Prologue

One was there to witness, just as before when the last god had died.

Emerging discreetly from his screen of trash, he crept near to the cinders and cruor of fallen Akasha, draped over by a glaucous, low mephitis.

No member was left of her - of them - and her killer was without trace. Only Elesarp remained as his invidious companion; spavined and sere, incapable of tongue but the gutter and growl of slow cremation.

Strange, he thought, that the Godqueen's blood was so lustrous. Fulgent, as if still hot with the souls she had amassed.

He knelt, dabbed it on his fingertips, and tasted it to his lips.

Desinence

Above the feculent carnage, a rudiment of brilliance levitated. Nascent still, nebulous in contour, it illuminated the quiesced rows and dwellings of Elesarp in a dull spectrum; fallow, fuscous, fulvous. Nothing spurred to disturb its coronal tacet.

It rose slowly, but lingered, as if to look back. On the world once of men: Antelucan now, eerily ciselysian, not deceased but dormant.

Then abdicated from it, up into the littoral of the Deep Sea, and thence to the place of its forebears.

The New Sun

Into the horde a selcouth presence came, with candent wrath, with reckless purpose. It skirred into the thousand manes, like a dengue, winnowing and threshing indiscriminately; hewing the goetic pleach to strike for the core.

Something came with it, something in the blood. A cunning venom that devoured the dead and vented living fire. It shut the ululation of the damned, smothered by the roar of a soliform aborning.

And when both eidolon and blight had reached her howling heart, a hundred hands irrupted; rending with gruesome, hysterical sthenia, they sundered thews and bone, til their phthisic trunk was split, and eructed an enceinte bolide to vanquish night.