Oneshots, etc.

Guess what! Eldritch weirdness, that's what.

A/N: This isn't going to make sense, and it's not really meant to. It's mostly just for Vibes(tm). There is an actual story to it, though.

The air is cold as Xylo makes his way through the trees - it is neither chilly nor biting; not freezing, crisp, or anything in between.

It is simply cold.

The kind of cold that burrows its way through your flesh and makes itself at home within the core of your very being; your lungs, your blood, muscles and bone and sinew, it creeps and crawls towards your slowly, ever-so slowly pulsing heart.

Xylo does not pull his layers of thick fur coats and knitted woollen jumpers tighter, does not close them around him like a shield against that soul-deep cold. There is no reason for him to do so, now that the story has finished and the end has begun.

The sweet, shining silver of the snow crunches beneath his boots, a trail of dark footprints disfiguring the pure white landscape behind him with stains of shadow as he trudges up the hill. A figure waits for him at the peak, their ink-black silhouette cast against the warm golden light of the setting sun as he approaches. They stare out over the idyllic city spread across the soft curves of the rolling landscape, watching in silence from afar as the people within go about their business - some ending their day, some only just beginning. All no bigger than ants as the two companions observe them in silence from their snow-coated perch, high above the city and all of its fears, its loves, its losses, its joy.

Xylo turns to Mario, grim acceptance in his eyes. Mario does not meet his gaze, face blank and apathetic. Neither of the two speak.

It is too late for that, anyhow.

Xylo thinks that, once, Mario may have offered him a smile as easily as the night sky does stars. He thinks that, once, he may have returned it, before the gaze of that which lurked above the heavens peered through the cracks and took what it desired.

There is not enough of them left for smiles. Not anymore.

There is a crow standing atop Mario's shoulder, it's dark eyes hollow and empty. Xylo does not think it was there a moment ago - and yet he knows that it has been perched there for all of eternity, and will continue to remain there forevermore.

The crow turns its head and grins at him.

Xylo does not think crows should have quite so many teeth.

Down in the city, far below, the tiny human specks live their lives as they always have, unaware that the end of this tale has arrived at last. Xylo thinks he might have pitied them, once. He thinks he might have shed a tear for the doom that will rupture from the sky and rain down upon them, grasping eyes and blinking hands hoarding everything that they are. He thinks of many things that he might have done, once.

He does none of those things.

Xylo lifts his gaze to the clouds above, and he waits.

He waits for the end.

He waits for the beginning.

He waits to fulfil his role in this neverending tale once more.