of steady-light. She counts them each and tells that wanting thing inside that each drop is an offering.
Eshek smiles and opens wide her eyes. The world returns to the speed of ants.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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