As Soon As You Came In…

…all the beasts went away.

To lay waste: ultimate destruction. Before him, nothing survived. Bylah left in his wake the screaming of children without fathers, wives sans husbands. Natural disasters were more forgiving than He.

At his feet, a dead man’s carnival; the ground was soft and pliant. It would be red for years, life’s blood to feed the vermin. At every turn was a crow’s laugh, high, mighty, and mad, colored with iris’ of the corpses. Birds cared for beautiful things; to them, Bylah was God.

Somewhere, trapped like rats in mazes, amazing, came the realization that all of the refuse was gone. Swept clean. No men. No loud braggarts, drunken sots, to clutter his time with. Every sling and arrow, bows shot fine, was out of his way. Spider-crawl slow was a smile, the sort found on sharks, found in dead black eyes, neither welcoming nor warm. The morning before cock’s crow was looking up.

Rules, regulations pushed aside, it did not take him long to stalk a meal, to snap and snarl, drag the girl to the ground as if she were butterfly and he, vastly, a sprawled-wide spider, venomous fangs and whatever else these foolish, two-legged beasts thought he was.

Had Bylah not arrived, she might have played house, laid beneath a man, gave him children. What a worthless life to suffer through. Remorse was not something trapped in the rot of Bylah’s breast, but he felt pity for those women. Had hunger not gnawed at his mind, he might have given her one last moment of brief glory, of mind-numbing pleasure. Woe to her, his heart was not in it.

He had no heart.