 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.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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