Afterbirth

There’s something wrong with the sun. It hangs in the sky like a cell caught mid-mitosis, embarrassed to be seen in such a flagrant state; the nighttime secrets which it has always hid in its lair beneath the sea finally dragged out into the day.

Doll stares up at it through a sheet of smoked glass, a jagged-edged thing salvaged from a wrecked limousine. It’s already streaked with blood from the false-flesh that coats her carefully woven fingers, little candy-colored droplets fanning out in painful rivulets.

That’s okay, though. Her hands will heal. It’s far more important that Doll sees everything she can before the sun remembers how to hide its shame and flees back into the sea—

Or, Doll thinks with a worried-eager shudder, turns its wrath upon the world and burns her to ash.

It doesn’t do either of those, though, and Doll stands dumbfounded as she watches the two daughter-suns, briefly identical in size, jostle for prominence. Coronal mass flows back and forth between them, sucked through the ever-shrinking connection in their incandescent membranes—

Doll decides to root for the one on the left; she’s always had a thing for the sinister.

Bad luck, though: her chosen champion comes away small and weak, burning with a ruddy-red flame. A failure; diminished. The victor swells ever-larger, vibrant and yellow, the one true sun—

For a long moment the world is bright and all is well.

Then the false-sun tears into it. A thousand thorny tentacles burst from its withering halo, hungry-toothed lines arcing out to encircle its twin; its heart opens into an emptiness, a hungry maw aching to be filled—

Doll gasps with fearful joy as the true-sun’s viscera splatters across the sky.

Slowly, inevitably, the world begins to dim.