what turns up in the dark; any

[Carnage]

and lord, I fashion dark gods too;

Worlds beyond these drift across his coat. It changes, unsteady – this time he has not just taken the colors of the nebula with him, but he mirrors it. Somewhere, light years away, there is a form, a shell of himself, that drifts through space, projecting the colors onto him.
It’s extravagant, a waste of magic, but gods have magic to spare – the years made it strong, honed it like steel to a whetstone.
(He’d tried space before, centuries ago. It had been beautiful but he had fallen, had failed. Now, he rules it as he does any other place.)
He sees the boy first – his son, draped in thorns like the sinner he surely is. You return, he says.
“I return,” he affirms, the words strange in his throat after so much time spent in space, the vocal chords gone to dust.

Another one comes, a mare – not his child but still his descent (as most of them are, he saturates Beqanna). An old queen, past her prime, though he takes a brutal pleasure in the way she falls to her knees, in the supplication that follows: you are everything.
It feeds the ego and he thrives on it – he’s missed the worship, missed the creatures laid prostrate before him, missed carving his mark on them.
(He will again, to those who wish. He is always happy to mark his property.)
“I am,” he says, and laughs, slightly.

“Tell me Weed, Tantalize,” he says, plucking their names from their minds, the plant-child and the jaguar, “how has Beqanna faired, in my absence?”

c a r n a g e