even monsters are made of stardust
Haunting the river is her nightly ritual.
She lingers above the water, her lips parted, as the moon glow grows around her. This makes it so much easier to see the moment when they come out. They being the stars that come back into their blinking existence with the progression of twilight into full dark. The stars that remind her of her place once among them (of the demon’s, too, as she would lie back on a carpet of constellations and invite Zosma in). Her own damning light casts a red-glow to the reflection, making it all the more true to her memories of her time beyond this world. How far away she is now from them, from her. She spends minutes, hours, watching the stars below her.
Never do they pull her back up.
This night is hardly different at first. She’s perched over the calm shallows like a hellish vulture. Her mind is millions of light-years away while her body is stuck fast in its current reality. Perhaps she is foolish to maintain her post after so long. Probably her once-lover has moved on to another stranded survivor on her island of nightmares (even now: stroking and strangling and teaching and torturing, all with abandon). It is impossible to let go of the brilliance she once clung to so effortlessly. But come dawn, she does so again and again.
Tonight she breaks the cycle.
Zosma forcibly peels herself away from the muck of the shoreline while the stars are still spinning above her. She trudges through the silt until the ground becomes firmer, earthier. Then it gives way to spongy forest floor as the demon spirits through to the other side. Next, she feels the breathy tickle of tall grasses against her leathery wings. She pauses here in the meadow, in the midst of full summer under a clear night, smelling the sweet grasses as the wind combs its’ fingers through them. It smells of life. It smells of all the things she is running towards, all the things she has ignored in favor of a past long dead.
Finally, as the sun breaks free of its bonds on the second night and crawls wearily into the sky, Zosma’s feet land somewhere new. Great mountains poke into the sky, puncturing the clouds so that they spill all the colors of the sunrise down their facades. Immediately before her is an alien forest full of strange trees. Discovery is too tantalizing an offer to refuse, so the dark creature moves forward into the land, boundaries be damned. Her forked tail twitches to and fro as she anticipates being caught. But oh, isn’t this why she’s left the river behind? Already, the stars are millions of miles from her mind.
zosma