A growl broke at the pit’s edge; and fell, then, words like black thunder. “Limbs — malformed. Fingers — five made three, hooked with length. A Mannish thing the myth. And, here, a true aberrant waits.” 

Morag cursed.

Maledictions warranted vigilance. And he borne them in care’s absence. Here. Elsewhere. Those evils pregnant with no good things. Malice.

Glaive shoveled on. Dust swirled, choked the pit-mouth from which it came. A toss, and the broken spade leapt skywards. Crashed. Old wounds opened; and he bled.

“Yet,” Glaive said, “it lies dead. Sleeping.”

In the great, blown-out hole, a man-corpse laid. The aberration was desiccated. Petrified black. It was short, headless, and racked over a buried menhir by a half-dozen serrated hooks. Flat, wrinkled growths sheathed the body. A sphincter-like orifice where the head ought to have sat. Below. A breast-wound gaped — packed with dust, fossil, a hewn horn in the centrum where hair was spindle-wound and drawn taunt about its person, the menhir, to the many anchoring hooks at its fringes. Assemblage of rape memories and matter. Appetite. Yoked. Here lies an old secret. Buried. Bound. Of dust and ruin, made seen and soon waking. Better dead than living — he knew. 

Glaive freed it.

He broke the restraints, threw the aberration from the pit. He went to his rock, then, and rested beside their guide — a vessel like living pottery, a child manning secret this suit within.

To the north, a violet bruise ripened. The molten disk would soon blotch dawn and whole the sky over. The mesa would smolder; and the old rancor of profanity would come, staining the air of its memory and color. It was to be bad — this. The coming turns of the wheel. The cycles, even. The pilgrimage had been well overlong, and was not without consequence. Glaive ached, and his sense blurred. Ephemeral things he knew not came before the earth at his feet rose to him. All made and unmade to his eyeless sight — that apocryphal stuff. He was exhausted, fatigued. Not like how flesh waned; but, in how stone failed.

Somewhere. 

Within. 

He crumbled.

And was changed. 

He, and Morag. 

No man spoke, now. Not Glaive; and not his consort, who’d armored himself already and held up — studying, then, the thing by its flanks. Morag read upon the bone-hollows names, knew the beast. And would die. If not this night, the next; and if not the next, then soon. Black obsession worked his hands, hearts. Reckless abandon in the eyes, hot from the shadow of his broad brow-ridge. He plundered the Name of things, and with no right knowing not the shape of his own in his mouth. The fathers’ word was hereditary. Their dreams and ‘mares their own, and so first Glaive’s. He wanted — 

The man-giant dressed. 

A frayed veil swayed, stuck on the butt of a nearby boulder. He shrouded himself  — secreting the rough, slate-cut bust that yet made his mien; and took onto the rest of his perfected-self a handful of pallid dust. At his feet, a wet sack sat  — a lobotomized root-babe within, bleeding mud, still, from its delivery even as it was removed and placed upon the base of a toppled cairn. He waited, then.

Morag stood with the aberrant in the shadow of a boulderstone — in the penumbra before dawn. The mesa fell clear before him. He looked to the blemished sky above. Then, to the pallid waste below. Dust reigned beyond. Dust, and rock. Dust. And little else. The stone-chill was gone, the grit-filled breeze blew aflame.

He spoke. “Beast, hear. From dust, come flesh again. From undeath, waken thee I. Heed my call.” Blood let from the warrior’s hand, from his palm onto the corpse’s missing face — into the orifice that was its head. “Yield. Make word thy chain. Yield. Wander, and dust thou shall return — dead.”

“Come,” he whispered, “surrender mine.”

A hundred prints stamped. Hands and feet burgeoned a haze; their grope devouring the warrior’s flesh — leaving all ‘flamed-touched and sore. Proof. Validity. Continuance. A mass. Host of Presence — all taken and made His.

The rock relented.

The corpse awoke. It squirmed, drew its limbs inwards. Like a newborn, it let loose a cry that wrought the flesh of name. And then, died. 

* * *

Ticks fell in a number countless and without end.

