Celery (or Jay)

What can you do with a Void? You can smell it. It smells cold, cloying, wrapping around you and into you over and over, the smell of what's inside, the smell of home and of birth, and of kin. It smells like something old, something that is so ancient that the word old is younger than it, a thousandfold. A curse, a blight, a mark within the shell and behind the eyes, an excommunication from light, and an exile into the unforgiving dark. You can hear it. It sounds like nothing at all. It drowns out everything in silence. Vague suggestions of scratching metal enter the mind where no sound can be found in order to compensate for the lack, to make recognizable what you cannot hear because it is too loud. It sounds like small hands hitting and cracking against rock, turning over stones and dead roots, looking for something, anything to eat. Any of that bright paleness that lives in everything but it. You can see it. It looks hollow like the eyes of a monarch, a god disgusted by the makings of His own plan, eyes turned away from the dark. It looks like a beating, writhing lifelessness, stirring within a still shell. You can feel it. It drips across your foreclaws, the liquid a mere suggestion of something in order to make the nothing that much more apparent. It feels like a numbness, it feels like home, it feels like everything and it feels like rest. But you deny it. You're so hungry. Your fingers pull open the pale shells, stretching and cracking, until you can sink your fingers deep, deep within the blackened phantoms dwelling inside. Your hands shake in ecstasy, in fear, in need, in loathing. They say nothing while you do it. They only look at you. You can taste it. Greedily shoveling small handfuls into the hole you tore open in your own mask, no tongue to taste or teeth to chew, just a blackness within you as cold and wet and empty as what is within them. It ravenously absorbs everything that you give it, that you take for yourself, your shell swelling grotesquely as your Shade grows and grows and grows. You cannot cry, so you do not cry. You cannot scream, so you do not scream. You cannot hate, but you hate anyways. You can smell something wrong. You can hear the crunch of shell fragments and the sounds of thick, viscous fluid sloshing into your skull. You can see your hands, your shaky hands, your siblings, your poor siblings. You can feel that you have done something very, very wrong. ... It tastes delicious. ... Thorn has always been glad that it lacked the ability to dream. But that hasn't prevented the recurring recollections. ... It gets up from the ground where it rested. It pulls its cloak snug around its body to feel the thorns digging in. Then it goes on its way.