"I've a deep streak of scale sympathy. Not entirely healthy, but if there's a question to be asked, my answer shies from blood. Always sunset, never noon, of course, but when then comes night? Forgive the cliché.
"Have I told you? Upon my first crossing into the woods, I took in a trifold malaise. An exchange. A thickening of blood for the life of thirty creeping things. That malady has passed, and their descendants are now either few enough to name, or too numerous to know. Riddles for the centipede, or centipedes riddling my future?
"Not that my alliances would shrivel under sun, but stone weathers. Where else comes soil?
"But you'll be wanting me to betroth the cross, the hydra, the shadow of the moon. Such certainty is too bittersweet. See me after I am gone, and before I arrive. I'll bring your skin."