Beneath the moon, beside an ancient lake - Etro

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

Sleep doesn’t come until much too late.
He stands by her funeral pyre – her cairn of bones and detritus. This place is no longer Hestia’s, though it is Hestia that remains and nothing more. It could have (should have) been so beautiful. It had been made to be intertwined. A weave of ribs and vertebrae; the bare waste of old bones, going dark and soft, and indigo. Soft, supple skin. His opus.

When he sleeps, he dreams the same thing

—he is falling. Falling. Falling…

Somewhere in that strange, suspended space between places, he sloughs off the hairless, smooth, pink skin. He shakes the boy off.He becomes mighty and when he awakes he is ready to meet them.

He is surrounded. Mounds of earth and rock and organic matter cover their modesty; they are marked carefully in a strange language (strange to him now – not always so). Astri, Thyndra, Hestia… He admires them; he feels a fondness for them and his heartbeat accelerates.

But always, one is empty. Its cover of soil and moss thrown back like a blanket – or like chains shorn from wrists – perverted. Unnamed.

He had lost one.

He had been quelled.

When he wakes it is still night, racing headlong into morning. Black and mauve – still darkness holds it stand. In his woodland greathall, it is cold and green. He is agitated, fitful. Angry. The gift giver moves, slow and solemn, a funeral procession. The first time he had met her, it had been night. He could not see her, nor she him – they could not suss each other out, though he tried in the dark to finger the broken places he felt he could feel, because he mirrored them in himself.
(He had been right, though. She was stronger for having the make of her being tested. If only he knew. A queen. And he, a queen-taker!)

He limps, slowly. His single wing, broken so as to look almost boneless, drags like a dirty, white cloak at his left. He reaps the sow of his vigil and sleeplessness – stiffness and soreness, his price to pay for his taste of godliness.
(When they had first met, he had been naked. Almost naked.) He is worn, hollow-eyed and bent. She has exposed him... addled him.

The gift giver is angry; the monster is ravenous.

POLLOCK
the gift giver