Eshek is watching from the ocean grass. She's nothing more than another star fallen into the sand-- cold dead and unappealing to beasts that crave blood and flesh. The grass sways around her, alive with the soft roar of the ocean wind. Below that there is the hum of flies and the groan of ants drowning in piles of sand. Deeper yet there is the scrape of crabs against roots that sink lower and lower. Root that are eager to trap anything foolish enough to descend into the belly of the beach where they rule.
There is life, death and decay below her and still she watches still as stone as the predator and the comet battle for the right to live.
She wonders if either understands that they only need to look at her to know the answer to all that they are leaving unasked.
The bear and the bit of space thrash and moan and each drinks of the other's blood. She watches wounds open up on their skin like graves. She counts the threads of muscle peaking through like fate counting the threads into which she's preparing to cut. She counts the waves crashing into the shore who eat of the sand like snakes eating rodents.
Strike after strike of teeth and claw she counts. Until the bit of space dives into the surf like a stone.
Eshek moves then from her altar of weed and sand. Each step is a whisper of wind that has not yet reached the sea. The bear is flowing over the sand like a mournful planet and she can taste his hunger like brine against her tongue. He turns his head, black and hungry, and she smiles at him because she is blacker and hungrier than he.
He moans and she doesn't think it call it a roar, not with the sea screaming in her ears. He moves and she doesn't think to call it an attack, there is nothing in her for him but death. He strikes with claws and teeth and she doesn't think to call it pain, for it feels like freedom is carving a way out through her flesh.
Light pours from the holes the bear makes in her skin and from it violence rises like a swell of salt-water.
Eshek becomes unhinged.
The bear turns to gore beneath her hooves with words of bones poking out between the pages of red ink. Bits of fur scrape at her tongue when she licks at the back of her teeth. She's not hungry anymore and her own light feels like it's searing against her cold skin.
She moves towards the sea and the water washes away the bits of blood clinging to her legs. The blood that is shining dissolves into the ocean like salt. It carries itself away into the deep. “Come out from the waves.” When she tosses her head threads of fur fall like rain from her lips.
She understands the way of the stars because she has been the black gravity holding them trapped in nothingness. If they are small specks of brightness in a void, she is the void in which all the light in the world is trapped. But then is she also not light? Is she not both the shining brightness and the void?
Of course she understands the way the girl moves like a star. She understands because she has been everything.
Eshek watches the waves move around the little star. The tide pushes them closer, and closer, and closer. She does not wonder if it feels a little like falling because she already knows. There is nothing in her that wants to fight the sea. Everything at the bottom of all that salt and brine is dead already, shells and ships, pale coral and fragile fish bones. It's all dead.
But what she cannot comprehend is the way this creature doesn't understand. It's eyes shine bright with confusion, like milk too thin to give life. It clicks like a bird with crooked wings and a broken beak. It moves towards her on thin legs that are not as bent as they should be. It is broken.
She knows it it broken.
And so when it licks at the blood on her knees, Eshek does what all universes do to broken things. Her lips pull back to reveal the last of the bear fur stuck in her gums like splinters. Each of her teeth shine like pearls caught in flesh instead of sand and sea. She lays them across its poll and she bites.
Eshek bites hard.
She tries to push it towards the water.
And when she pulls back it is only enough to growl in a way no bear could ever speak. She growls and it sounds like a universe crashing down and cracking open. Her roar is the sound of a hundred stars falling to a mountain where gods pretend to rule.
Bow. Her roar says, bow and I will not eviscerate you.
Eshek feels like she's just waking up. She's shaking loose all the grave-dirt that buried her violence for so long. She's leaving all the lotus-faces of her dead city and all her endless blackness in which she was the only real light.
She loves the feeling of being awake. All the light in her feels like fire, like the core of everything is dancing hot and bright inside her stomach.
