Work Text:
Here is the rock, but the body is nowhere to be found. It is heavy, it is hauled, it is a strange granite and the edges are chipped and battered, the text long crumbled to the texture of an ancient grave. How apt that it would come to rest here, foreign rock in a foreign tomb, and high above this winding bowel through layer on layer of clay flesh rests the iron weight of the cursed city, fossilizing beneath it everything that has ever grieved.
The hands that bore it here would have been huge and coarse, palms the size of a skull with life lines cut deep. Timber arms and barrel breast. Bones that knew all the Psalms of burden.
But he is gone away from here. His bones soft with spores, a mycelium mesh holding his shape like hot ash. Perhaps there lies a bitten crescent of a skull, the bold brow peering out from its fragile feather bed, and in the cave of oiled bone a cold flower grows, makes a map of vanished veins in colours it has learned from the dark. Fingerbones like pearls in the dust.
I think about him down there, alone and dying. I think about him crumbling to nothing. I think about his white bones and the grey eyes they once held. I think about his hands and his body, his heat, his heart, his hurt. It is comforting, like pressing a bruise is comforting. It is pain that reminds you that you are real. Love is carved from grief; they share the same face, as the city and its shadow share the same shape. Fate reaches up to the heavens with bloodless fingers as it plunges into the earth with roots, with bone. They are folded at the plane of you. You are the black line of the horizon that is like a shut eye which opens only inwards.
So crack the coffin, the sarcophagus, the sepulture. Heal the hammer with bloodstone scab. Yours are the hands now to bear it home.