Heart

There was once a land in which lived two peoples where one lived to be very full, and the other lived only a half-life. This was due to a dark and menacing creature that scoured the land, greeting each person who lived there with its fearsome presence. For there came a point in each of their lives when they would call it.

            Onyx black, undulating and without form, it came, and when every person saw it, they crumpled in a heap for all the fear it inspired in the very core of them. But it was only those who looked to find its eyes that rose again from the encounter. For it was in the search through the rippled terror that they saw their own hearts beating back at them, and the creature no more than a subtle melody that spoke of sorrow.

And at its hearing, they stood again, and found the weight of living bearable.

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