When the floors. When walls. When corridors were streaked with blood and figures lay hunched or huddled there. When the rest had retreated behind a barricade. When came the roar of a bear-man now leashed, collared, chained. When the door lay open for a time. When the leviathan could, be-set and be-sored, became determined and moved long-dormant fins. When much diminished: self-rescue.

Light was warm upon his back, his jaws. Light agile and indiscriminate. Light pouring into the broken places. Light knew the way to the holding ponds, gave permission. For the deep plunge. For the relief of safety. From everything. Except the green light.

Behemoth could no longer. Was not. Had no. Become Leviathan. Ravenous a sacrifice to Nocturnalia. Hunger an empty stomach that felt full. Tried to remember and forget: Nocturnalia. The house on the hill. Nocturnalia: The tidal pools that must be holding ponds. Cool nothing of mud against the hot itch of scales enflamed by rheum and cracks, comfort against battle scars under the stars, the night surcease, too, a different kind. In kind.

The Company ran in ever-widening circles, ever-smaller circles. Sent out expeditions, did not send out expeditions. Fell into disrepair, still repaired. Creatures escaped that the Company had not meant to escape and Leviathan altered let some scuttle and rustle and run out across the desert to a kind of safety in the City. The small ones. The ones that professed to innocence. The ones that had no voice to plead.

The ones that grunted and the ones that gurgled and those that sang to their deaths. The ones that pranced or sprang. The ones that had wide eyes and the ones that had narrow. The ones covered in blood that wept and screamed at the sight of Leviathan. The ones that screamed with their blank-eyed silence. Salvaged. Saved. Given safe passage. Passage. Passing through. Unnatural. But not to me.

Cast out: Many of the Company’s guardians, no longer trusted. Mighty among them, the bear-man, who had grown dangerous. A hesitation. A lingering doubt. The memory of a slaughter inside the Company building, between factions, that had not happened yet, given over to Leviathan as gift and burden. Visions that hurt to understand, and Leviathan let the monster pass.

A dark shadow upon the ground, looming from the sky. The presence on the far side of the Company building that shuddered and shattered the world with its roars, its pain. A flicker of a premonition. Watching a wasp crawl across the crawled mud flats. How it leapt into the air as the surface shook. How it had been crawling across the imprint of a vast paw. How it honored the line of that border.

The paw print the wasp had crawled across filled with water from some hidden source. Leviathan wallowed in the mud of it, slid a vast bulk across the width of it. As if to eclipse it. Yet not large enough to hide it. Only tadpole next to that.