08-20-2017, 08:20 PM
A time of falling.
Stars fall, and he falls with them, tumbling back to the earth smeared in soot and stardust. It’s rare, for him to stray from his usual gravestone gray, to appear to them so lurid and colorful. He’d long thought such displays below him, when he was a weaker thing, when his image was one of a blood-soaked warrior.
(Now, what is he – a thing apart, a thing that rarely appears, a god who vomited forth a land only to have it sink back into the ocean when he left it, abandoned it as he had so much else in this mortal plane.)
But he’d fallen – in love, that is, though that particular word sits ill on the dark god, however we use it – as he drifted, timeless, in space, as he watched constellations form and collapse, a beauty so whole and terrible that of course he wanted it for himself, and he took it the only way he could, in imagery, painted across him.
And now – fallen – he walks, and spreads the stars, the colors, leaves a legion of them, lets Beqanna know her dark god persists and pervades her.
He sees her, and she smells like the sea, like earth – like heat. And that old, bestial wanting, the one mortal desire he has not shed, rises its head.
Want.
Not for her – she could have been anyone – but for the smell of earth, for the heat, to leave behind some star-stricken child as a reminder of the worlds that exist beyond theirs.
She is waiting, and he does not wonder why – he is a thing worth waiting for – and so he goes to her.
“Hello,” – he tastes her mind, finds the name there – “Tangerine.”
CARNAGE