Nibbles

The body runs in stacked, ridged scale plates that hold light like wet coal. Bone shows white along the side where the plates gave way. The fins and tail are carved through with vortex negative space, thin enough that the color bleeds and pools at every trailing edge. He still grins. That part never stopped. The Graveyard does not ask where you came from. The archivists have him shelved with the Small Ones and a note that the Swamp Shark would not have lasted a week in that pond.

Every layer line reads as scale striation. The heat bloom across the fins is the machine leaving its own mark, and it stays in.