The flesh-tags had been bloodened and were arachnoid-made, now. From rock, they were eased and live — again. Sloughing like glistening fat, leaving the ossified flesh shorn. Some fled the host falling; others crawled from Morag to dust; but all went, then, by shadow to some great rock behind its waker. There. A knuckled scutum rose. An idiosoma — a hoard of contracting nymph-plates. Half the size of its host, the very incantation of desiccation. Like some hand, a seven fingered hand. Open and massive with extremities casted down. A tick, a seven legged tick. Sprawling upon the night-air, aerial as if upon some self-conjured and secret stair. Lastly. It was like a man-joke of some child-jester, or the study of an unusual god  — conspired, nevertheless, by he who had no thing like mercy in their heart. An alien man. An aborted parody. With seven limbs and no trunk and one oblong and colossal head. Here. It stood — or hung, and then stood — first, tall as man does upon its two foremost finger-legs. Then, settled wholly upon its perch. Working naught in the gene of avarice, but from some sister cause that was primordial and like some imperative contrived at the world’s birth and null only upon its death.

Then. It ‘sembled, ceased to their vision. 

Glaive could not feel it, could not place eternal the thing in his mind as it was before him. Dust carved its form, and some terrible fate took what conjured image was. To him, the aberration was as a dying thought — or burnt fog. 

Impermanent. And a thief. 

“Trod earth,” Morag said, “ages past.”

Silence. 

He spoke his words again, signaled for Glaive to bridle and command. The foetal root-babe upon the toppled cairn moaned. Words rolled exact from its black mouth, then — in languages secret to blood’s memory.

The aberration plucked upon gjenganger cords. 

Then. The air popped, flexed — swung. A whisper both terrible and far distant made through the flux, and felled the men.

The man-giant rose.

In dust, Morag heaved. Piss darkened the earth like some fluidic melt of a blood-dawn sacrificed between the legs. His right eye dribbled from its socket; and his words exposed the slaying of thought-meat. Black verity slung him low: a press of masonry to the earth. He suffered what all he wanted, and more. The Abuse of Will. A flesh-command absolute. 

Five forward finger-legs rose, surrendering the abarrant’s palmed-underside. 

The scene was fragmentary, dismembering, veiled like the unbodied in hanging dust. The root-babe upon the cairn was; and, then, went globular to that handed-thing ‘til all as it was was gone. The aberration spoke in a pidgin language, thereafter. In made inferences, notions both living and dead — of far earth and wide breadth. Abstractions fell to the mens’ flesh, and, then, to their minds. As thought was worked, shappend by indistinct palps, the language was honed and made the more sensible.

Hunger.

The choleric humor of his progenitor spurred him. Morag rose. “Know lands worlds over? Of bygone times; that which yet live.”

  Give.

“Answer. Of the Dead-Seed, Command.” 

Submission. Hunger. Relent. Man. 

  “The Dead-Seed,” Morag managed. “Speak.”

The aberration chorused. Hunger —

The warrior went to the Guide, then, who’d been struck dumb and lame by its first words, still. A black-tared fist breached their abdominal wind-hollow, and the Guide slumped. He offered them to the beast. Caring naught for the act, or the deed to come.

Clay chassis, living mud —  dreams and hate and love and hope, those portraits, too, and chests held deep — were made, then, like blood in fall, or rain. Orbed, and deliquesced. The Guide writhed, howled; and the aberration took this, too, from them. When the mud-roots flailed naked to the day above, they were only then cast aside. A knotted foetus remained. Feverish from their vessel ruin, crawling to Glaive’s feet.

“The Dead-Seed,” Morag roared. “Subjection. Iron. Rule. Bond.”

Silence.

He named it. Sounding as the silent death of a sea: Drouth. “Command thee I. Bid!” 

The aberration laughed.

Malice blackened the warrior’s bone-yellow face. Lips twisted, pink froth foamed about the girth of his short tusks. “Thou will tell.” 

Hunger. I. Prey.

