Work Text:
Ajax couldn't begin to fathom what he was seeing. It was a huge, hulking beast, and it reeked of raw meat and stagnant water. Every part of it writhed; the only consistency it kept was a silhouette, vague. The moment he thought he understood what he was looking at, its whole body pulsated with such vigour that it looked, momentarily, even more foreign than before.
There was a ribcage. Something that looked like a ribcage, and it was all… wrong. It spiked up irregularly, each with varying angles. It was backwards, he thought. Like spines, like a defence mechanism. If his judgement was to be trusted, they were easily twice as wide as the family cottage in Morpesok, and so long he couldn't dream of making a worthwhile comparison. They shifted with the pulsations, rocking impossibly, hinged on its 'vertebrae'. Some were broken, had holes carved in them, or otherwise suffered some unidentifiable trauma. The young boy watched as one broke off, making a noise so loud he could feel it in his teeth, yet the beast remained unbothered as parts of its own body disintegrated into the void.
It stayed idle. If not for the time he'd already spent here, if not for the knowledge that he should expect the otherworldly, he would have taken it for an inanimate object. Perhaps a colossal corpse. He had seen a corpse move before, after all, maggots writhing under its skin, but that was nothing like this. Whatever this thing was, it had a heartbeat, he could feel it.
It radiated heat, something he wasn't too familiar with, and while he shivered he could feel the sweat evaporating from his clothes. It hummed.
No, the air hummed. It was the first time he'd seen it move. His first confirmation that the thing floating in the void, that Skirk told him to 'pay no attention to', was alive, not just a malformed floating island. There was adrenaline nipping his fingertips.
It rolled. Rather, Ajax didn't know what it did at all, but it looked to spin like meat on a spit. It displaced the stars in the distance beyond it as it shifted, leisurely. It propelled itself, he thought, with something that looked like a tail. Not up and down, or side to side, or even in a circle. It was like a mix of all three. He couldn't well enough judge with nothing to compare it to.
It was facing him, he thought, and it smiled. Then it closed its mouth. The skin on the top of its head peeled, as did the skin of its underside. The edges curled with needles pointing inwards and the 'jaws' came together with a resounding snap. He felt another bone in his foot break like a twig, distracting him from the feeling of warm blood pooling in his collar. This thing had no face to speak of, hidden beneath its upper jaw was only a huge red mass. A heart, he thought, where weird lines all over its body finally came together, and their strange movements made sense. Unfurling from around the 'heart' was a great white Something. Prehensile, it seemed, covered in ridges. Twisted. Pointed.
It looked like the horn of a narwhal, for a moment. Then it uncurled further.
There was a foreign tradition he'd heard of once. A lovely lady from somewhere far away had described the results of the not-so-lovely process as "lotus feet", too pretty a word for what it described. Arched feet, twisted joints. She carried with her an awful drawing of a foot curled in on itself, unnaturally, and drew metaphorical parallels he thought he would never understand.
But as this magnificent horn came apart before his eyes, he saw beauty. It was webbed like a bat wing, clawed. Fifty fingers with fifty joints reached towards him from the darkness, and all he saw was the silhouette of his own hand reaching for the sky as he plummeted.