 This is how luminescence is made.
It's poured from the moon, and from the core of the sun. It's collected like honey from a hive full of dead bees with wings torn down to dust. It's made molten from the heat of the everything, every inch of skin, every drop of life running hot and thick through the veins of monsters. It's pulled out from all the places shadows are too afraid to cross.
Every star in the world, every moon, every sun must die to make it. Everything. Must. Die.
And it's luminescence that pours out when the basilisk draws his beak across the tender flesh of a god-cage. Drops of her fall like the first desert rain of summer. She watches herself fall across the dirt and she watches the beast flail at the end of his fragile tether. Each drop of her that's falling, falling, falling is another dead star, another dead moon, another dead sun. Each drop of her is dead.
She is the mother of ghosts.
Eshek smiles. It is sharp and blinding. It is hungry.
He comes closer.
That is always the first mistake of a mortal man, to walk by dead thing and think life is some sort of shield. It is the second mortal mistake of men to think that beasts are made to be tamed into a weapon. It is the final mistake to think that anything made of dead stars, and moon, and suns, cares about any of that.
“You think of hunger like a wolf thinks of a crippled lamb. You think like something that will die.” Her teeth are leaking light. Her nose is leaking light. She drags both across his cheek and she doubts he understands what it means to be anointed by luminescence. Another mistake. “And you will die. But you know that don't you?” She doesn't laugh, she doesn't need to when every planet inside her bones is reaching out like a sea against the shoreline of her corpse.
Eshek wants to feast upon his eyes and lay them across the dirt so that he might see clearly. Then, maybe, she will feast upon every mad thing that lives inside his body. And she will still be hungry.
“And when you are dead, I will be the stone upon which you pray out all your sins until you are mute and sore with all of it. All the ants will pray upon me until that's all the world is-- ants and bone, dead kings and dead monsters.” Her lips are everything already dead and her voice is everything that wants to be dead. The curl of her throat lays bared before him and her spine lays curled and waiting like a snake beneath his beast.
She waits like a lamb. She waits.
All of her light remains trained on him. All of it.
“So tell me more of what you know about stone, little king. Tell me more.” Luminescence speaks through her. Luminescence always wants to be remade, and reformed, and reincarnated.
Always.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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