[attr="class","dorado2"]
(In the aftermath of Lulu Flint's attack, nightmares become a razor-sharp relief against the velvet black of your subconscious, digging deeper and deeper with each passing night.

And though their intensity decreases with time, every lingering detail feels like the tides battering at the shore. 

Consuming. One grain of sand at a time. Until nothing is left.)

---

It writes itself across your skin in smothered laughter and soft sighs, in gentle fingers combing through your hair and half-forgotten bedtime stories.

In rough hands guiding yours, settling over the hull of a newly bought boat with love and pride.

In playful shoves and insults, in a friendly arm tossed over your shoulders, pulling you against a familiar warmth.

In the flash of a challenge, beckoning, and in the scent of tequila drunk lips whispering your name against salty skin.

In the shiver of a fingertip sliding down your spine and in the slow, teasing drag of teeth up the column of your neck.

You don’t think to ask for mercy. It’s always more, more, more.

It is savage and carnal and soft and warm and yours. And though you’d never kneel before the altar of a god, the name falls from your lips like a prayer, half worship and half ecstasy.


You chase after the sunlight that kisses your skin golden, and find divinity in the ocean depths that call you from shore, boundless and terrifying.

Your darkness is entirely of your own making, bloodied knuckles and teeth bared in a vicious snarl against the strings of fate.

You wonder how easy it is to die. How easy it is to kill.

---

You wrap gauze around your battered fists, the motion slow and hypnotic. Salt coats your hair, your skin, your tongue. It crawls through your insides, spills from your moonlit eyes.

Lapras bob along the surface, messengers and executioners of your own fragmented, corrupted divinity. Their hymns coast over the waves in refracted echoes, and you wait. Silent.

First come the children. Then the adults.

A slow procession of blank, sightless stares and of teeth bared in rictus of maniacal fervor, spilling into the dark streets. Bare feet drag themselves from warm beds, heeding the siren song to find the crashing waves waiting, welcoming.

(A small teddy bear briefly drifts along the surface of the ocean: a monument to the drowned.

In memory of those who chose the sea, it says before it, too, sinks to the depths.)

The ocean is hungry. So are you.

You walk in the wake of a bloodless massacre with a conquistador’s stride. Buildings crowd the familiar sidewalks, their empty shells a homage to countless lives mercilessly interrupted.

If you could not save them, you challenge the uncaring stars above, then why should you bother with the rest?

(You drowned a long time go. The rest of the world can drown with you.)

You make your throne out of shipwrecks and misremembered tragedies. A collection of old tombstones lie at your feet, wrapped in long-dead seaweed. “-ngelo”, one of them reads, nearly weathered beyond recognition.

“Cheers,” you snarl to the heavens. The words taste of untethered fury, of distilled madness, of the anguished howl that scratches at your throat but refuses to come out. You were broken in all the wrong places, forged anew in the shape of savagery untempered.

You reach for the stars only to watch them blot out one by one . The ravenous smile that curls your lips is the most beautiful form of ruination.

Below, the ocean swallows all.

[attr="class","dorado3"]

[attr="class","bycrane"]made by crane