you can read almost anything about
angels
how they bite off the heads first,
copulate with tigers

Cicadas hum as thunder in the distant recesses of the electric-washed forest, a walkway in which he does not currently tread. He lingers as a bated breath on the borderline betwixt the overcast and the trickling of fractal light spearing past the fragments of clouds -- it does little to deter the stubborn darkness congregating on the entirety of his frame, casting instead a whitewashed glance to the ground beneath his paws. He does not move: motionlessness sets his bones into creeping stasis asides from the sporadic shift of his eyes (deep set and sunken and glaringly green, a sickening green that roils and hisses and chatters between the teeth of the monsters in the dark) and he exhales the mist into the humid air. Vertigo seeps along his spine, and his teeth clamor together, terrible and round about and horribly curved. He lingers.

He is a shadow.

An elongated pause gives him time to ponder. He does not ponder. His mind rattles, churns and chatters, murmurs of existential thought that he passes from the momentarily slack skew of his jaw with a lackluster growl.
Somewhere, somewhere near, a bird scatters from the heavy, heavy trees.

Brontide and bullets are the second grind of teeth. Leviathan shifts in barely audible impatience, sifting through the dry grass with hefty paws and nails blunt from friction (if he puts enough pressure, though, they certainly tear). The stench of ashes and population curl within the stressed flare of his nostrils, and his spine presses -- he stands poised, ears at a collected half-mast and lazy eyes sweeping, sludge of a stare (strangely and uncomfortably bright) drawn to the linear tangle of the trees.

He lingers.

He has not been here long, but his body rebels. The quiescence of stillness rips the maw of restlessness through the muscles of his limbs; his toes curl, and his eyes slit, deviating from the cluster of trees to wander. He revels in the existence of noise and shadows, and relates with a pass of his arid tongue over the impasse of his lower lip.

It does little to soothe the hiss of resulting pain. He does not react.

He is a shadow.

He lingers in the corners and the angles, a peripheral shudder of something that curls trepidation in the back of the legs. He exhales rust -- it is a barren breath, soundless and unimportant. His lungs billow, and his stare lifts.

He waits.



leviathan.