Sunbeam Lair [m] So if you care to find me, look to the western sky

Mature Content Warning

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The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: Some disturbing imagery and gore!

Where the gilded girl flew, the snake, the sawbones, the doctor fell.

Deeper and deeper into that greedy darkness, the light so far up it was nothing more than a haunting pinprick against her pupils. In the dark that swallowed her whole, she had found the small gods.

The small gods had found her, clamoring and raving in her ears, like Gulliver and the Lilliputians.

Finally! Finally they cried Finally! Finally! they wept.

Finally! Finally! Our vessel is here! Finally finally! The mother to birth it! Finally finally!

They claimed her weakened soul in that dark, where she cried for all she ever knew so alone and so lost with a scrambled head and eyes that saw nothing and yet everything. In the end, in that dark, that small dark of the small places of nowhere of note, they had eaten the remnants of the lonesome, they had shot down the dove and devoured it whole.

And she had laid there, her ribs broken, her skin flayed from her chest and laid out to dry, her blood melding with the dust and the dirt and the smell of the desert sun, and the small gods had their fill. They plucked out her liver, wrapped her intestines around their necks like bloody feather boas, took pieces of her heart to eat from their talon tipped fingers like a rich lady eats cheese upon a toothpick. They’d had her, kept her, wrapped her up whole in cloths and stuffed the remnants with cloud fluff and blood.

There was nothing divine about the hyena howling laughter of the small gods. Lonesome Dove, whoever she had been, whoever she was, was not divine.

Perhaps she was the farthest thing from it.

She watched the golden girl, watched her with the eyes of a predator upon a lamb fresh from the womb, as her own twisted into knots, expelling, expelling. The crisp, iron tang that knotted the furs of her thighs and backs of her legs.

She did not flinch.

The rattlesnake quieted it’s rattle, and in its place the dark swallowed all sound whole.