 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.”
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