Darkness consumes them again and again. 

Someone is following them, the yellow mare says to nobody, breathless, exhausted, her eyes ringed with wildness. She rarely sleeps now, and when she does, it is only because she is one step ahead of death, and it is only for the briefest moment because the nightmares come on almost immediately. They claw her awake over and over until the line between them and reality is drawn too thin to see. 

When daylight sprays across the pair with the scent of salt and greening earth, the shadows they travel through break apart, whipping furiously and then evaporating. Who could possibly be following them? And yet, she knows it to be true. The young wendigo has turned her pitch-dark eyes on great forests that stretch impossibly into the sky, on glassy shores reflecting strange green lights that dance in the sky, on red sand and golden grasses, and on a mountain that pierced the sky like a dagger and rumbled under her feet like a living thing. The wendigo could tell her that nothing follows them through those shadow portals but darkness and the yellow mare's nightmares, but she does not. She, too, has her distraction.

Illunis is hungry. Illunis is always hungry. Her narrow head turns to the empty-looking sea and sees no respite there. It scalds, that knowledge. Illunis would devour the world, yet the sea rebuffs her in a way frozen wastelands, parched deserts, and milky cloud forests have not. The child growls softly at the water lapping close at hand. One day. And perhaps then her belly will know what it is to be full.

It is not the yellow mare's fault that the wendigo is hungry. Illunis nurses greedily. Is it more than the twins? There's no room left in her shattered consciousness to remember - or to think to try to remember. The black-boned child (had the twins been black-boned?) is consuming her, an ounce, a grain, a shadow at a time. The yellow mare knows, but she forgets so easily, now. The click of her daughter's black teeth distracts her. It stirs a memory.

Someone is coming.

Clicking. Have Pangea's aliens found her at last? Old fears loom too large, the yellow-eyed xenomorph is near twice the size it should be, as unreflective of the noon sun as the shadow it is made of, yet its black bladed tail still cuts through the air with a whistle as it stalks the gaunt mare and child through the Ruins.