To a strange night of stone - Bruise

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

This, too, is part of the ritual. A ritual nobody has ever witnessed before.
It is a quiet, solemn, consecrate affair.

Observe;

He is silent as he walks with Bruise. His lame gait does not get in his way much and they make good use of those flexible, nimble feet as he guides them across Pangea’s gnarled, diseased crests and finally to the western edge where water laps far below. Normally, this would be undertaken at the Beach, the very place where he had attended her well-moistened corpse, having heard word from brothers that she was gone. Finally.

(She, who years ago Pollock had warned the then boy, Bruise, never to mention again—
This badgers old memories from their burrows, but not in the biting, savage way they had come a-knocking when his son had asked him what is mother had called him. No.

In a soft, gentler way. Memories that feel as warm as the blood that had found willing refuge on his face—the brine brings memories of absolution.)

He has spent many hours pacing this bluff, he has come to know it well. He eyes a perilously thin strip of sea spray soaked rock, a hard, bedraggled beach of sorts, laying uncovered by a low tide. This morning, the sea sits quiet and sun-soaked, refracting back the sun’s blinding eye.
“Watch your step,” he growls, and as usual, his tone reeks of begging for blood. Those rocks look hungry, too, and if they shall be fed today, so be it.

He lives to die.

The descent is threatening. 
Men like them, he knows, love a good threat. The rocks are sharp and slippery, grown thick with green slime near the bottom where the tide will rise and whisper of apocalypse to him. They make it. Of course they do. Men like them do not bow to mere fucking threats.

“Always wash,” he grunts, stepping out until the cold sea water nips wantingly at his legs. “The blood becomes ignoble, after a time.” He bends a single knee, bowing and pressing his face into the water, just enough for the sea to caress his forehead and bridge; it pools pink around his downturned face, taking from him their sins. All of them. His. hers. The darkness that, together, they made beautiful.
It is an offering. A baptism. A cleansing.

He sucks in air and pushes clear of the surface, sinking his heavy head down to the rock bottom, only the back curvature of his horns sticking out. He hold it there, bubbles rising slowly, the pink darkening and growing.

When it becomes unbearable, and the sea becomes too greedy, he pulls back, disrupting the quiet and sending sanguinary water cascading down his neck, chest and back. “You like to play with them,” he muses, breathing and blinking, righting to a stand, “like a cat does. And that’s fine.” The gift-giver turns, his golden skin still stained, “I do, too. But something more final must be done, soon.” He considers the young man, every inch is capable. Probably, every inch willing.

“You have something to prove to me,” he knows it might bite, hopes it might, because the ragged pull of his influence is the only thing (besides, of course, the fear) that he knows can... inspire. “Understand?” he waits, his skin twitching off the brine, “I have something to show you.” Back up the sea wall.

the gift-giver