Scorpius B3 - Thursday - 5/15
Behold the floor of rhymeless rock, where time
Lies sleeping in a cave, a seamless deep
And dreamless sleep, unpatterned dark
Within, without. Time is a reddened dragon.
..........The claws refuse to clench, though they are made,
..........Are always made in readiness to strike
..........The rock, and spark the flint. Then to ignite
..........The mouth of time that, hungry for a meal
....................Will chew and swallow all our tattered days
....................As well as those inhabited by men
....................More vivid than we now can ever be,
....................Because they were the first to ache, and thrive.
..............................Time's dragon nuzzles at its dragon chin.
..............................Amnesia steams through its copper lungs.
..............................Its blood the juice of emeralds, uncongealed.
..............................Because as yet unwounded, yet unhealed.

........................................He was somewhere new, a place as dark as the Witch's cloak, as dark as her hair had been. As dark as his own. But where the cloak was soft, held warmth, this place was cold. Hard. A darker darkness than he'd ever known even in the depths of Southstairs. The fishwell. Himself.

And in that impossible darkness, the chill crept up the skin he didn't have and made the hair that wasn't there stand up. He floated, for he had no feet or could feel no feet, and wondered where he was. Where he'd ever be. How long he'd been here. The space might have been as small as a room or as massive as the Emerald City itself and he wouldn't have known, couldn't have been sure. And yet he thought he drifted, because he wanted to drift and usually when he was like this, out of his body, it drifted when he wanted to. But he couldn't be sure.

He was more sure as he came upon the Thing.

It had no characteristics he could tell in this darkness other than Being. Being massive, Being real. More real than anything or anyone he'd ever felt even with skin, even with eyes, even with hormones and chemicals and flesh and bone and everything else that he needed to have emotions. It Was and existing beside it was both incredibly comforting and distinctly disconcerting.

He didn't have mass. He had no reality, no belief, no center. Nothing. He was nothing. He had thought all his life that he was nothing, but now he knew he'd been wrong. He'd still been something. He'd had a Witch and a Nanny, a home and food and dog. He'd had cold stones beneath his feet and he'd had feet. He'd just been terrified of being nothing. Of disappearing.

But nothingness... in nothing, there was no love or hate or fear. Nothing never makes mistakes.

He was here and he was nothing. Nothing hurt. Nothing ached. Nothing was wrong. Nothing was gone. Nothing Was. And he was nothing, just movement: drifting, shifting. Perhaps he should have felt small in the face of that massive, real Thing, but he felt nothing.

It was real, though. It was Real and it felt and it was Something. Something important, something massive, Something! And he couldn't resist it. He couldn't resist drifting, sensing, knowing. He couldn't help but rise, float as if on his broom, to get the true scope of that great and massive Thing even if he didn't have the first idea of how he'd find out anything about it.

But even though he was nothing, he was enough. The great Thing that had been still for longer than he could even understand moved and as it moved, there was a sound. A noise. The brush of scale against rock. The sound of bones and flesh and muscle exerting themselves for the first time in so long that it could have been the First Time. And with that noise came another; light and heat like a thousand ovens, a million bonfires, a hundred stars and a match against the skin. The great draconian claws sparked against the darkness, the rock, and dazzled like the light through a barn window to a boy with no breath.

And Everything Was.