At first, the thing that becomes erasmus thinks that it has fallen headlong into a dream.
It is just before dawn when it arrives at the place that connects them all together – the web, the realm, the island. When the darkness of the night and the heat of the stars do not shift and reveal to it its namesake, it realizes that sleep has not carried it here. There are no dying embers of suns or the coldness of forsaken moons, no half-eaten planets lost to some new orbit, though it cannot help but feel as though it is still the black hole on the precipice – still the event horizon, hungry, lost, and waiting.
When the stars lose their place and barrel earthward, he closes his eyes and grins, but it is not sated still. They cascade like shards, the sound and smell of death and ashes, and the aether leaks from his pores in a veil of starless night. He waits until there is nothing but silence. And waits still. The gravity is spellbound, then heavy – it longs to drag him with it, drag it into the graveyard of stars that catch the faint glint of his gold then lapse into darkness, longs to fold him into the wreck yard of sharp and harrowing things, of deathly things to which he belongs.
He is no god. No devil. No savior. The aether is an abomination.
But the universe makes no mistakes.
Dawn pulls refractions over the mangled corpses of still-hot stars, colors bounding weightlessly from their tomb, the embers of constellations still glowing, sparking, then giving in to the cold stillness of death. At first, it is unclear if it is snow or ashes that drift from the sky – dancing, cascading – until a flake settles in the heat of his spine and too, dies.
When he walks, each step that folds itself over a still struggling shard of star crushes it with a gasp or sigh, or the long-gone cry of agony. Aether reaches to them meekly – as though shadows drip from him like a funeral veil, tattered edges separating the pieces left in his wake. They knead and knot, stitch and pull, ripping that final, diseased life from each suffering fragment of wounded heaven. Some cease into dust, mixing with the ash-snow.
Beneath him, the mirrors regress and fade like the light gone from the eyes of a doe, and in the horrific shadow that passes over him: reveal in each surface, the animation of colliding planets, dying suns, collapsing galaxies that against each other knit and burst like a supernova. In some, the sunlight draws a shimmer across broad faces, and when Erasmus passes the reflections shift and ripple and pull apart like multiplying cells. In each, his flesh is not horseflesh but a silhouette full with collapsing solar systems, blackening skies, black holes which collide and swell and break apart and eat and eat and eat.
In some, Erasmus is not the likeness of a boy at all but something awful, something horrific, something with dark eyes and shuddering ribs and a mouth full of grating, grinning, grinding rows of reticulated teeth.
When he stops, the darkness of him spreads beyond his shadow, consuming shards in hopeless images of dying worlds like an unfurling malignancy. At its heart, a mere boy – the image of Erasmus, seeming innocent (but it's the eyes, the eyes tell) and ponderous, waiting for the death of the Novusian sun.
