because I wanted to try something with an eldritch abomination?[CW]

[Felicity]

 

This is a bleak, crimson world and there are only two inhabitants.

 

One person stands tall, their back is to the red light in the sky and it casts a supreme shadow over everything they can see. They stare, cold, steel eyes gleaming endlessly into the middle distance as though to pierce the shroud between worlds. I can’t tell their gender. They have long, wispy black hair that floats in the air around them like an aria, supported by a nonexistent wind blowing through it. Their lips are full and the colour of raspberries covered in frost. Their features are sharp and angular with a curved nose and a long, narrow jaw. Their body is silhouetted by the light but they look thin. Not frail, or gaunt, just thin. Like a metal pole. Their eyes are terrifying and indifferent. They are still beautiful. I shiver in terror and pleasure when I see them and no matter how much I dwell on this I just don’t understand. If I had lips, a gasp of ecstasy would soon escape them. This implacable attraction is indescribable.

 

The other inhabitant isn’t a person, so far as I can see. Maybe it was a person, once, I don’t think I’ll ever know. This inhabitant is a writhing orb of black limbs that tapers off into shadowy fingers, they spread out from the core, the shifting mass disturbingly alive in it’s sinister, sinuous movements.

 

It gropes out, further and further as my seconds shift ahead. Soon the hands find the person and on the slightest touch of her feet the fingers of shade recoil, winding around itself, looping over itself again and again in a frenzied motion of absurd defense. Eventually it calms down and begins to grope out again.

 

Once, a hand almost reached the edge of the person's shadow but before it crossed the boundary into the crimson kiss of light the shadow seemed to inexplicably extend. The person hadn’t moved, I would have noticed. I look back but their shadow hadn’t changed either, what had happened?

 

Eventually the orbs hands find the person again. This time they hesitantly brush against her silhouetted skin, cautious. She is motionless. She? Why did I decide she was a woman now? I look into their features and start to see some femininity in her features. Her body is still obscured but when I look closer it doesn’t seem to be the darkness of her cast shadow hiding her. I just couldn’t see.

 

I looked at the orb, expecting some new revelation about that. All I could see was that, rather than opaque shadow, the thing seemed to be made of dark, roiling smoke. Or maybe the thunderclouds of a particularly grim storm. The stormy shade continued to explore the woman and her body. One hand cupped her cheek, it seemed like an affectionate motion. Then it tried to dart past her face, through the halo of ebony hair that mirrored the hands shade.

 

Those haunting, grey eyes flashed wide and bright, animated by wrath, and I almost broke. The orb recoiled again and this world, so bleak and empty, overflowed with a silent roar of anguish. No sounds were made but tremors shook my body, listening to it was so painful. Limbs broke apart, dispersing like a gas and dropping to the floor as the mass coalesced into a horrid sludge that fell toward the ground and deeper into her shadow.

 

It was clear to me then what she was. She was the warden of the orb and also the bars that kept it within its cell of shade.

 

A shadowy limb snaked over my eyes. Oh, was I in her shadow?