Work Text:
Old Mother, the Lady in White, the pale leviathan, the queen of the drowned and lost at sea. She who was old when the stars were young, who sang the Outsider lullabies and rocked him gently to sleep as a boy, let him dream his sad songs sung in tones incomprehensible to human ears and strange meetings of flesh and gears. Old Mother, with her brood hundreds strong, a fleet of smooth black prows and teeth that jut forth like the jagged rocks of a ship-sundering coast. She bears her scars as a veil upon her delicate pink hide, a mourning raiment for her lost children in the slaughterhouses and the sailors torn asunder by storm or the sun poisoning of the doldrums. She who stands as a bulwark of all that is ancient and inscrutable against the million-booted march of industry and science. The day that she lays dying upon the gray sand, bellowing out her last hymn of rage and sorrow for what the world had been, and all the sorrow that has yet to come to pass, is the day where all the secrets of the world have been uncovered and cataloged neatly, the day every light in the sky has been assigned a name, just in time for them to fade out one by one.