#for tw

The Bull of Heaven’s bones are pitted and scarred, a rib cracked and burnt through by the Sunswallowers rude entry. To the scavengers and treasure-hunters of the Underworld, nothing seems so obvious as to descend on them like hyenas and vultures, tearing and cracking until every drop of divine marrow is sucked clean.

Eresh approaches things more…subtly is the wrong word. From a different angle. Something more appropriate to the prize.

Ashaima taught the Fellowship that dead gods yet dream, and it is in that incoherent and fragmented dreamtime that the procession approaches. A whole host of seekers and dreamwalkers, of children of Fuxi delighted to play their part in the whole charade. What greets them are not the scorched bones of a slaughtered beast, but a regal temple worthy of his presence. Gossamer threads and the demands of hospitality bind it together, and force the dangerous fragments of power and death-curses now cast as priests and guardians to observe their roles exactly.

It is in Eresh’s nature to go everywhere, to talk to everyone. It requires far more portent a force than the death spasms of a celestial beast to deny her entrance. The expedition follows in her wake, observing every courtesy and expectation of guests in such a holy place - or being devoured as soon as they fail to, having lost by the terms of the game they themselves sent.

By sympathetic connection and allegory, Eresh walks through the memory of the temple with cleverness and grace. Gifts are received, secrets stolen, blessings usurped.

Until at last Eresh enters the innermost sanctum of the temple, the heart and crown of what remains of the Bull. Pale marble and golden, a testament to regal decadence in its purest and most exalted form.

Eresh speaks more sincerely now, the venom and spite in her voice mixing freely with the glamor coating her silvered tongue.

She denounces the Bull of Heaven, and all the kings to have ever taken it as a totem. Lawgivers - tyrants, letting their slaves toil and starve to pile ever more riches at their feet. Priests - slaves of the heavens themselves, traitors to the mortal commonality in pursuit of divine favor. Generals - captains and warleaders who lost the world itself, their domain unmade in the most obvious and irreparable way.

The Bull of Heaven is a reprobate to justice, its death preventing any semblance of repayment for its crimes. It is called to defend itself, as every declaration hammers another nail through its flesh, lest all it is be taken as reparations.

The Bull’s hide was white as snow, and tough enough to turn away any spear. But the dream is never so solid as the reality, the memory more permeable than the flesh. Her denunciation unchallenged, Eresh’s is the hand of justice - not a thing in the world could turn aside her fine bronze knife as it opened the wretched thing’s throat.