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There is an end. There is.
Time - time, ticking, the clocks and their hands moving out of unison, synchronised in agony if nothing else through cracked glass, the trickle of sand as it slips down the hourglass.
Time, devoured. Consumed, shovelled in handfuls, with salt-wet clothes sticking to skin and flesh, the folds stiff, damp. Something aches - throbs, pulsing, growing, pushing out from arteries, from muscle and tendon and bone, indiscriminate. It curves around the circumference of a skull, and lays all to waste without a single touch.
Time - time again, thicker than water, than the stench of it in the nose, tart with iron, metallic but so human. It gives him more time. He devours it all.
Time. There are galaxies moving, constant motion, cannibalistic by nature, obligation. Collision and a feast, stars merging, meeting their violent end. It was always going to happen, always has happened. It eats, ravenous, a starving desperate beast unable to stop itself as it loses itself in something greater, something that could once have been called whole.
Fact: there is blood on his hands. Rich, deep, pooling in the lines of his palms, the scrapes on his skin. Fact: he has more time. He has more time. He has more time.
The white on the fabric strewn about his waist is stained, near unintelligible beneath the flood of it.
Red.
Red.
Red.
Apathy.
I am that I am, and I am nothing.
Time - he eats. He eats and eats, glutton, feels every second of it, and he rejoices in the delirium as his traitor hands shovel torn innards past his lips. It is something beautiful, in its own morbidity, the carcass beneath him.
There lingers the taste of the ocean salt. The growth beneath his skin writhes as if truly living.
Disruption.
There goes a great shudder through the muscle. Bells chiming through mist settled upon lonely sands, water lapping at the rocks. The bells toll. They know. There is an end. There is.
Curiosity.
One quick moment to crane the neck.
It happened fast - he did not use up much time. None has gone to waste, savoured every morsel. He picks the tacky red from stained white, gnaws at the edges, a dog gone mad. The time had ticked - he had tilted his head, watched, listened. He always listens.
The body beneath him knew the score. The body beneath him may have known seconds only before cosmic collision.
He has always possessed the insatiable need to see it. What happens, like this. He consumes it all.
Assimilation.
Time - he will dislocate his own jaw to fit it all in. Feeling, sensation, beauty overwhelming. It tastes like freedom twisted into something broken, something sacred and rare on his tongue. It is red.
Red.
Red.
The clocktower is empty, now. a hollowed out shell, once a home, precious, ephemeral. Its walls are crumbling. The clock ticks wrong, delayed, never quite steady in its rhythm. He watches the second hand falter in place. The walls will not last.
Aggrandisation.
The pull. Yes, the pull.
It suffocates. Let him in.
Time, limited and sparse, scraped from marrow. Torn from the cage of ribs, from the soft of a torso, given new meaning. He doesn’t want to leave any left behind. This is his. It has to be his, there is no other reason.
The ground beneath him is thick and wet and red, red, red. It soaks into his clothes - second by second - weighs him down.
Delineation.
There are those beyond the veil he is so closely pressed against, who See, who never stop Watching. He wants to know what they Know - just a taste, as his world quietens, naught but the sound of his own sighing breaths and the remains between his teeth to be heard, as he Listens, straining his ears. He wants to Know.
He is on the edge, sent over by the ringing in his ears. He thinks he Hears voices there.
He thinks he Hears his own soul, in the emptiness.
Perversion.
It’s all almost gone. He looks up - the world spins, and his jaw aches. There are things there - bearing false witness to his undoing. It is no good. There is a star in his chest, destroying itself, dying as every second passes.
There is an ending here. He is what he is - but he is not the same, not the same as them, or those that Watch. There is something different, now, in his head, and the radio-echo of distant things. Maybe he just Hears himself.
There is no fairness here. A fool’s errand, to think, to believe in such fairness. The corpse still lays at his feet, stripped of its being. The blood has not yet dried on his sword, or his lips. The sand chafes his skin.
He watches, but does not Watch. The clock does not tick, but he Hears it anyway.
Resentment.
The corpse had laurels, once. They - red-splattered and dulled - sit now atop his head, woven in between the coral that tears his skin apart in a mockery of a crown. Are these laurels to be proud of?
He blinks, and blinks again, and the sky blurs. There is water at his feet, but he does not Hear it. He stares down at the bones, and he looks out at the Beyond, and he Hates. How much he has begun to Hate, since he has lived, since this all began. That they might try to take this from him.
Separation.
Falling.
He remembers falling, he thinks, of the great wide nothing he has fallen through. He sees the canary fall, again, when he blinks. An angel, plummeting - feathers like stars against the too-bright backdrop, and gone, just moments later.
He tastes blood in his mouth. He will fall again. His hellish purgatory is cold, he knows.
The star in his chest is at its end - ready to destroy all life with the finality of its own death, wiping all that is around it out. Perhaps he has beaten his star to the mark.
The corpse below him smells of cosmic desolation. He is a cannibal galaxy, teeth bared. He has taken without remorse. The stars within are as beams - they shine through the wheel, and he thinks he can Hear them, even now.
Degradation.
The sand bites into his skin. The saltwater burns every cut, every graze. He is barely living. He is the universe tasting itself, tearing itself apart, as time moves onwards. His feet ache when he stumbles.
Nature chews him up and spits him out onto the shore at the foot of the hourglass. He leaves behind the bloodied bones. He does not deserve them.
Annihilation.
This agony - it fills him from every fibre of what remains of him. Bone-deep, soul-deep. He tears his way through sodden wood and sand, and stains what sifts inside the cracked glass red with his own blood. His own - not from his body, but his own, as it belongs to him. The corpse on the beach smiles at him - a stained rictus through the grass. His, because it must be.
Such are the consequences. The audience Watches, from Beyond the veil. They watch, too. The stars he snuffed out. The galaxies he consumed.
The hourglass is red within. He will claw his way back to his frigid purgatory, that great dark, and he will not forget. Such is his curse. He Knows this. He Hears it, as his time draws to an end.
They will never speak of this again.
Desolation.
There is something screaming. He is trapped in his own walls, trying to get out. He tastes the event horizon on his tongue, with the tang of blood, pure and cosmic. Ouroboros - he is the universe eating itself, tearing itself apart for an eternity that ends so soon, a forever that falls apart in seconds.
His body, so quiet, it Hears its own soul, in the chatter of the Beyond. This is his punishment.
The water takes him, cradles him in its embrace, and the bones on the shore aren’t his, and the words in his mind aren’t his, and the hands that guided his own are no longer there. He is sick to his stomach. Time runs out.
I am that I was, as I no longer am, for I am nothing.
He falls.