Darkness, the blank slate. Pop pop pop: White-boned skulls flash, of cattle, fish, frog, dog, human, a multitude of calcified blooms on the slowly greening tree that is greeting the light. A neon skeleton of ash flashes solid and boils with leaves and keys that keen in a high wind. Picture this. The disembodied skulls swing in the teasing wind, as if hung from rope… and they are.

Golden hemp, noosed at the necks of rotting corpse bodies slowly fading solid like a photographer’s darkroom trick. Bull’s head above a half fleshed ribcage, cobra vertebrae hissing raspily against paperdust snakeskin, a weasel writhes a facsimile of life under its dead-eyed glare, shark teeth grin at the irony of deathdealer dealt its own card, a man without a face but for a skull wears his skin like a loose robe. The skulls gain a light of their own, red and green and blue and purple and yellow and orange, in soft, blinking auras.

Ornamental tree. Raiments of diffuse death hung on the worldtree, coat rack of the dead gods; the gods have dusted, turned into the very earth the ash roots in, and the goddesses have splashed, a monsoon from which its root suckle greedily.