 The sand tastes like gold on her teeth, hard sharp and full of blood. He looks like diamonds. He's slick with grit. Each scar cuts a facet across his skin and Eshek, who is counting them, thinks that there is no other jewel in the world like this one. What other diamond can grow love in the center of it, love enough and full enough to form blood diamonds from darkness?
For Eshek there is no other name for stones now, no other name but gray (and sad, oh so sad). He looks like he could have been dropped down by some beast on the moon-- gray, pitted and soft as dust. She smiles, and moonlight leaks out.
All the air rushing between them feels like nothing against her skin. It is not hot or cold, home or homesickness. It is nothing but wind on which sand runs, and runs, until the world looks dirty and fouled. She hates the sand, she hates the gold and the wealth. All she wants is diamonds, slick and cut. Blood and shine. Blood and shine.
That's all death is in the end, blood and shine. Red skin with light pouring out from every crevice like a rainstorm of redemption.
“Don't.” She says, but what she is saying is: don't pretend you are not a stone, don't pretend that all you are is alive. But what keeps pouring out from her in shine, shine, shine are words that sound like: “Do not ask me questions when you already know what I will say. You have always known.” Religion lies writ in the cracks of her teeth, and across the char scrawled across her bones like suffering is scrawled across him like a honeycomb. She thinks he will understand all the things she means to say.
Eshek blinks. Light goes out. Light goes on. The sun rises and sets in the pits of her face.
A god blinks.
A god turns away.
The sand still tastes like gold on her teeth. A god still wants diamonds.
A god is gone, into Solterra. Solterra who is fat and bloated with sorrow.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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