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.

Red on Red

He did not get far before she appeared to him, a ruck of silhouettes that coalesced through the firelit dim.

But she was no longer the Godqueen; as he, she had become something more. A vermian leviathan, a sarcous mass of scavenged bodies thrutched together, limbs twisted and agley, a nidorous hulk.

"Come closer," spoke a hundred sibilant voices, and when he did not, they did. Its feet and hands all lurched and stumbled, disconcordant, a hundred eyes all stared with desperate hunger.

"Come closer!" a hundred voices squealed, and he did. With trembling steps, with outstretched arms, he went to do his work. What came next took all that he had, but he had what it took.

Then only a single voice sighed; "Lord," frail and forlorn, "you've come back to me."

Its weight descended, and crushed him to a pomace.

Matin

From a specific distance, the igneous bloom of Elesarp revived a very old memory: Light low on the horizon, smudged by charcoal clouds and attenuated by the remoteness of winter. He thought this projection of his undertaking more than coincidental. Somewhere in that burning carcass hid the heart of dawn.

Closer, that hideous redoubt was a mighty pillar of sempiternal flames, retching up a melanotic nimbus. Its cacophony the aubade of an aeon's ghosts.

He knew of a postern safe from the blaze, and there met a hermit armored in garbage, equally as surprised to meet him.

Plainly, he requested, "I am for the doyenne. Do you know where I can find her?"

Bemused, the hermit answered, "I know where she can't find me."

"Are you one of her children?"

The other shrugged, ignorant or careless of that question's threat. "I am one of yours, Alastor. " Then mulled, and evenly confided, "Go to the Edifice of Cydonia. Call her name: Akasha."

"So I will. But that was not her name before."

Rage

The Panoptes of Elesarp was trammeled in her own web.

Sedulous she had culled together her host, sucked the surviving life from their limp husks; until a thousand selves crowded out her own, a hundred thousand memories buzzed in her like a swarm of bees; her pillaged ipseity the single flower from which they all drank, into which they deposited their foul pollen.

Around and around the keep's blasted districts and courts they drove her, through Kron and Ampridatvir and Talislanta, their funeral galleries and gutted tenements, and she could not close her hundred eyes to the abject ugliness that she had sponsored. She learned instead to withdraw into the hum and keen of the strangers' music, the places in their thoughts that could not be mapped in words, and excited her corpulent length into a dancing fury.

Around and around, so her rage and horme purified, undivided.

Hyuri's specter walked the streets of the last city on a hundred crooked, shambling feet.

Patience

Ask a man: What is patience?

If he is young, then to him patience is a willful tolerance. An inconvenience, no different than the patience of a stalking animal. Better nerve than patience, better to challenge than to obey.

If he is assiduous, then to him patience is the luxury of procrastination. A deception for the indolent. Better action than patience, better to proceed than to wait.

If he is powerful, then to him patience is a rightful ordering. An accommodation for authority. All things in their accorded time! Better patience than anarchy, better to forestall than to cede.

If he is old, then to him patience is the lees of sorrow. Anyone can forgive a young fool, but an old fool is an embarrassment. Better patience than regret, better to forbear than to grieve.

Patience, today, for tomorrow. Patience, my love, wait for me. Patience, my child, for soon you'll grow.

Patience, death, wait for me.