The sky hung heavy like a sheet of tarnished zinc, pricked with tiny, cross-shaped stars that gave off no real warmth. The mother lowered her hand, her long, tapered fingers gesturing toward the tide of pale, skull-faced shapes pressing up through the root-choked soil. "Watch their eyes, little one," she murmured, her voice like dry leaves scraping across stone. "You do not pull them from the mud; you simply show them which way the dark turns."
Mirror in the Thorns:
The trees around the clearing grew inward, clawing at the sky, but they dared not touch the artifact. Framed in decadent Baroque gold, the entity pulls itself upward from the abyss of its own beard, a pale, screaming remnant of a forgotten king. The swirling void behind it is not a reflection, but a window into the very void that consumed its humanity
