He does not dream of her but when her body divides the waters like a searing comet breaking the atmosphere, he cannot help but dream of the eating of worlds, the division of milky ways, the carving of a star as it screams, burning, splintering anew and changing evermore. Her veins sing a song like the one he has only ever known – syllables remiss, but a hymn resounds like bone-white heat stinging in the night; it is not the cadence of stones or the cries of no-brained creatures coursing through the shadow of a red sun. It is not the guttural psalm of a dying planet but a chorale of things risen, things blistered, things breaking a sky, a heaven, the singsong lilt of a falcon splitting clouds in its crescendo. It is a sound not unlike a hot blade belting a deafening chime, a croon unto death or a chorus of victory stirred from visceral quarters yet. He is envious before he wakes from this unrest to witness her, because that which becomes Erasmus is not yet – and never will be, and may never again hear such a song sung for him the way her veins sing for her, for power, for her hunger rising like a choir.
His bones only hum with the echo of remembrance and the sting of mortality abated, waiting like pale teeth in the dark grating sharp on wet stone flashes. Flesh crawls, and that chill climbs down the spine and down the gullet and down into the pit of enmity that only knows the rolling heat of appetite, parasite. Her outline is burned into the dark of his eyelids and when they shutter back on their hinges – he cannot be disappointed. She stands to the waters as an idol stands the course of weather on its pedestal, brilliant and restless and glorious and invincible. And though Erasmus, the whole of him and it now, does not kneel or bow as one may to such idols, he bears her with a certain esteem she warrants; if it is not awe it is a wordless, grinless admiration. They speak not as animals or men or stars or anything quite so compact for flesh or bone or death, but as an understanding of stellar forms, eldritch and true, one soul honoring another.
As one unhallowed monster to another, eyes and teeth and fangs in the night. Go on, they glint, careening, sharp and jagged, silent as a tomb. Make of me what you will.
When he looks to her then with hunger stirring in his core, he cannot help but watch as the waters boil around her, and the shifting steam cast shadows across the brine on the curve of her back like the eclipse of a thousand moons. She is a reflection of the cosmos then – but more brilliant, blindingly deft as carved starsong and cruel brightness. He wonders if he were to open her throat to him the way her veins open to her, if she would taste like the undoing of stars, or the mergeance of celestial bodies. Touching his lips to the silver surface of the lake, he smooths them along the white line of her neck's reflection, and wonders also if she would be his undoing, then. Would she carve him of hot whiteness burning like the thousand suns he's devoured? When he raises his head again, his mane falls in dark waves against his neck, the fibers dulled in the shadow of her luster, his horns framing the crescent moon.
Aether, iridescent blackness, shifting inky green and violet and indigo as basking in the heat of her light, skims the waters between them. They ghost, shadows curling against one another like the roll of oceanic currents wrought; crashing, withdrawn, crashing, pulsing, sighing, hound tongues licking the glow of her shine. They yearn along her curves, gather their black eyes in the shallow salt-glass of ocean droplets, pressing meekly along the length of her spine, gathered back to the steaming waters to draw languidly along her hips. Were he a god – for such creatures were vain things, vain and arrogant and contemptible – perhaps he would have laughed then, a sound that was cruel as winter and light as spring, and sought to open her brightness unto him. To devour. To carve. To drink and drink and drink and on, never knowing an end.
Instead, the sharp contours of his expression shift, something amiable or adoring, or awful and hungry, or all of which may be accounted. The moon casts a thin line down the length of his nose, broadens across the angles of his high cheekbone, curving devilishly with the line of his lips. Stars cluster at the square of his shoulders, the tuck of his waist, ever watchful Sisters bright-eyed and wanton. "Does it feel like burning?" just barely over the decibels of a whisper, wind through a briar, an utterance so smooth and low and full it is unearthly, humming: "Does it feel like resurgence?" Purred like a lion with a bloody mouth.
into the ashes of no return
@Leto