* * *

Off the salt-flats of a dead sea, the night winds came — cool and rushing on ’bout a crop of hoodoos and dust-stone mesas. Sweeping over plateaus, down on-through tortured canyons, blowing from pebble-studded shelves antiquity. It raked a basin’s slope.

And fell on Glaive as he marched.

The storms had raged since nightfall. Amalgams of dust-cut memories, clashing. Change suffused the air, and whirlwinds played by him now. 

In his hand, the Guide laid still.

Morag had not returned. He was to be dead — or worse, and naught else. Once, a hulking pugilist. A yellow-bone hided, long-armed, great-handed thing. A grass-dog of Grasrutjan, with thinned orceanion blood. This warrior  — amongst shaded sprouts, was like colossal grass. A mountain to mound-hills. And he was reduced. His shape withered, now. The flesh blotched with leadening; a slow petrifying within what grew hard fast without.

Dead. Or worst. 

Glaive knew not which he preferred.

He’d found the last adumbral cairn, sought his lodging at the center of a flat-floored valley. With continuity butchered, the Night of Recrudescence had begun. The moteless vault and chariot motioning. He’d crossed thrice this very land. Once beneath the sun; twice in the cover of night. With each passage, it had changed. Now. The earth stretched without end. Naked. Broken. White. White for it was dust that made this earth; white the slated stone of his person where clung this dust to him as he strode. White that was, now, in the night black. No pastoral grass rose, here — or loam where it could be seeded. No common law of other worlds  — where grass grew in violence, scrub choking scrub, a tree in the death-shadow of another species. The to-be right. No. Here, there was dust. Knolls. Mesas. An inselburg. The ancient bajada. All was hard and of that thin chaff. Like the flesh of a drowned man baked by day, this land went without in what it’d long since had. Bones laid prominent beneath a mantle of pallid, split skin. The great prosaic stretches unadorned, pictorial oddities cached with time, relics buried — the hewn bases of the great cities unsung. From the cadaverous to that beyond rot, the land reached; and found short itself to the surface above. In the dark, it would be remade. And by dawn, anew — with only the savaged relics scar-stuck. The waste would be short, then  — too.

Glaive found the village a league of regs northward.

He treaded, then, buckled bits of mosaic flagstone. Towering past domes of fired clay, avoiding ornate bowls overturned and other loose rite-fetishes. Wax stubs filled portalways, and pools of cooled tallow held, still, pygmy gods’ feet and left droppings. 

Beyond. Droves of clay-vessels danced with dark spirit. The impetus of their festivities paraded at their feet. 

Children —

Glaive hated them.

Sick caricatures. Perverted imitations. Bundles of hair, and confluence and blacker purpose. They were many and small, and played without speech — clutching ancient horns, or shattered crockery in their fit. 

It was wrong. This night-day Glaive, now, walked; its hold to the count of three; the starless pitch overhead; the dead —  who revel amongst the living as the living amongst the loved. The things Glaive slayed did not returned. His basalt had at its blunt edge finality. And they — these beggar-things — lacked this. An end.

Their hut laid beyond the fete. 

Ungulates milled, huddled hairless in the bedding of that single chamber. Here. He laid the babe inside and withdrew to the exterior wall. 

What had been taken from the man-giant  — he knew, was not what was never once lost before; what was stolen from this child, however, was a first. A wounding terrible as little else. He ached for them, could do —

“It comes.”

Ungulates bleated, scattered. Those pillowing the babe shrunk into themselves, stealing into a place that was not and like this one now.

Foot-fall of a hundred sounded. A chimera and a white-haze and from the dark. Silent proofs pressed the world. Then. There was a hand. A hand that staunched a bleed at the breast. The bandage-made undergarment in its possession stripped and soaked black and through.

Glaive had taken to counting drops of salt-water from his wounds; and he did this, still, when the warrior passed into the poorly pathed junction.

Morag fell opposite of him. 

“With all its givings?”

The warrior grunted. Blood sweated through the shredded haubergeon and maille — wetting dark the remaining plates of that black, flat-boned lamellar that hung upon his frame. Hands of liminality tore at him. Wringing his neck, his wrist, the ankles; pressing white and hot at the temples — above and upon the naked meat where his hearts hid. They vanish — like tracks in dust, burgeoned elsewhere, again. He continued.

