The little girl could not help opening her mouth, catching the hot stream gushing from her eye sockets.
She spread her arms to welcome the thing wriggling out from within the mountain of corpses, lush with flowers and brimming with life.
"Crack, crack. Crack, crack."
The corpse mountain kept writhing, and from within came a sound that would have made one's skin crawl in reality, yet sounded sweet in the dream—at least a hundred times better than the cawing of crows.
Layers upon layers of rotten corpses peeled away, like flower buds slowly blooming.
Revealing within, crystalline and radiant, both majestic and warm...
The Great Horned Rat God.
That was right. What appeared before the little girl, condensed from the bones of countless relatives, friends, and neighbors, was a skeletal statue of the Great Horned Rat God sitting cross-legged.
The skeleton, as though carved from seven-colored crystal, was covered in vast swathes of fungal carpet.
The fungal carpet writhed continuously, spraying out spores like layer upon layer of colorful gauze.
It softened the sharpness of the skeletal spikes and horns.
Making the enormous statue seem strangely intimate in the little girl's eyes.
Even the two clusters of ghostly light pulsing in its hollow eye sockets
reminded the little girl of the stove fire in her home, which had never gone out all year round.
And so, when the skeletal statue of the Great Horned Rat God stretched out its bony arm toward the little girl's head,
she not only did not dodge, but took the initiative to step forward.
After all, that pale skeletal palm contained the bones of her father and mother as well.
It allowed her to sense her parents' warmth one last time.
"Do not be afraid, my child. Suffering will soon pass."
As the skeletal statue