go on and be a big girl, you asked for this now

He had looked upon and found her wanting. God had turned His face away from her when she had finally crawled her way to him, broken and bleeding. In her very final breaths, she begged Him to welcome her into His embrace. She'd felt His assessment, that cold and calculating gaze. Where she had expected warmth and acceptance, she was met at every end with a distant, disinterested regard. Calamity opened her mouth to speak to Him, hot tears streaming her eyes, and found her throat wouldn't produce a single noise. She choked and gagged - finally, a single firefly spun out from her jaws and spiraled up towards the stars. A strangled noise of confusion, caught between a gasp and a retch, escaped her. Thousands of fireflies poured from her body. She felt every single one.

A crack of thunder woke her from her nightmare. Her eyes sprung open wide, red and sore from how long she'd managed to stay awake before finally passing into a fitful, half-sleep filled with all of her greatest fears. Sweat soaked her flanks. A gnawing hunger flared in her stomach, painfully insistent. Calamity breathed hard on her side, trying to focus her mind by recounting how she'd gotten here. First, she had separated from Toxicity to go a spiritual sojourn. After travelling with her and her children for this long, she'd felt a stirring unrest. Was this her life's curse? To always feel unsettled. To never belong. Even among the last few members of her family - her sect, her tribe - she felt... lost. It was her responsibility to find herself. She had looked within herself and found it wanting. Just a vacant pit, black and deep as the depths of the sea. A void. Her breathing had slowed to a reasonable rhythm. When she finally stood, shaking slightly from the cold sweat that had instantly chilled in the winter air, she saw it all around her: the crystals. They grew in patches like flowers between the roots of the trees. When she padded closer to inspect them, she saw they were affixed to the flat rocks scattered around the forest floor. Her stomach cramped hard, reminding her again (as if she could forget) just how long it had been since she had last eaten. Calamity licked her lips nervously and allowed her eyes to adjust to the eerie gloom of the forest floor. It should be mid-morning, but the moon hung malevolently above. It was high in the sky and larger than she'd ever seen, yet its light barely penetrated to the floor of the woods. Everything was awash in a blue half-light.

Her stomach growled out loud. Grunting at the fierce hunger pang, Calamity set her nose to ground to try and track... something. She was starting to get dizzy. But this was a forest. Even if it was winter, an entire ecosystem thrived here. There had to be something. A skinny squirrel? Mangy chipmunk? Just a little something to get her going. Just a little bit of anything to make the fierce pain in her stomach go away. She started walking in the vague direction of a stale scent, bobbing and weaving between the trees and stepping over shimmering crystals that stretched up from the rocks. They were beautiful, but she couldn't stop to admire them. Her stomach was guiding her now, insistent and feral.

Eventually the scent grew... sour. An undertow of rot and decay colored it. Calamity wrinkled her nose in distaste, but she was starving. A prouder wolf might have turned down carrion, but she was desperate. And miserable. And empty. Cala came upon the source of the smell: an elk calf, desiccated and picked apart by other denizens of the forest. Its white ribs were exposed to the sky, its chest having been completely excavated. Crystals grew in fractured colonies all along the exposed bone. It was morbidly beautiful and utterly enchanting. "Did you get lost?" she whispered, approaching the corpse. She circled it, as it was alive. As if it needed to be killed again. Calamity eyed the crystals. They glimmered everywhere her gaze passed. Its skull was mostly intact, save for a single long crystal sharpened to a deadly point protruded from its empty eye socket. There were some rotting strips of skin still hanging from the ribs and more to be sluiced out from deeper inside of the body's cavity. If she was careful she could eat around them. Cala had never seen anything like it, but her brain had surpassed the point of rational thinking. It was crying for food. She licked her lips again and leaned in, ripping a strip of furred skin off of the rib it dangled from. It dislodged a few crystal shards that sparkled as they fell to the ground. Calamity admired them as she sucked the skin down ravenously. It whetted the rest of her appetite, for better or worse. Fully committed now, she brought her slavering jaws down on the other parts of the calf she could easily reach.

Calamity ate hungrily, greedily, indiscriminately. Amongst her indiscriminate feasting, a few crystal shards undoubtedly made their way clattering down her throat along with small shards of bone lodged in cartilage and fat. It was as if the flayed corpse of the calf had been left here for her. As if she had been lead to it. There was a higher power. There had to be. Her God would not let her starve. Calamity slowly reclined in front of the bejeweled skeleton. Was this a sign as well? The crystals? Fireflies flickered at the edge of the clearing but didn't pass near the corpse, as if they were somehow aware of it. "Well, at least I found you," she said, voice soft as silk. Perhaps she would wait until her stomach settled, grab a few more morsels, and take some bones with her. They would make fantastic new casting runes. This encounter felt important. The bones would surely carry this latent, charged energy on into their second life as runes. For now, she simply admired the way the crystals glittered, unaware that she had ingested several slivers.