“Comes. Hunting. It comes, still.”

“It was infantile. Dead, and living. It will grow strong.”

Morag managed a single word, then fell quite. “Witness.”

Beyond. Dust-cut shapes danced. Wind-moans rose. Feet rumbled. Bodies warmed the earth. The village razed in phantasmal dread. 

They left.

* * *

Shattered pottery remained. The song-dance was over. Terror rode the waves of night, now.

The aberration sat fat upon more people. Swollen with matter of the flesh, things of the mind. It’d slain a dozen sentinels. And their mud wetted flagstone, braided bands, shell-made and bone hewn beads where they’d scattered — fetishes and more jewelry, sculpted miniatures, too. About. Child-moans rose from arachnidian-hordes like half-made burial mounds. Their foetal bodies trapped, and before the aberration proper drawn.

Glaive struck.

He made underhanded and way low as he would for lesser prey. Missed. Swinging, again, he found with his basalt dust. He was driven, then, into the laid-stone and into the dust beneath. Torn of his veil, bandited of memories he could not, now, recall. 

Whispers gathered. A mass hot to the surfaces about a third, waiting combatant.

Morag tore from body limb, drove the beast flat and onto a waiting hut and through. Furnishings, clay debris, even the little gods fleeing were made as machines of war. Black hands and tarred arms. Falling — one and all, like raining stone upon that creature. With his short, crippled thing of iron, he punched joints straight, vented ‘sembling planes of the idiosoma in the hanging dust. Amber eggs and larvae welled across the earth-like plates of its integument. Scutum to festoon. Slits. He gored it in his hand. Then. His wound-hound filled and as all others before —  failed. 

It was upon him.

Glaive tackled it through pallid billows, a blood-soaked earth, and together crossed a clearing and from a short bluff fell.

Down.

And into lesion —

A pit of germinal seed. The rainbow slaver. Here. Primordial soup woke, and from it  —  life was once won. With clay and germinal tuber, mated pairs before the dying of day kneaded wet their progeny. Using this, then: the black of the mere. That which yet is and ever was. Few roots grew, now; few practiced that ritual cupping. Veneration had long been feigned, the pilgrimage no more. Few wanted this deathing place —

Slate-fist rained from overhead, into the nascent. Flotsam of tick and egg bobbed.

The man-giant ground the aberration upon the mucosal bed, homogenized its form like the substrate of mortar and pestle. Guard-breaks yielded a host of finger-legs, and in that clenched hand permanence was with neither will nor wit to be wrestled straight. Specters marked permanent their accord where they raged. Crawling in the cracks of their personages, filling the animate space with screams. Here. Glaive warred as he could. 

Fighting. 

Continuing, still.

The more wounded.

He drowned the beast in a parade of avarice, now. Risen full and above the wet grapple of the old dead and the unborn.

The wails of the mere died. 

What Glaive hit, he knew not; but, what waited was not as it once was.

The earth tremored —

A splash, a second quake followed.

Morag carried a boulder upon his shoulders and nape. A rock of dust, large as the man-giant was long. He waded in a low squat, waded where by the step presence was stripped — flayed of names and their weight by deliquescent hands.

“Move!”

Glaive tore a lone tick from within the nascent and cast it into the night. When pulverization loomed, he lunged crossways with what strength he had left.

The aberration righted itself — 

Morag roared, the meteoric-lodestone cratered. 

The nascent erupted, then. Earth shook for the final time that night, and, then, it was done.

The aberration thrashed, clawed at the night and upon the stone with what broke the mere’s surface. Wind-cries rent the open air, and broken bodies laid still and in the dark unaccompanied. Little gods grazed at their roots. The children — now only hair, were scattered by wind. 

“We leave,” Morag started. “Find —”

The warrior fell to the earth. Glaive settled in the dust beside him. 

