EAT & EATEN

The rush of the water pulling against him was all Leto felt before the sensation was past and it was dark once again. He wondered what it would feel like to be devoured whole by a great sea serpent. Would he know he had actually been swallowed? Would he only know when he stopped thinking? Slowly as he pondered and the sense of fear ebbed from him did he start to hear it again. The whispers... far off and soft that soon built up into a kind of gentle roar. He wasn't surprised the the sensation of stars appearing before him returned and this time narrowed his eyes to try and memorize patterns and shapes in them. He wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to see but they never seemed to really be moving, just vanishing and reappearing slightly to the side if it was even the same light at all. He watched with care as the sound grew in intensity if not really in volume and the lights rushed at him once more.

Again the sensation that he was being swallowed by something with rows and rows of giant teeth. Again the lonely darkness. Again the whispers. Again the stars. Again again. And again again again after that. Leto stopped counting soon after how many times he experienced this, as each time came with a dread settling in the pit of his stomach but not so much terror, and instead he focused on trying to find something new. Each time he did see something. Just small changes and details that told him this wasn't a perfect loop but a new attack each time. Though what kind of attack left him unharmed he couldn't really say. Leto came to the idea that he was indeed being eaten, surely he was if such great titans swam these waters. Yet once eaten a new titan swam around him looking at its new prey. Were the monsters getting smaller? Was he? Like a bit of ice slowly shrinking as you held it in your hand. That thought was odd, sitting in his mind like a stone refusing to be shaken free.

Eaten over and over again for eternity, each time becoming less. Not smaller but less. Once this thought was with him it felt oh so very true. At each repetition he felt weaker and smaller. He closed his eyes a few times and waited for the rushing whispers to take him but in the end that felt like giving up and scared him more than just the idea of being eaten away. Leto couldn't say how long this went on but eventually he felt like nothing. Stripped of hope when he fell into this black sea and then stripped of even his terror by the casual death he was given with each devouring. It was then that it finally, blessedly, changed.

The water rushed past him as he was devoured once again, but when the pull of the sea around him ebbed his feet clicked oh so lightly against a solid surface. Leto wanted to open his eyes but he was nothing so he had no eyes to open. Even still he looked as hard as he could in the darkness to try and see the seafloor he seemed to have reached. He could not. What he did see was a single bobbing starlight nearing him. This light as it neared was connected to something horrible and wrong, but Leto couldn't see it as he was nothing and as such had no eyes. But he knew. He knew it was twisted and hateful. It had a single whisper to it that floated around it as it swam near him. As Leto listened as hard as he could, a task that should have also been as impossible as looking yet one he managed with surprising ease, the words formed and made sense. Leto didn't know the language but he knew what it was saying. It was only one word.

- eat -

Leto didn't know if the word was a command for simply what it wanted. But he did not wish to be eaten again. He wasn't sure what would happen if it were to happen again. What happened when you were eaten but there was nothing left? What did you become when you couldn't even be nothing? So Leto waited until the light was next to him and reached out with his hand, which he no longer had, and grabbed the thing. It squirmed and writhed with its sharp and jagged body. The satyr brought it up to his mouth, which again he no longer had, and bit down sharply. In that moment. In that crisp clean moment the world around him came to life. Not to light, for no light could really survive that darkness, but to life at the very least.

Leto looked at his hand, it was white and thin like he was made just of fog. He held the body of a satyr in it. Only it couldn't be as it was far too small and it was missing a chunk of its upper body. His mouth was full of meat and he could put two and two together but he didn't stop. With each chew the rush of blood in his mouth made him feel like more. He was tired of being nothing and there was no euphoria like being allowed to simply Be. Leto ate the little satyr wearing the purple shawl he should have recognized and watched as his wispy fog-like form gave off the softest of lights. From the light he gave off himself he could see that the floor he stood on was stone. Old stone cracked and cragged from eons. He could see a few feet out in front of himself and could see the book still grasped firmly in his hand. It was leaking its pages' ink out into the water in long thin tendrils that coiled around but never actually touched him. Now he could hear a faint chorus of whispers from the book...

- walk -

Ahead of him many rows of starlight arranged themselves. Leto couldn't be sure what they were but two parallel ideas came to mind. A great building and an open maw.