Quoted By:
>Continued
White noise and dry dust and a heady floral scent like something from home. The garden. Rosebushes. You breathe it in and fog up. Under your skin is the crawling godsblood, your second flesh, and under your flesh is the sun you stole and swallowed. Dry and warm and yellow and white. Its light drains the vigor and the wet from your flesh, killing its hungry vainglory, rendering it brittle crust and then fine powder. Kaolin. The Herald leans and hinges open its rosethorned mouth and lets drip her spit and her venom into you. It mixes you into clay.
You sit and listen to soft humming and static as you are wedged and coiled and fettled and trimmed smooth. Your outside, thin paper, sits untouched: it's your inside that's molded, vesselized, made ready. The sun is stoked, and you are fired in Herald-shape, spined and sinuous, white as marble, white as bone. Glossy porcelain. At last you are finished; at last you are perfect. God's favorite daughter.
At last she descends the spiral staircase and steps into you, and at last you shudder and begin to tear up. You've done nothing wrong. It isn't your fault. You didn't choose this. The world is on your shoulders, the sun in your throat, you are clean and warm and perfect, and all of this has happened— will happen— is happening— isn't it? It twists all up on itself, doesn't it? Here again and here forever, until you find the will to make it end. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. The world is ending.
>[-2 ID: 0/14]
<span class="mu-i">Lottie.</span>
The world has ended and will end and you'll be there to see it happen. You'll be the only one left. Oh God! And you can't die!
<span class="mu-i">Lottie.</span>
You're too perfect to die, too dense and too perfect— you contain too much, mean too much, have done this too many times— the inside of the closed spiral is a circle, and it goes around forever, no end, no end, no God-damned end, and you—
<span class="mu-i">Lottie! Stop!</span>
Inside your body, the Herald's voice sounds like your voice distorted.
<span class="mu-i">It's not time. Please. I'm going to help you.</span>
You're going to help her. She's going to help you. You're going to help you. We're going to help us.
<span class="mu-i">Yes. You're helping me, too. I appreciate it.</span>
<span class="mu-i">But I'm going to need you to calm down. I'm not leaving you like this. Remember positive thinking.</span>
<span class="mu-i">Here.</span>
Roses. Powder. Static. You fog and slump. Your body, of course, stays rigid.
<span class="mu-i">I'm sorry it's quick and dirty. I'll help you remember anything you need to. But I'll be taking over for a second, since it's what you wanted, anyways. Showing them what-for.</span>
<span class="mu-i">I lo...</span>
<span class="mu-i">...</span>
<span class="mu-i">Nevermind. I'll talk to you later.</span>
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