He appeared on the bank of the nascent like bleached bone. Blood and the flesh of men had been levied from Morag in excess. Chelicerae had sawed akton, pulped and deliquesced his part in clumps leaving what remained naught like the aged ochre it was. Still. In the night that was the land, the warrior appeared gilt  — not in gold, but in cold iron where his blade dappled his face. He was empty-handed. White. The more red; the more black. Hapless. And without. . 

Glaive thought, now, upon the throes of rubble, the susurration of hanging dust. The ghost upon the waste, and upon his thing-like-heart. What before me lays waiting; what past that I know naught; what could have and was so lost; what had I, then, fought. Images rose. And the man-giant was left, always, with nothing. 

He would leave Morag, here. Leave him to his haunting. His proofs —

A fresh, infantile hand stretched before them. 

From out the outer-dark, the oddment came. A dozen paces in length and more. Stopping only before the man-giant’s feet, where it’d plowed straight its path like some beached worm waiting worship. There. It was atramentous. Substantiated. A supple congruence of infinitesimally smaller hands in some backwards union. Bulbous fingers uncurled. And the Arm of Bane revealed a  sole tick to its witness.

Glaive accepted the nymph. 

Then, he rose — the sacred and rare oddity sliding back to some far-off darkness.

He ferried Morag with a single hand upon the maille and lamellar, slowed only by a weight that would keep the warrior stationary. Nevertheless. They went. To the village; to grab what little they had; then, to the waste — back from whence they came. 

The aberrant would come, he knew. Out from under that boulderstone. Born of an arachnidian mill, an exodus of lesser selves. A dark and growing trail of yet more desert-bug. Crawling slow across those dunes, enraptured by a call unheard. They’d would make far before that he’d hoped, for no bug number was meaningfully wrought, here. 

He walked out into darkness. Stumbling —

He and Morag. 

They left tracks on the earth, and in the dust. Tracks of a lone man walking. When the wind followed — called by a dry, storm home-bound — there were tracks no more. 

* * *

A scabrous land. The sky-bleed, again. Violet, fleshy light bathed the dust-plain, hid in that morning-spread the last motes of twilight. The long night was passed. The hot anger of day returned.

Still, they trekked a curse’s face. 

The escapade had claimed perfection from the man-giant’s sculpted body. Stealing strength from his grip — the drive, even, from his toes. Tucked beneath the arm; then, dragged by a leg. He’d carried Morag, and could no more. Now. When that warrior walked raving, the man-giant walked too; and when he fell into a stupor, Glaive found company in the herd. Witness, then. The warrior’s matted mane heavy upon his back, dull and brittle and bound, there. Large rings — the color of blooded-coral, belted his left arm, the right leg, the side neck and meat of his ribs where flesh had been reaped. His hide had shed its sweat-sheath, and he’d won upon the mind the fangs of fever. In this trek, there was little respite to be had. Little the man-giant could else do.

They went, simply. On  —

Glaive. Morag. The little gods of a lesser score.

By their breath, the earth had been ‘risen. The laying dust sucked clean libations of blood, sweat, their thought-life where serrated rocks drew it.

She took —

Yes. 

The land.

Remembering with the secrets of mens’ givings. And in Glaive, finding her oldest acclaim.

She was no badland, however. Inchoate recollects strode the hanging dust. In Glaive, they’d lifted a stuck stone, and with the passing cycles wrought timbre. Echos rang. Sparks bursted. He’d tease out the names of Stone, the faces worn — then. And was incognizant of these early meddlings. Blind to the world without earth; blind, too, to even these very machinations that took him in her shape. 

Now. Glaive sat upon a short rise, on a stump of beaten mud-brick. Ungulates slept at hand, the pregnant beast of that god-herd summoning dust-plumes at his toes — from beneath the arachnoid bedding her nape. Below. Morag worked naked  — half-wording, and in dialogue with the fantasms of his mind-sickness. He fumbled with flat, hammered bands of looted copper. Trying, failing, and trying — again, his hand at mending the maille. Feeding band through ring; and, again, band through ring; then, drawing close the latticed puncture with his knit.

Then. A song played. 

