I have heaved this body to the edge of a void; walked the precipice of an incalculable abyss. I have seen myself staring back from sheens of black water. Felt the heave of a terrible wave, mounting a timorous internal blaze; a deluge of salt water that rolls, merciless, across the fields of good fire, snuffing the sweet smells, lolling its great maned head back in guttural screams.


Tearing at flesh its tongue, slathered and heavy, laps at my blood with an obstinate hunger. It feeds. I feed. We were one, the abyss and I. Monstrous in our power. Our burnt, scalded and lacerated lips, cracked under the furnaces of starvation, peel back across two glistening jaws and howl, our eyes thrown back to the sky.