and then thought, screamingly,

She outstretches a great hand, as deep and as unknowable as he is great and evident. She has encompassed the world, just as he has overtaken the sky. Creatures of sensation rarely satiated. Tremulous and strangers to each other and to existence, they will their breath through lungs not yet shaped. They are concept. Signifier without signified. Imago, ready to be breach-birthed through the gaps between the Dreaming and the World.

Her mate and her, they come from the same splintered branch, off the same swaying stone tree. They gestated, entwined, as the world decided what it would be before it released them wet-mouthed and wandering onto the shores of newfangled reality. Engendered from the breath of the world, still shapeless and unknown to themselves, to each other, they existed as one.

Voices not-yet-born would call them siblings, mother and father, Vengeance and Justice.

She germinated from the spit of the ocean and he reached into that bloodied birth-foam (blood of the earth! blood of the world!) and hooked his fingers into her gaping, begging, mouth. She slid her teeth into his wrist and let him drag her from the depths, gulping ichor into a throat that wasn't flesh yet.

Now they squirm, unfound and new, beneath a sun that has no interest in seeing its children happy. They have no weight. They are form-less, wanting shape. What is there for two newfound spirits to do? They ask the earth and it refuses an answer. Its children scurry along its spine and pick at them like insects. The sun is hot and the air is stale. The greenery is vast and lush and they wish to know it all, to have it, burn it, be it.

They ask again and the insects say nothing. The earth has no answer. They wish to shape it in the way they best see fit and the earth threatens to crack them in two.

Her husband, sibling-in-song, is quick to anger. So is she. The earth stakes a claim to itself that it has no right to. It decides for them where they can and cannot go. Demands sovereignty over itself when they are here to shepherd it.

How dare it!

HOW DARE IT!

Sinking their shapeless hands into its soft and fleshy abdomen, they descend upon it storm-ridden. They have no chosen shape, and so choose for this reckoning one they both find beautiful. Wings and claws and talons. Horns like crowns, and power diaphanous to break bones with and suck them dry.

A hunted thing has not existed in this world before. They hunt the very pillars of the world.

She caves the earth's head in and he climbs in the cavern of its broken skull to anoint himself with its death. It is awake as it dies, and babbles in a language that is ugly and stupid. In the warmth of the world's womb, they dreamt to each other in much lovelier, brighter words. The earth's words are the words of things that have no place here anymore, a jagged and recursive language that held the fabric of existence fast and closed until they came, wiser and greater, and now there is no need for the pillars' harsh and broken words. The earth speaks as one, a copy of a copy. What beauty can an echo make?

In the midst of this gore, they are hungry. But they were never hungry before, and it cores them, like thunder a tree. With claws and teeth, they tear out great chunks of soil and cram them into their bloodied un-mouths. Lungfuls, gulpfuls, of rib and gut and gore, of blue-bright heaviness that satiates until they vomit.

They have bodies to vomit from.

She grips his great broad shoulder and keels over, suddenly meat. With gut comes pain, a thrill from head to toe. Her esophagus spasms and she reels from the bile, acid and bitter. She laughs. Her throat pops colour out of her in the shape of sound. He grins at her, and he has teeth to grin with. A mouth smeared with acid and half-digested land. Appalling. He grins and grins, and pulls her towards him and pushes her open. His hands are so large. Her body so unformed, uncompromised.

But a body has a heaviness. A body has phlegm. And viscousness. And wetness in its unexplored and depth-hot corners. He gathers chunks of her like he gathered the soil to eat, spreading and kneading, opening, unlatching a door in her core. Out spills light. She has no say in where his hands roam, wondrous in his conquest of earth and sea and sky, as he appends mud to her bones and smooths its ridges down to make a body. She cannot stop him from claiming the making of her, but she can do the same to him, so that they will forever be a creature of both.

She yields, to make him pliable and bendable. With his hands, terrible and bloodied, he cracks her open like a femur as he learns how to crawl back inside of her. She opens, a womb, mother of this new world. She uses the earth to fashion him further. Under her muddied hands his features gain definition. Sharp cheekbones. Full lips. She shapes his chest and makes his hands more solid and with weight, large enough to engulf her if she wishes, hardy enough to wield a weapon or a sceptre.

He is not just impression, anymore. They are not just tendrils of consciousness upon which to graft flesh. There is intent in her design of him and in her fashioning of her own self, guided by his hands that make her breasts, her throat, her nipples hard with just a gentle rub. He is large but she is capable of holding him. She tells herself she will be able to contain him, when the time comes for the world to burn so they can rebirth it.

He smears blood and phlegm across her lips with his own. They have gored a thing and have eaten it, and a great secret has now passed between them, at the coming of this new world in their image. A new world that extends beneath their clawed and smooth-skinned feet, and it has gifted them with their own unknown downfall.

All has changed. Now comes a world where things can be killed on a whim. They have chosen smallness for the sake of primacy.

He pushes her onto her back. Bone fragments, grey matter, pressed up against her shoulders and spine. Her hair, dark and long, wet with innards. They learn new ways. They were one thing, and now they are two, and seek to make each other one again. He returns to the fold of her; she turns her back to him onto all fours so she does not have to see his blue bright teeth. His wide hands that she has made lost in her hair, new sensation ripped from the roots as he yanks her head back. She slips on the dead and discovers pain when her elbow hits the ground. It doesn't matter. Magic is splitting her open, making her mighty.

He feeds her more, from behind, her back against his chest and his hands prying her jaw open, and drips the lovely blood down her chin and chest, onto her belly that wasn't there even just moments before.

It rips the world between them. Fans her ribcage into wings adorned with veins and capillaries. A thunder around and above them. She rolls her head back and glares upwards to the storm.