The black-eyed child of Anastasia’s blood, curled beneath the rock made meat as salamander curls in stream, yipping kit-noises like an orphan from a mother-noosed litter, the song of death panting from her moaning throat even as she clutched closer—
thou art my own beloved, said the child, salvation of my s—oul—wh—whatever thou wilt of me I w—will perform, I—I have—loved thee—ohh—and her speech was cut short by a great sound of lamentation—
stolen satellite, the life of her life, the bone of a bright body, born to fell purpose but beautiful as the long-demolished dawn, whose wet and wriggling flesh as brown as Anastasia’s firstborn child made mock of her marble-veined hideousness, yet whom for that Alecto loved all the more—
again the child reared beneath her, a foal in wild flight, a jackknifed fawn, and with all her flowering lungs cried out O my love—your mouth—kiss me, of your mercy—my love—my love—
for Alecto had seized upon the meat of her love with tongue and lips and teeth, inside, inside, as flesh mates to flesh and hot life oozes forth, as rot cradles seed-leaves and furs dry duff with clouded moistness, as blood gushes when hungry teeth meet in the messenger of hunger’s end, Alecto desired a oneness of the child and she: not enough the slick skin, not enough the hoarse breath, not enough the pounding heart, the neck she sought, the throat—
ah, ah, ah, said the child, and shuddered where she lay, and was not appeased, and said, Please—
and Alecto tasted of her bleeding meat, and knew her again by the tang of the blood, again, again, by the pleasure of the vow she had made to her lost Anastasia, by the service she had sworn—nor should the child be appeased by a mere kiss, for she was of Anastasia’s line, who had relinquished all at the point of the unholy sword, for whose devotion’s sake this child yet lived—this child who had come through rock and water and ice and the vacuum of lonely space to reunite as one with her beloved—
though I, the child breathed, though I deserve it not, she groaned, though I deserve it not, beloved, she sobbed, I would have you kiss me again—
then like a great cold upwelling beneath a rocky coast was Alecto’s heart, rich and strange with many small creatures, and crossed and crossed again by circling shadows, whose whalefall deaths would feed generations of the living world; and she said, the blood flowing forth from her mouth, I am in your service, as the blood dripped down, thus I swore, and I would not have you go unsatisfied—
and the child opened her mouth at once to receive the boon, a nursing cub, a pleading fledgling, a ravenous heart in blind submission to a hunger all life knows; and the blood dripped forth in slick pink mixture with the water of Alecto’s mouth, as cold spring trickles through cave’s cracking wall until each fern’s sporangium bursts wide in riotous ecstasy, and Alecto followed the trail down, and caught up the child’s blood-smeared tongue with hers—
and the child cried out as one close to death, and she and the child knew of one another, and became one flesh: as it was, so shall it be; and sank deep beneath the salt surface of the sea, and were satisfied.
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