and I pretend to pray
So many falter at the bridge. They look down. I look down, too. Is it the ribs that disturb them, or the flesh? The dying muscle, the remnants of organs and once-life? Maybe it’s gross. It’s definitely gross. Rot is not the same as just-killed, still-pumping blood in the body dead. It’s too dead. Way too dead. I think the gemstones were a nice touch, anyway.
I cross the bridge. Some others do, too, now and then, but I reckon it’s not as many as usual. I haven’t been to the island before, myself - I’ve heard of lots of beautiful things coming and going with the seasons, but business has been too good for me to make it out here. I asked the Sleepmother for some awake-time and headed out here before anyone had the chance to tell me what it was like.
I’m not disappointed.
There is a great sparkling city, and a castle in the distance. I didn’t read many story-books as a child (I couldn’t read), but this feels rather fantastical (maybe not to those who didn't cross the bridge, maybe not to those who ever read a knightly tale). Every corner is dark and looming, a ghost-wind howling through the empty shops, between what living bodies wander the streets. I don’t talk to anyone - I don’t need to. Or want to. In a window I see a sculpture - I think - of a horse, falling, pressed up against the glass as if violently thrown against it. One of her wings is crushed beneath her body, bloody bones splintering up between the feathers, and the other flails helplessly, eternally paused, above her. Her expression is twisted into a scream. I wonder what knocked her from the sky.
I enter the shop, and in it there seems to be nothing - until I follow the pegasi’s gaze to the opposite wall, where black stone pulses with orange crystal. It takes up the entire corner, stretching to the cathedral-high ceiling; a vast shadow, and several appendages - or something like them, I am hesitant to say that any part of it resembles a living thing - reach out across the other walls. It has no eyes, no mouth. It might as well be an ore deposit, but obviously - obviously - it is a monster. The kind you see when you snuff the candle and your eyes find only melting shadows in the sudden darkness.
I do not think this is a store at all.
@Tenebrae
