He is wading in a sea of yellow flowers and wildgrass. The plants reach out to touch the skin of his legs and belly as he passes, not noticing that they’re beautiful. Instead, he hears the stalks underfoot - the fresh snap of the stems as the flowers bend, then break, left to wilt in his wake. He hates the meadow, has never recognized the beauty in any of it, and today is not different. 

He’s seen what time has chosen to hide - the gore, the shorelines that ran red with entrails.
He’s heard what time has buried - the crack of bone, the shht of flesh ripping, and the gutteral sound of mourning. 

Omnipotence has come with a price.

When he stops at last it’s under the dappled shade of an old oak tree, where veils of light find him through the eyelets in the leaves and cast glints of metal out into the meadow. “Let them come,” he thinks, a beacon in the springtime daylight - because he watched the lives of those he met like movies. He saw their births and deaths, counted them like loose change (casually and without delicacy). They didn’t matter to him, because they lived and died in the amount of time he took between breaths, if he wanted. There were millions more just like them, if he wanted. 

He sees them coming before they make the decision to turn.

ELEKTRUM

how time twines around your neck,