The Spilling

What climbs out when the starless dark finally reaches the stair, and it is not spiders, not rats, nothing that was ever under a sun: eyeless, boneless, pale as things grown in deep cold water, all gullet and recurved teeth, climbing each other upward in one glistening motion. Cold means little to what the cold made; chill your blade all you like, its climb lands all but whole through the frost. It keeps a single law: it never climbs back down. Every turn it is more than it was, it never loses what it gains, no blade stays keen against ten thousand small teeth, the cairns you raise it swallows stone by stone — and the Dust you bank spills with everything else over the rail: every turn of its climb shakes eight grains from your hourglass, and they do not come back. Wounding it teaches you the law's last clause: it does not bleed, it rises.