 A bell tolls in soft peels and it echoes like death through bones when it rings and chimes across the court built out of stone.
A bell tolls and the city starts to listen. It opens up ears that are so trained now to the taste of violence on the night. It opens up just to start closing down, each horse listening to the tolling song like lambs listening to the crack of a whip driving them onward (onward, onward to the blade).
A bell tolls and she is there walking in the opposite direction of the lambs, She's bright and bloody and each of her steps seems like the mechanical twitch of an spider hunting. The setting sun shadows should feel cool against her skin as the heat of the day starts to die. But she can hardly feel the wind against her skin or the dust between her teeth.
She can feel nothing but the brightness and the coolness of the reaper (of herself). There is nothing but her steps, the steps of the lambs and the gray stallion walking like a ghost inside his map-skin made of scars. She wants to fill him in with ink and light, black and bright.
There is something in the horror hidden in all those map marks that makes her draw closer to him. She can almost hear the grind of his teeth and the ache of his soul that might be as marked as his form. Surely no lamb has every walked so wearily in such a skin and laid its head willingly upon the altar. She pauses in the street and blinks her eyes so they shine like a lighthouse shines in the sea.
She beckons his ship closer and closer and the rocks around them look bright as blood as she waits. The street spreads out around her like a stomach trapped between the bones of the walls.
For him she would wait forever, if only to know if his scars hold as many celestial secrets as her form does.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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