She stood there, half in the shadows and smirking as he slowly bled to death. All his life he'd seen her in the corners of rooms and just outside of the streetlights, always too shaded to see but now he could see more of her than ever before, finding familial traits in her eerily ageless face.
His mother's eyes, uncle's dimples and grandfather's nose all so clearly present but damned if he could put a name to the face of the woman who'd haunted him his whole life. Not that it mattered as he realised how little of his body he could feel, how cold the room was and how far away she now seemed to be.
With a few more slow blinks, a sigh full of blood and a gentle slump, he was gone. He was gone and yet he was standing over himself, watching as the woman finally stepped fully out of the shadows and into the dying light of the fire he'd lit barely an hour earlier.
He noticed how unnatural all the faint wrinkles on her face looked just before the skin split completely, all humanity fleeing as her throat expanded, body twisted and hunkered down at his feet. One of her eyes seemed to stare at him while the other stared at his body for a few seconds.
In that moment he realised that he would be declared missing rather than dead - just like his mother, his uncle and his grandfather all before him - as the woman gently pulled his feet into her mouth, slowly but surely swallowing him whole before reassembling her face - now with his smile - and slipped back into the shadows for good.
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