And now I call you to pray - Exemplary

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray


As dawn breaks through the overhang of limbs, soft leaves and needles, the gift giver growls curses like something feral and runs a great, curved horn down the side of a tree, skinning it down to the bone.
He did not sleep soundly. But he rarely does these days.
A Norwegian cold nipped at his face and ears… and hands. Strange, fleshy hands and his smooth, pink cheeks were bitten by the rough friction of arctic wind. He was surrounded by strange little men and he thought he may know them by name, but he couldn’t remember – thought that he may have done wrong by them, but the price he had paid had been worth it in the end… It had been him. It had been him as he had been.

Then he had fallen. The steel, cogs and ice below his feet fell through and he plummeted.
—But he had it. Clutched in his long fingers.

When he blinked open his eyes, his head was overburdened and his chest ached deeply.
All around him, like rocks in a witch’s circle – he in their center – were perfect mounds of fresh earth. He thought he could name a few but the others were yet strangers to him. Later things.

Things to look forward to.

When he woke up he could remember none of it.

He moves as if wrapped up in cobwebs, slowly and stiffly, through the familiar tracts of lichen covered stones and thin birch trees. (Near where he knows her bones are drying out and cracking. Far away from where the other one is wriggling and still very meaty.) Somewhere nearby, she skulks in between her world and the one she refuses to vacate. He lets her roam in peace. She is attached to him by something neither of them understands and neither of them can cleave.
Not that he is sure that is what she wants, to be free of him and this.
Maybe she fears what she can only stave off for so long.

He leaves the choke of moss and rot and shade. The Forest is his greathall, but his hall is crawling with maggots and every so often, he needs to leave it. 
He goes to the Beach, to dip his feet in the saltwater and imagine her there, where she had been so long ago. He goes, under his cloak of invisibility, to the glittering crags of his little brother’s humble little home and watches the boy frolic with the girl and he wonders which would break first.

He goes to the Meadow this time. Pollock watches, from afar, birds picks around her clean ribs and eye sockets and her skin like gold (like his, in more ways than one) fall off in strips. He still feels nothing.
He had returned to stand by her once Chessur had cleared out that little rat from her dead teat and he had waited. Waited for it to come to him but it never did. She grew stiff and cold, but never sympathetic. Never meaningful.


POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina’s