Ashes

And in the morning I woke to mist, and from the center of it appeared a great face, a face of brilliant blue pouring from the steam and glowing like the center of the sun. And about it there was a halo of death, of dead children, a ring of mummified remains in orbit around the great face. And the great face opened its mouth, a giant mouth, and it summoned me inside. And in the mouth of the great face there stood the expanse of a forest, a forest of the tallest pines reaching up to a sky of molding yellow. In the spires of pine, at the tip of each colossal tree, a halo of fire burned, and the whole of them together formed a web of fire in the sky. And as I stared into the web of fire burning into the hazy yellow sky, filling the hazy yellow sky with the thick inky smoke of ink diffused in dirty water. And the web of fire burnt out, slowly and the ashes that rained down from the sky filled my lungs. And those ashes were alive with some otherworldly spirit, some animating spirit and from the inside of my lungs the ashes, full of diminutive mouths, devoured me from the inside out. And as those living ashes, the ashes rained down from the sky's web of fire, my flesh began to gray and shrivel on my bones, and I was filled with all the terror of dying. And in the dying, I saw a ring of flowered eyes lord over my spirit, and I was afraid, for each eye was transparent like glass and filled with blood like a crystal of wine. And I whispered my fears to each eye, my secret fears, and each eye was imbued with the word of one fear. And from that word, each eye grew tendrils like an octopus or squid and those tendrils from each fear-instilled eye wrapped the last moments of my beating heart.