 Eshek is watching from the ocean grass. She's nothing more than another star fallen into the sand-- cold dead and unappealing to beasts that crave blood and flesh. The grass sways around her, alive with the soft roar of the ocean wind. Below that there is the hum of flies and the groan of ants drowning in piles of sand. Deeper yet there is the scrape of crabs against roots that sink lower and lower. Root that are eager to trap anything foolish enough to descend into the belly of the beach where they rule.
There is life, death and decay below her and still she watches still as stone as the predator and the comet battle for the right to live.
She wonders if either understands that they only need to look at her to know the answer to all that they are leaving unasked.
The bear and the bit of space thrash and moan and each drinks of the other's blood. She watches wounds open up on their skin like graves. She counts the threads of muscle peaking through like fate counting the threads into which she's preparing to cut. She counts the waves crashing into the shore who eat of the sand like snakes eating rodents.
Strike after strike of teeth and claw she counts. Until the bit of space dives into the surf like a stone.
Eshek moves then from her altar of weed and sand. Each step is a whisper of wind that has not yet reached the sea. The bear is flowing over the sand like a mournful planet and she can taste his hunger like brine against her tongue. He turns his head, black and hungry, and she smiles at him because she is blacker and hungrier than he.
He moans and she doesn't think it call it a roar, not with the sea screaming in her ears. He moves and she doesn't think to call it an attack, there is nothing in her for him but death. He strikes with claws and teeth and she doesn't think to call it pain, for it feels like freedom is carving a way out through her flesh.
Light pours from the holes the bear makes in her skin and from it violence rises like a swell of salt-water.
Eshek becomes unhinged.
The bear turns to gore beneath her hooves with words of bones poking out between the pages of red ink. Bits of fur scrape at her tongue when she licks at the back of her teeth. She's not hungry anymore and her own light feels like it's searing against her cold skin.
She moves towards the sea and the water washes away the bits of blood clinging to her legs. The blood that is shining dissolves into the ocean like salt. It carries itself away into the deep. “Come out from the waves.” When she tosses her head threads of fur fall like rain from her lips.
That too is lost to the sea.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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