 Each of the shadows twists grotesquely, mausoleums of black that reach out in tangles suggesting shape and form, in the sunlight. The canyon is a chorus of black and light and red-rock that looks a little bit like hard, dried blood where two shades meet. It stretches out endlessly before her and endlessly behind her, and still she walks, and her eyes shine in the black shadows with spectral half-light.
And each time she blinks the rock near her looks to be squirming.
If there are other bodies around her she takes no notice of their mortal-brine, nor of the direction in which their earthly coils drives them. She takes no notice but that of blood-stone, and squirming rock and the way the sun arches through the shadows around her like a halo. Only the pillars of stones that make altars around her matter, only the things the strongest south wind could not bend.
There is something primitive in this place, she thinks, where the rock curls above her head like a guillotine. Something that suggests that deep in these rocks another world lives, where twilight lives and strange stones bloom from the walls like blood from a wound. She wonders how deep she would have to dig to find it, the thing beneath this world that pulses and drives it onward through the cosmos.
She wonders what it would taste like on her tongue. Would the core of the world burn or cool the reckless wants that pools hollowly in all the light of her?
It's in her wondering that she hears him calling. He sounds like a sinner calling for saving when their eyes are dripping gore instead of tears. She turns to him and answers his hello in a code of darkness and light. She replies by the blinking of her eyes. It seems slow and strange when the chime of his chains rings almost needy and frantic through the hollow canyon. Each of her movements seems grandiose, a suggestion of infinite violence.
Closer he comes and closer she moves toward him. She matches him step for step and where he drips sweat she leaks brightness instead of mortal debris. Stillness only comes to her when he's close enough to touch. She counts the chains on him, each one a mark of worth that she counts like a jailer counts villainous acts. The number pleases her and so she opens her lips to reply and the walls still squirm like worms in the throb of her blinking, bright gaze.
“God.” She says, with light pouring out between her teeth.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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