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The Long Man wrapped himself in grief to hide his shame. "I had no choice. The war never ends. My attempts to win it marked me with its darkness."
"My child, there is no place for you here." The Father pressed his fingers into the Long Man's chest, forcing him deeper into the niche. The golden stones grew cold and hard against the Long Man's back, and crystalline spines pierced his flesh. "You are an abomination."
The tortured monster's pride flared like the last lash of a dying sun. "I did it for you. I became this defiled thing to save your precious men. I sacrificed myself to save them--and they destroyed me. They stole my power and cast me out. Father, I have earned this rest."
The Father's eyes turned hard and cold as the stone impaling the twisted being he had once embraced as his own child. "You have earned nothing. You took the gifts I gave you and corrupted them. You are of the shadow now, and this is light's home."
The Long Man's remaining eyes burned with unshed tears. "You may cast me out, Father, but I will return. I will reclaim what was mine and prove this is my place by right."
The Father turned his face away and the Long Man found himself crawling once more upon the broken plain. The jagged earth bit into his palms and the caustic dust clawed at his throat.
The Long Man crawled back to the world of men, back to the place of his death.
"So it begins, so it begins . . ." he chanted to himself in a language dead long before the sun first burned above the world of dust, "and so will it end."
The Long Man glared at the world through the remnants of his body: a single feather-rimmed eye. Its pupil as wide as a grown man's hand, the eye all that remained of the flesh that once carried him through the world of men. Only this scrap of his majesty survived the Night Marshal's betrayal.
It wasn't much, but it was enough.
His ancient power was as crippled as his physical form. The Night Marshal had stolen most of it away in their final confrontation, leaving him with a few sad dregs of his ancient strength.
It wasn't much, but it was enough.
The Long Man waited for days following his return to this world. He watched the sun rise and fall and rise again in a cycle that tormented him with its unchanging regularity. His sole eye lay on the floor of the Black Lodge. Shadows covered it, the sun shone upon its oily surface, and night fell on it again. Nothing else changed.
Until a lone squirrel hopped through the broken window and scampered across the ash-strewn floor in search of an acorn.
It wasn't much, but it was enough.
The Long Man blinked and a single tear oozed from his eye. He flicked his feathered lashes and the salty bead splashed against the squirrel's face.
The rodent screamed and shuddered from nose to tail as the Long Man burrowed into its flesh.
And then the Long Man was in the eye, but also within the squirrel.
A part of him scurried out of the Black Lodge, bushy tail twitching and beady eyes darting. The squirrel was a start, but he needed more.
He found the sow soon after. The squirrel dropped acorns in front of the great pink mother, one after another, a few inches of trail at a time.
The gravid pig happily followed the trail through the fire-cracked doors and ignored the slipping of her hooves on the Lodge's slick marble floors. The scent of death was in the air, but the scent of death was always in the air around this place. The sow's hunger was all that was important, and she would not stop until she'd stuffed her belly full.
The last acorn dropped from the squirrel's jaws and landed before the eye. The Long Man shed more tears and his essence flowed out to embrace the acorn.
The sow snuffled after the tasty morsel, and she gulped it down before sensing the danger. The Long Man pinned her primitive thoughts beneath his own. Her body quivered, struggling to resist his command, but she was far too weak to stand against him.
The sow walked on stiff legs. She stood before the eye, trembling. Her head lowered, inch by inch, until her snuffling nose pressed against the orb's bulging surface.
Her lips peeled back from her teeth and the sow ate, filling her belly with the Long Man's essence.
Then she ran, screaming, and the Long Man was within her, too.
Sean heard a pig's panicked squeals and imagined the feral hog bacon he'd make in the drum smoker behind his house. Killing the damned thing would make him late for his shift at the mill, but he gave no fucks.
A whole hog's worth of meat would more than make up for the lost wages, and killing the porker would save somebody's yard from getting ripped up. He rolled down the window to hear the hog better and slowed the truck to a crawl. There was something in the pig's cry, some panic-stricken note that struck a chord of unease deep in the reptilian core of Sean's brain. For a moment, he considered leaving the hunt for some other lucky bastard.
And then he saw the sow.
"Well, I'll be goddamned."
