Day Seven

Life aboard the Bright Sun was a life circumscribed. Its paths, its crevices, its vaulted chambers summed up the totality of existence. Outside— there was no outside. Outside was less than nothing. Had our walls windows the curious of sight would have discovered his own face.
It is, perhaps, more accurate in name: Echoes-Die.
To combat this terror— this unknown unknowable, this realm of non-memory, this not— we went to concerts.
Or, rather, this was why our guardians attended.
The crowd runs upwards of ten thousand: a vast sandy expanse of lacquered backs, gilded carriage, bobbing heads and arms, crests and tails and tendrils trailing luminous ghosts of heat-memory. Shoulders-to-shoulders. Plate-to-plate. Batteries aflame. A single creature with sixty thousand legs and sixty thousand arms and a shell of song wrought solid.
Pillar-chimes ring red thunder.
Chant:
Strip by crackling strip we sunder/rent/rip/tear—
we close our claws our jaws and flay
fine knives
Ours is the dust-flesh,
Ours is the making
Call:
We are the throat
We are the muscle
We are the brain
Counterchant:
Reduce to recover— slay to preserve
Bone by bone we reassemble (revert, reactivate, reaffirm)
Stars skeleton-strung
Carved, polished, mounted
Snarling silent trapped and bound
Countercall:
We save the solid and devour the soft
We take and we become
Eternity gapes in ice