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The eye is upon you. It has caught your feet…no, it has caught your idea of movement. The creature is but a few steps away from your cleansing hand, yet the memory of how to move does not come to you. Something is getting closer, from the voidform craning over the mountains comes an invisible, an inarticulate, an unspeakable. The creature is but a few steps away, yet you can’t even turn your head in its direction.
Then something touches your cheek, argent fingers take hold ever so gently. They’re warm on your skin, a feeling so exotic you have trouble recognizing it at first. They dole out a virgin pressure, and you remember that you can move your neck, that your neck moves your head, that your eyes can see things other than that wretched terminus set into the sky.
Your gaze leaves it, and greets the creature, its low breath discernable solely by the new droplets of blood that ring its beak at every interval. The creature is but a few steps away and that hand presses surely on your shoulder. You take a step, and then another. The earth resists you, the notion of your tread is ugly to it, this place and time is not meant for you. Still you walk on, the presence behind, breathing fragrance into your nostrils and a fine note of something like vaporous glass into the chamber of your ear.
The creature was but a few steps away, but now you stand above its body, observing its trundle, its bearing of what you’ve wrought upon it. The knife is in hand, your blood is spilled, the symbol is made. One line down, one line across. That presence, that hand, whatever is just as the margin of vision, squeezes your shoulder almost apologetically. Finger by finger, it leaves you. The cold returns and the entire world falls back out of focus. You are removed of thought and time and feeling, except for a bright red brand whipped across your back, the weep of blood staining your shirt. The pain is unconquerable, it defines you, and yet it provokes the last remnant of that holy presence, words it left inside your mouth, that all come tumbling out.
“There is none holy as the Lord: for there is none beside thee: neither is there any rock like our God.”
“The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength.”
“The Lord killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up.”
“He will keep the feet of his saints, and the wicked shall be silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail.”
The Divinity drives through the creature, from and into every pore, from and into every channel of air or blood. It comes like water and like wind it goes. Bright white crystals flutter the air, very different from the snows prevailing on the ground. It is taken somewhere beyond this place and time, somewhere out of the sphere of heaven, and then there is nothing where the creature once stood.