At the horizon-line, a runty, heat-warped silhouette broke before the dust. A black smudge unbodied and wavy where its song was immutable. From many mens’ length to a dozen; a distance of a lone man’s span; then, to upon them. The Guide crawled. A feotal babe without vessel, now — even what had been spared to them at the hollowed site wheel-turns ago. The mass of knotted roots palpitated, dragged at their loose ends stuck clay and baked mud; their head tottering as sorrow broke from those tubers framing darkness.

It crawled into the shadow of Morag below. 

And he did not care.

He worked as the Guide went before him; worked when they’d made onto his foot; then, leg and knee where he sat. They’d striven for this since the village, Glaive knew. Hunting by the fitful furrow that stretched long from his consort to the edge of the visible world, and, there, to their home. From their home to their hunt. The loom of that small hill where he worked, now. When the Guide made upon Morag’s breast — trying, there, to clamber into his rambling mouth, and work, then, down to the hearts where they’d bathe, again, in living warmth, claiming for their germinal tuber life-stuff and so live reborn — the warrior woke.

He flattened their shape and pain beneath a massive hand. 

Wildness was in his eyes.

A fierce blaze fanned from ember.

“Child. Now, weak-plagued — pathetic, benign, inconsequential. Thou wast saved. And to me come, now. Smelling o’ Hate. Hate — as all ye before.”

“Good!” he croaked. “ I bathe thee. Ready thyself… for His grope at the pith.” 

Then. Morag quartered the Guide — a hand holding isolate limb from head and head from limb. He beheld for the final time that babe as they were. The proof witnessed. Then, bit clean an appendage of braided-root, and spat this into his free hand. Black sap wetted the earth. The Guide thrashed, a keening erupted, wavered — died with the delusions of their hunt. He scribed in sap with the wound-end of that fibrous tendril His sigil. Unto the brow-roots of their head, and, then, onto the bod’ of their name.

  “Borne murder,” he said, “whence wanes despair. Make in that tide, child — fat, and singular this want. In light as in dark. Claw! Bite! Near me! Thy right-proof shall mass; thy breadth; the earth-memory of ye. Come! Break! Like sea on shore-stone. Wound folds more wait thy head.” Then, he tossed the Guide aside, and never looked upon them again.

A weight had been lifted. An existence to himself. A hand added. One hundred and one. 

One that was stolen —

Plundered. 

Raped. 

The babe was shorn, divorced from all that moored them right to the waking realm. He’d taken a thing they’d never, again, reclaim. And for this, they’d hunt him. And hard across lands with terrible possession. Even as Morag died and was so lost, they’d come and unknowingly for all that was his. This. In diametric opposition to how they stayed, now. Cutting throes into the earth like those kin who fell nights past. 

Glaive looked away. He settled for the little god at his feet. 

The pregnant ungulate watched him. Her dun eye reading petroglyphs of Man and God; the birth and death and rebirth of the former in flesh where it was, now, stone; what was writ of the First Child of the latter which sat before her now. This history was old to her forebearers. Old to her Elder Blood when they were writ; old, even, to their Name. Old, the eldest, for he was the First and from his step history burgeoned. Outward and behind. And separate of him, always. He was; and so it was, then. And only then. 

Upon her nape, the arachnoid was a size equal to its danger, too  — capable of plundering from an unguarding warrior what it’d taken from this mother already. Presence —

She was dead.

The nymph would be placed onto the next of the little gods. For nights and days and nights onwards, this taking would count.

And the mother —

She would be left where she laid, as all others had and would. Where in this wound-washed waste no thought was further cast. Bloated. And full. Her babies, those gods-to-be-and-never-wills, entombed forever in a belly of shadow — cold and still where in a world where the sun was charitable and equal in affect, they’d have loped in dust that was instead crag-brush and fed fatly their bones away and so not bone waiting ‘neath dust yet come — or so would’ve been had this arachnid not taken that, too, from her. Drinking deep the divine yoke.

The womb was empty. 

Of simple grace, it was a killing. Sealing, forever and reprehensibly, a gilded eye; stopping short some rare good.

A mother and her children were no more.

A babe, now, less.

In the man-giant, kinship was sired.