Soon the sun would rise, although with rain on the way its single glaring eye would likely not be visible for long, and that too was well. Leave the cloud’s tears to wash away all the blood, and before too long the absence of over a score of brazen, incipient tyrants would rush in among the Shake like a sudden fresh and bracing wind.
Strangers rode the night sky, and if the Shake had any hope of surviving what was coming, the politics of betrayal must be swept away. With finality.
It was his responsibility, after all. Perhaps his sister had forgotten the oldest vows that bound the Watch. But he had not. And so he had done what was necessary.
There was no pleasure in the act. Satisfaction, yes, as would be felt by any wise, intelligent person who succeeds in sweeping aside a multitude of shortsighted sharks, thus clearing the water. But no pleasure.
To his right, as he walked the shoreline, the land was growing light.
But the sea to his left remained dark.
Sometimes the verge between the two grew very narrow indeed.
Shifting weight from one foot to the other, Pully stared down into the pit. Snakes swarmed by the hundred in that hole, sluggish at first but now, as the day warmed, they writhed like worms in an open wound. She tugged at her nose, which had a tendency to tingle whenever she fell back into the habit of chewing her lips, but the tingling wouldn’t leave. Which meant, of course, that she was gnawing away at those wrinkled flaps covering what was left of her teeth.
Getting old was a misery. First the skin sagged. Then aches settled into every place and places that didn’t even exist. Pangs and twinges and spasms, and all the while the skin kept sagging, lines deepening, folds folding, and all beauty going away. The lilt of upright buttocks, the innocence of wide, shallow tits. The face still able to brave the weather, and lips still sweet and soft as pouches of rendered fat. All gone. What was left was a mind that still imagined itself young, its future stretching out, trapped inside a sack of loose meat and brittle bones. It wasn’t fair.
She yanked at her nose again, trying to get the feeling back. And that was another thing. The wrong parts kept on growing. Ears and nose, warts and moles, hairs sprouting everywhere. The body forgot its own rules, the flesh went senile and the bright mind within could wail all it wanted, but nothing that was real ever changed except for the worse.
She widened her stance and sent a stream of piss down into the stony earth. Even simple things got less predictable. Oh, what a misery ageing was.