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A tooth was dislodged from a black gumline, worked free by a worrying tongue. It was rolled against the palate and then out towards the subtle parting of black lips. As if it were a wish made in reverse, its sharp enamel was dropped like a coin from the obsidian well of the man's mouth. It hit the wire-wrapped gutstring of his lyre with a surprisingly pleasant tink.
"A molar," His voice was a deep, resonant melody. Around him, the inert stones of the charnel seemed to jitter at his song. Skeletal fingers found the tooth where it had started to roll away, leaving a trail of sound in its wake. The blind man took it between forefinger and thumb and raised it before unseeing eyes. From his vantage point, ocular nerves attuned only to the unseen, he glimpsed a tightly wound mass of black. It undulated in his fingers as he tipped his head from left to right in an avian manner. His skull was like a bullet in a well-oiled joint as he appraised it.
In the vibrations he divined the message.
"Four tides quick," He announced to himself. The stones again rustled like black birds in a rookery. Hauling himself to his bare feet and the black shadows that wreathed them, he tucked the tooth back into his mouth from where it had fallen from. Not yet ready to accept the loss of the open hole in his jaw, where the gummy sinew felt like seaweed underfoot in deep water, he swallowed the bone. Like all things, it would return.
The tooth and the moribund spirit within it had called him east. He arrived in his traditional pall, tongue yet milking the sweet taste of ichor from the hole in his mouth. It made his words sweeter, as if he had lowered his head between the legs of man or a plate of decorated cake before speaking. From behind the thick weft of burial fabric wrapped thrice about his head, concealing the shadow of his face, he spoke whipped frosting over the cot in the dulcet tones of his voice.
"Forgive me this late arrival. You are terribly kind to have kept the kettle warm."
An abyssal cacophony glittered behind his words. An air of mirth twisted around them like a black snake swallowing itself.
With the labored sigh of a traveler, the figure hewn from basalt and shadow lowered himself beside the lodge cot. The smell of sickness and freshly laundered linen atop a haybale was the first hand to greet him, then the smell of smoked black tea where it rose in twists of heady steam. Having been bid unspoken welcome, he felt across the bedside table, over the corpse of a dead cockroach and cloth that had gone rigid with dry snot, until at last his fingers found a handle and a cool ceramic cup. A steady hand filled it to the brim with the amber colored water and he took a deep sip and hummed.
"A bit over-steeped, I am afraid. But naught a bit of sweetness cannot redress."
At last, his guest gave him proper welcome. One long, resinous groan that rattled up from the depths of a sunken chest. It carried with it a stench of pus and dried organ meat. Illness, though more rare than accident and folly, had come. A black hand reached forward to press the tea cup blindly to the man's chapped lips.
"Drink and see for yourself," The voice was barely above a whisper as the ceramic was tilted and a torrent of its earthy liquid was poured down the dying man's throat. He let it run until one last thirst was slaked, until it caught on brittle cartilage and rubbed raw the man's last semblance of awareness.
"Have you no honey, host mine?"
The man coughed. The sound was raw and with each heave of deflated lung, a splatter of blood covered the black beak of the Visitor's mask from where it jutted out from behind its fabric curtain. The cosmic enamel drank the blood thirstily and from it gleaned every memory before. His name had been Lagash. His mother tended the tea fields, making his first memory that of whisks and leaves. His creation was that of a yak who turned fire ash into endless milk. He had born two children, both returned before him after losing a contest of chess. His laughter once sounded like two bells tied to a goat's neck. His wife was buried beneath the winter store. Her mask, shaped like an mallard's head, was nailed to the ceiling. His greatest regret was that he never loved them, that mallard and her ducklings, as much as he loved his yaks. The Other remembered them.
Lagash coughed and he coughed until the bright, brilliant violet of his soul wound up like a clump of phlegm and shot out like a falling star. Unburdened by memory and regret, Lagash filled his guest's cup with the liquid of life ; a sweeter honey, that wondrous spit. The rugged farmer was neither magnificent nor overwhelming, but returned as he had labored to be in life — simple and convenient. Illness would take four more in his village before the week was through, but none would serve their end in earthenware.
Not wanting to begrudge his host the kindness, the Visitor lifted the cup to his lips again. The soul, brilliant and warm, slipped past his jagged teeth and over the black mass of his tongue. It sank into the pit of his vessel and then deeper still until it filled his stomach that was not truly a stomach with the feeling of moth wings. It tickled him, like a song burst into ten thousand feathery splinters, as he reached forward to lay his hand across the death-wide eyes of the ailing man. His palm would smell of rotted fruit until morning.
Preparing to leave, as any good guest of good rearing would, he returned to the cup and drank deep the dregs of soul. Swallowing the detritus of pain and bitterness from having been kept in boiling water overlong, he noticed something hard at the bottom of his cup. It clinked about the edge like a marble, its sound muffled by the sound of tea leaves.
Death smiled like a black hole and all of its swallowed stars behind his shroud.
A molar.