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Eresh stands in human guise before a broken city. Her bronze skin cast in copper glow under sickly green auroral light; the moon just barely visible in a darkened sky through all that haze. Eresh’s dark curls dancing in sharp winds drowned out by the howl of the Maw as it rips through what’s left of Marrowmont.
Come the dawn, it will be six days...
Six days since the Maw slipped its leash to batter open the barrier between irreality and this, her sometime home. Her other, in Boston, barely an hour away, untouched. The devastation contained, for now, to this city.
Six days of chaos and fire and screaming and digging for bodies in the rubble. Her hands aching from the cold and her head pounding.
It’s getting harder to believe that any of what they’re doing to keep the Maw here is going to matter. The Maidens who built this city, the only things that can touch the Maw and live – that its embrace does not erase from existence; that it does not devour – do not tire in their effort to hold the Maw here. But there is no end to the beast, always more slipping through the crack in the world just outside the city’s borders. Atop that nameless hill from which it spills.
Unlike the Maidens, the rest of them – those who stayed behind to aid the Maidens when the city was evacuated – are flagging. Slowly, true. But Eresh is already watching the work take its toll on the other goddesses, divine entities, monsters of legend and dream, and the witches who still defend this failing city. If they can’t find a way to kill the Maw or shove it back across the border it breached, it’s only a matter of time before Marrowmont will be entirely wiped away. And everything else after it.
There’s some small measure of hope in that what the Maidens sever from the Maw ceases to harm. Its dead, inert flesh food and fuel for the maenads who do their part to harry it and feast on its remnants. Greek banshees screaming in glee as they rage through the city, unofficial cleanup crew for the exponentially more of the Maw pouring in every day. The only creatures brave, or fool, enough to eat its leavings. Though they've as yet showed no ill effects. But even they’re not fool enough to try eating its living limbs – and it’s all limbs.
She shudders at the thought of what lingers beyond that breach. Whatever’s attached to all that devouring flesh, fashioned of tendrils and grasping appendage. What parts of it they’ve not yet seen.
A whoop from the maenads shakes her from distressing imaginings of what that might entail.
