One day, the shadow upon the ground grew until it was so immense there was no place in the holding ponds to hide. The monster behind it, the bear-man grown enormous, set one huge paw down upon the Company building. Crushed it. Feasted upon what came furious out from it. Roared out pain and rage and triumph.

Old jaws lunged out of older reflex. Caught hold of the great bear’s flank. For a moment. Then slid away, snapping, and the bear had hold of Leviathan. There came a rending and a tearing and the sky was where the holding ponds should be. Could not move limbs. Could not see except out of one eye. Thrown down. Discarded. As the bear moved on.

Constellations of scar, lit up by pain. The deep and the narrow. The ones that had cost nothing. The ones that had cost almost everything. And as they flared and burned and cindered, Nocturnalia released into the horizon and each creature that had made them stitched their outline into the pattern of the stars. A bridge. A tunnel. A burning shed.

Nothing in the dying was brief. But neither was it overlong. Spread out too far across the holding ponds. Alive but not. Dead but not. The dust of the sky drifted onto Behemoth and the gasping call or cry from the broken jaws slackened.

Just the sear of the blue sky and the distant sounds of conflict and a burning that became a numbness. And that was better than nothing.

And in time, Behemoth, you will not suffer. Nor will you cause suffering. In time, you will be as you were hatched from the egg. New, curious. And I will be the old one. And you will be the start of something new … again, through me.

– 7 –

There’s always a burning in your brain. Walls burning. Never turning to ash. And you don’t know if you’re inside the walls or outside. Doubled up, coughing, staring down at the moss strewn with plastic bags and straws and cups that line the polluted river some might call a stream. Rendered spectral by moonlight. Framed by a dark thicket of low, gnarled trees.

Something there, entangled. You don’t know what you’ve found at first. It’s just you, being sick onto the muddy ground and, off to the left, this image of a creature staring up at you. Improbable. Crude drawing. Scrap of something left behind.

But then it resolves into the black cover of some book. Wedged violent into the riverbank. The creature staring up at you, drawn in a luminous blue ink. A fox? Probably a fox. Scraps of cloth curl around the base of ferns and weeds nearby, a purple you think might be dried blood.