#nokama

Her right hand leads her and all her now woefully awake sisters onto solid, wet sand, beyond the gate, beyond the waterfalls, beyond the waves. To the coffin.

It's a ghastly sight. In the light, in the tender light of day, perhaps it would be beautiful in the way dead buildings are, draped across their landscapes with such sweet melancholy, carcasses of giants merely too deep within their sleep to notice their bodies falling apart - perhaps it would be beautiful in the way the Great Spirit is, yes, in the way it has been forced to be. But the sky is devoid of light beyond the cracks of lightning streaking its suffocating canopy of clouds, and it looks worse than a coffin: it looks like a piece of an animal ripped from its abdomen, stolen away violently, abandoned upon their shores to die.

From the severed silver organ, by the flashes that preceed thunder, has already emerged the horrid thing.

What a squelching spectacle they must have avoided! But they can see it, can hear it as lightning casts its revolted spotlights onto it; they can see it, can hear it in the putrefaction of the muscles, chopped and melted and dangling from stained bones, in the mess of pieces fallen from the whole, in the stench of rotten matter arising from the sorry lump trying to drag itself on frail cracked hooks as its neck cannot even sustain its head.

It howls to the sky, to the rain, to the storm - it screams and shrieks and curses wordlessly against the world that won't accept its disgusting form upon itself.

She hears it like sobbing.

A sound rips from her throat. It's a nasal sound, deep, beastly, like the call of a Kikanalo; it's a sound that doesn't mean anything, that she has no means to make mean anything anymore; it's a sound she makes either way.

And the beast ceases her struggle to turn her awful yellow eyes onto her, as the rain seems to soften so slightly and for a second - for a second - her wail wanes.

Take her, the shadow on the wall says. Take her: she is ours.

Don't ring blasphemies within my mind, she snaps. Ours, what an affront; she is not ours. She belongs to higher things.

Higher things will not rear nor feed her, snarls the shadow: Watch her! Abandoned and defenseless - she will not survive the night! She is new! Take her, or let the salt dig into her wounds and the storm never stop. Take her: we heard her cry and answered. She is ours by right.

By right.

She calls out again with that sound that means nothing, that memory of a comfort gentler than a frightened downpour.

The woeful thing wails back. Begs.

She moves, sleepwalker, she kneels before the skull with a neck too weak to bear its weight, as the awful mesh of visceral fluids seeps into her legs like it did into the sand before her (she is filthy, hisses the shadow on the wall, she is filthy and they must wash her, wash the grime and gore off her until she knows we can take care, will take care of her, until she knows she belongs in what is ours by right) and her hands reach out to tether the beast to a world she only has become part of through such a terrible, bloody ritual.

The creature whines under her palm, sobs so loud it becomes the howling tempest. She repeats that meaningless sound to her, like she can understand her as she once could understand all languages, and she repeats it gently as her hands soothe the senses and the pain.

The creature cries. She cries so much, poor thing. She cries because she has no other way to breathe.

She grunts and bellows softly as she stains herself with the horrid beast's body, as she forsakes the purity of her person to lower into an animal that nudges a young not its own to eat. She pulls the heavy head into her lap, soothes a broken arm, leans down and speaks nonsense noises into the brain that struggles to understand everything at once when it can barely begin to understand itself. A burning moment of clairity, the rolling crackle, the wailing rises: is the storm too much, is it too frightful, too loud, too bright? She brings the terrible beast to her chest, forcing herself to still her heart into a comforting steady glow, and lulls the awful thing into her arms with her foolish, speechless, meaningless language.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, the storm turns to rain, the rain to drizzle, the drizzle to nothing. The waves soften, the clouds dissipate, the lightning dissolves. Stars shine upon the broken, rotten creature.

She cries still, but she is calm now.

She is calm now.

She is hers.

Nokama stares as the beast whines quieter, quieter.

She is hers.

Her hands curl around the tattered body.

Hers.

Curled in her hold, the thing that once was Toa Mata Gali at last sleeps.

She turns.

Her Matoran, drenched but no longer battered by the storm, wait.

"Take her," she says, too focused on the beast at rest to suppress the beast in her voice: "Take her. We must wash her."

The pieces of their legend are collected carefully, dripping still of the awful marks of birth that water alone struggles to wash away. She brings the little one back herself, unaided, because she is hers; in a far away point of her mind that feels like fire shaping itself into things yet to happen she sees herself and her brothers walk to meet, arms full of wondrous creatures half maimed and half saved, still writhing and groaning, begging for the elements to hold them, for tender hands to make the world bearable enough to see.

The little one whimpers.

"Hush," speaks the shadow through her, because it is her and it is everything she doesn't know, cannot know, was not made to know: "Hush, little one, I am here. I am here."