Blackfoot Forest Otherside

"They came from the moon," she began with an awed inflection trailing on the fringe of her voice. "Though they did not stay for a mere day...maybe it wouldn't have been so bad then. They came with the moon and brought it's darkness with them; we thought surely they would move...that they would grow tired-"   She broke off as she caught her voice rising with hysteria.
 
One. Two. Her eyes shut and she counted with a slow, steadying breath through her nose. "Five days," she said quietly. "Five full days where the sun and the moon looked the same because we stumbled in their shadows and choked on their fury. He called it the Exodus." Whatever that meant. "And he wasn't a demon...not at first. Not until we got tangled up in that spider's web in the long night. He was kind and just and everything I'd been looking for but," and her she gave her head an irritated toss, "I suppose those things I'm looking for aren't everlasting."
 
Marcus had been so damn excited about the anomaly. They'd heard rumors, varying degrees of madness recollected in tales of refugees, but until they'd seen that black edge blipping out the very shine of the stars they hadn't quite believed in it.
 
"There's never going to be anything like it!" he cried out in that geekish way that made her toes tingle. A retort came...laced with the blasé lilt of a teenage girl. "Like what?" She'd been a bit jealous. Wasn't she supposed to be the thing that there was nothing like in the world?
 
But all that jealousy was satiated when his eyes DID finally turn to her in that black night beneath the locusts' shadows. "You can look at them all you'd like!" she'd begged as her stumbling feet crunched on a bed of bugs. "Just don't - don't look at me with those eyes!" But he couldn't hear her. Marcus, or at least the thing that bore his name, would never hear her again.
 
"He was the devil himself in the end though," she murmured quietly as her cheek turned to brush against the scabbed wound of her shoulder.