Medea crawls to a rotten tree uprooted and fallen across the forest floor, dismembered, its meat reddish and tracked and inhabited. Termites, their frail wings. She pinches their heads, adds several to her bag. Her fingers unspeakably large, she tears apart a mountainside, exposes caverns and tubes filled with bodies. Finds what she was looking for, slack black skin of a scorpion in a cavern, tail hidden. Thick arms, brutish. Arms of an infant, fatty, segmented, held close.

How it reached this cavern a mystery. Deep inside the log, pathways too narrow, and what will it do here? Wait in darkness forever?

Tombs in a wall, arranged in lines as if written here, carved into stone, layer upon layer. Some record of a place unknown, preserved by an unseen hand. Order in the world, even in places buried. Prophecy the art of reading these signs. Scorpion among termites, wrath waiting as all is eaten. Prophecy always about decay.

She will wear this scorpion as a bracelet, its legs curling around, and use this hand to hold their forearms in place. Pale insect head on her tongue, black infant arms of the scorpion on her wrist, feel of the knife and vision of blood. They will believe this to be the most ancient of rituals, from a darker past before telling, and they will fear her as they fear their own ancestors.

But Medea knows no ritual is sacred. No ritual ancient. All are made in their own time. No one taught her Hekate’s rites.

Her knife edged in bronze golden from use, dull green across its face. Thick and imperfect and hovering close to the dark low head so flat it can’t really be seen, only a part of the rumpled shelf of body, cradled by thick pincers obscenely swollen.

The termites in panic, dragging their wings, climbing the face of their destroyed home, strange waddling walk.

Blade upside down, carving slowly into the decayed roof above, point nearing the head, and still no movement. Red dust falling on soft black plates.

Medea stabs, and the scorpion arches, pincers thrown wide, tail curved high, hooked, and the floor fails and he tumbles close to her knees. She yanks back, stabs again and misses. The scorpion fast, gone backward, flat curve gliding away, but she stabs him through his midsection, pins him to the ground. He flexes and his tail stings the blade, last spasms, soundless. Pain unregistered, unrecorded.

Collapse of a form difficult to believe. Where did the scorpion come from? Unlike anything else in this forest, born of what dream.

The tail in her fingers still pulsing, wicked point hooked and reddish. She presses it down against the body, wonders if he can feel his own sting. Legs curling in, death slow. Until all is slack, and she slides him off the knife into her bag.