 There are reeds singing in his step, hollow and full of wind-song. He's louder than the fires crackling pale at her back and the smoke rising in towers of prayer towards the black thickness of space. When he comes she licks the air and it tastes like bitter, rotten wine on her corpse lips. She smiles, to hear the thrum of his steps and a deluge of flickering light pours out from her.
It pours from her eyes and her mouth, like sickness and plague. She's poisoned with god-light and she's dead from the brightness just as she always had been.
She wonders if he knows how sweet the dirt is, how it tastes like sugar when the swamp water soaks it and makes brackish water and drowning mud. Each of her eyes holds a promise of it, of death, of darkness and she's eager to close the distance between them. She leans into the space not like a wood-land creature but the space itself, reaching out endlessly in a refusal to be tamed. There's stardust in her teeth and wormholes in the hollow creases framing her rib-cage where the fire is afraid to glow.
He is a forest and wine. She is everything in the places where the forest is full of rot, bones and moss. And the forest always dies, even when it's reborn it dies and dies and dies again. She wonders when he will die.
“Oh." It's not a question but a sigh of light in the way the moon sighs through the dark clouds that try to devour all the stone-light of it. She blinks and the fires look bright because she lets them. “Is this a mortal world?” Stardust makes the words coarse, like dust and smoke and soot, when she raises her eyes to the tines of his antlers reaching from his crown like bones reaching out from a spine.
Eshek knows it's not a mortal world anymore. Not now, not ever again. How could it be?
She wonders if he looks at all her light and realizes that the course of this place has shifted and realigned like a fracture, jagged and sharp enough to puncture through skin. “I am here.” A pause, an aching throb of light that taste like life when she swallows it down, down, down like a stone of a planet. It sits heavy in her stomach and she feels bloated with it (bloated like a fat, dead sea-worm). “Because your world is broken.” Each words sits on her tongue like a gavel, a blade of judgment eager for the neck.
Eshek has come, as she always does, to save them all.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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