No. It'd only been the storm playing tricks on her eyes, blurring her vision and her mind.
There he is, radiant, with his smile of cherub complexion.
A tiny bit reconforted by such a beautiful sight, the young Ms Akensen decides to press forward nevertheless, to march towards the boy she feels like she shouldn't let go. If she did, what promised her that she'd find as fine a man as he in what'd be left of her time on Earth ?
She has to keep him close, even if that means freezing a bit. Even if that meant freezing more than a bit. Anything is tolerable, she thinks, because it's done in search of love, and anything accomplished for that matter is - must be - of noble intent and, certainly worth the suffering it brings.
She reaches his position, shivering in the cold, her lower legs livid and blue, her lips pale as that of the deceased, her lower jaw clapping gainst the rooftop of her mouth in quick fashion.
He gets a hold of her, and using the arm that isn't embracing the fair little lady's frigid frame, he shows her the way forward.
The way forward is as follows : The innards of the dead god.
Unable to protest, too weakened by the frost, she lets herself be guided by the stranger with ocean hair.
She enters the giant corpse.
And then the boy lets go of her, stops holding her so tight. She's free to wander about in this new place she is just now discovering.
And what a place.
All black. Full black. Totally, completely, utterly black. Pitch black, one could even say.
Her eyes fail her then, but for a moment, she doesn't seem to mind. For she comes back to all her other senses. The numbness of the cold withers away in nothing but bad memories.
It feels so warm to be inside of the colossus' body. So very warm. Even dressed as she is, in her silk-pink nightdress, she doesn't feel bitten by the frost at all anymore. Her legs regain their strength, her lips burst to life anew, and her lower set of teeth cease to tambourine against their neighbours from on the upper floor.
Even her breath has slowed down now.
But she can't help it.
That uneasy feeling. Disturbing sensation. Of being watched. Of being observed. Not by eyes well intentioned, but by pupils raw and violent.
She cries out for the boy.
Where are-
She stops. She thinks. She doesn't even know his name. And on that topic, he doesn't know hers as well since... He hasn't spoken a single word since they first met less than an hour ago.
She begins to panick.
- Boy ! Friend ! Young man, please ! Tell me where you have gone to ! I can't see the light from outside anymore ! You've led me deep inside the bowels of this titan, yet as I thank you for your kindness towards me, I can't help but wonder why we must have taken refuge here !
The darkness is oppressive. The silence even more. She reaches her arms out in search of something, anything, to hold onto, to latch onto, to grab, to touch, to feel. Something that'd tell her she isn't already dead.
But around her, all around her, blackness remains.
- I reckon that if you led me here, Ania shouts, hoping still for her green-eyed love to answer her desperate pleas, it was because my strength was leaving me at a rate too rapid to reach home inside of a timeframe reasonable, or that perhaps, you thought that it'd be better to wait somewhere for the snowstorm outside to stop raging, but in any case, I feel better now dear, and though my eyes can't see, my ears have noticed that the wind stopped howling a long time ago ! So tell me boy, why aren't you taking me back to my house ! Please ! I don't know the way out !
Suddenly.
A light appears in the shadows.
A burning flame. A crimson torch of flesh : The hand of the young man. His palm an inferno, he walks calmly towards the young Ms. Akensen.
But as he steps closer, as the flames grow thicker and more powerful, brighter and luminous, she notices his face has changed.
Now that thought back then, outside of the carcass, well it wasn't no thought in truth, was it?
He's become horrifying.
He's warped into a true monster.
His body has become skeletal, all black, the same black as the ink she used to birth him from the words written on the god's ring. His hair : Tinted black also. One feature of his which remains undarkened are his teeth, which though unconcerned by the somber becoming of the other parts of his body, have grown to ten times the size of normal human teeth, and have sharpened into what seems like blades that could cut through metal if they so pleased.
Alas, his eyes have morphed as well, looking presently as if they've been torn apart, cut through, slashed at. They're a million little scars, bleeding a blood red as that of a human, and what shocks Akensen when she notices it, even moreso than the sudden growth of the boy's teeth, is the fact that instead of pupils, what she sees in the white of those bad scars that flood the boy's visage, are mirrors. A thousand mirrors of all shapes and sizes replace the eyeballs of the man. Gone are the dark-green irises. Now she sees herself when she looks at the one she thought she loved.
She tries to run away. But to where ? To nowhere.
He grabs her. Not with care this time, but with nonchalance and some brutality. Using one hand, he pins her to a wall (a wall of flesh, a wall of bone), and with the other, the one which burns brightly, he caresses the face of Akensen.
She hurls. Tries to fight back. Punches him the best she can. But his skin feels like iron. And she hurts herself while she tries to get away.
The monster still makes his fingers go round the features of her face and once again.Ania burns litterally. Her nose, her cheeks, her lips, her everything, it starts to burn. Embers latch onto strands of her hair and so this fires up as well. Consequently, because her hair is long, the flames reach her shoulders and crawl along the fabric of her dress, the fabric of her skin.
The monster smiles. Is he ? With teeth like his, difficult for a human to tell wether or not the beast is enjoying any of what its doing. It doesn't speak, doesn't groan or moan, doesn't growl and doesn't laugh, it just stands there, killing her slowly, reducing the body of a girl who loved it to naught but a miserable pile of ashes.
And soon enough indeed, Ania Akensen's no more. The shouting ceases, the cries as well. Silence takes up the throne. And the monster, perfectly able to navigate this black maze of bowels, escapes the insides of that giant with blood so thick it's used as ink.
In the blink of an eye, he also, as Ania before him, becomes one with the aether. No trace of what happened here, the crime and the killing, the treason, the betrayal, none of it remains.
The shore is calm. The whales dare not disturb the sleep of a dead god.
