It was a beautiful night to have a curse. Warm, not muggy, just balmy, rhyming with blood at rest. Surroundings that felt… inherently feel… like restful blood. But the sky was a matte blue pool. On nights like these the earth felt freshly dead, and like everyone was locked in the intricate dance of day-to-day decay. 

A flash rang out, and like thunder, a scream: unfurling across the umbral heaven. 

A scream as if upon waking… 

The unrestrained nightmare-breaker. 

It was no use. 

It was gone as fast as the lightning. Retreated in an inverse rhythm with the tidal expanse of a glassy black pool of crimson.  

The material of a Shade, slaked down in an instant. 

What a soulless homunculus was doing here is irrelevant. The matter was that the matter was and is no more. In place of the dusty shawl of flesh, gleaming fangs sharpened sleek in the absentee glow of the new Moon. 

Between the blood of the ghost and the material of the beast, the warm air started to stink like copper. 

The creature which seemed to simply pluck the shade from existence was in fact an apex predator residing in a misaligned body of warm-toned metal. 

Just like the Shade’s agony pooled in blood, its contained pacing was like a pool of power on a whole other level.  

It moved slowly, in glimmering tones of bronze and gold. Its fatal blows were less a movement of the self, and more a removal of distance between itself and the target. 

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Bloated with lifeblood, the beast moved in a painfully misaligned limp, its default state. Its entire body bristled with nail-like spikes. They were shaped achingly organically, like long thorns or shivs made from angel bones, and clustered at the tail. Its wincing gait implied just as many of these quills faced inwards, aimed toward whatever biologically adjacent systems required or even allowed for such brutal consumption. 

Its prey couldn’t tell you a thing about it. 

As soon as it was gone, the Manticore darted back into the inky blue. Not slinked–darted.  

This lone abomination of an apex predator either scented some new prey, or else–feared. 

Deepest space, and the depths of the body… opposites, equally inscrutable. 

God, I swear I’ve seen this blackest matter in a dream before… or something. 

Perfect blue-black velvet. Perfect red-black glass.  

The hard obsidian forms of my mind, body drifted apart and coalesced in discordance. Chiaroscuro, the oily haze… The dreams stank of copper these days. Vomited blood and sore teeth. The numb buzz of a thousand cicadas, just futile really. 

I tilted my head back, flooded my face in the stars; a map ripe for misinterpretation. I looked for the one light of my Astralism but she did not show. She was making herself anew, and so I carried on. 

My one Shadow wasn’t with me either. Each of my gentle steps, a poised performance for no one, made no noise: the empty street would catch and carry news of my mistakes. Infinite potentiality fixed its gaze on me from under each straggling, raspy leaf. 

Alone I feared for the sunrise. Oily golden disc burning images of slipped misaligned spines, Saturn eclipsing the Moon and consuming the Sun, dark portents, evil avatars, my once-again fractured soul…  

Momentary visions.  

Something about the warm, clear night felt sick.  

Why are you here? 

I had a purpose.