When night breaks solemn over the mountainside, and the lake is a sheet of glass, a mirror full of the millions of stars which flit and glitter so – silence too, comes with it. But it is not the pleasant silence of a summer night, with the distant ebb of the cricket hymns and the breeze shuddering the pines. It is an unsettled quiet, a tense quiet, one which waits as one holds their breath and waits, and sweats, and bleeds, folded beneath the shadow of a sword. It is a beautiful sight despite this enlightening sensation – the stars, each a light amongst lights burning brighter than recalled, fill the lake until it can hold no more. It brims with them, weighs down with them, a heavy thing to beholden; it is still because it must be, because exhaustion may find it were it to move, to break, to force off those things that have swelled it to its capacity. Galaxies are stead in its grasp, whorling and impenetrable by the practicality of the mind, a cluster of sisters gaze into their reflection from their heavenly throne. Somewhere beyond them, a deadened galaxy waits as a black hole, a gaping eye observant and patient. A chaise, a grand niche, a seating fit for a god, or something much more terrible.
He arrives when Vitreus is at its quietest, or the quiet arrives with him – bade, as though knelt to the very sound of his approach, under foot and under world. A vagrant thing, a wraith shrouded in the webbing tangles of glistening aether from the contours of his image; each golden vein reflects within them, or absorbs the brilliance of, the countless myriad stars. Beneath them shadows dance and the crescent moon bows, nurturing and gentle, or sharp and curious as a hungry scythe, to cast a wan light along the reticulated length of his spine. His symmetry waxes and wanes – wolfish, prowling, the roughened angles and the curve of muscle that rove, moonlight tender across the broad stretch of his shoulders and the tone of his core; laid bare beneath the watch of night and its steady roam. Uninvited, a godless wretch, he sacrileges the stillness of the Vitreus Lake when he enters, ripples unraveled from the coursing blade of his likeness – peeled, as though by the undoing of a wound, and poisoned by the stretch of shadow which consume the reflection of the amorous Pleiades and embracing starlight which fades beneath his silhouette.
There he bathes in the waters of Vitreus, consumed by starlight and unwinding shadows that glint and shimmer, a celestial undertow, centered by a black hole. There, he closes his eyes and dreams of things gentler creatures dare not – his mane unwound in the soft, slow ripples, his shoulders eased to the coolness of the lake and the quiet of the night.
into the ashes of no return
