February 20, 2012

Ague

A mail of motile leaves dressed him. Like insects, skittering iridescent on his skin; aurulent, rutilant, verdant. At his hiemal touch the squirming foliage wilted and abscised. Naked to his bones, bereft of all efficacy, he looked up from the bottom of Hyuri's contaminated maw.

There in gloom he waited, to taste the sapid dawn. His limbs loured, wooden, his ribs their pulp disgorged. There and thus she found him. A girl, bearing clay amphora, and wide actinic eyes.

She said, "Now is the aphelion of your kith."

He drank. The vessel mouth became a river, and heaved backward the blood of the ten-thousand; until Iylum's own leaked from his lips. So his roots grew tumid, his boughs pullulated and surged. He reached high into the unknowable distances of the plenum, the far abyssopelagic of the night. And he sniffed the breeze of the galaxy for the direction of the new sun.

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