Bram missed plumbing and mirrors and hot water.

He missed food prepared in restaurants and grocers full of fruit and meats for the taking in exchange for trinkets and promises.

He missed toilets.

He missed blankets.

But he missed heat most of all.

It had never seemed important to learn how to make fire without use of any tools but those you could construct out in the wilds from scratch.

There would always be lighters.

There would always be matches.

Damnation and the looming figures of the horrors above there was supposed to be lenses!

But as the horrible clouds of grasping tendrils scoured more and more thoroughly across the valleys there was fewer and fewer instruments of civilization.

First to go was all the larger structures, vehicles and engines.

Then smaller and less notable artefacts.

Finally it had settled to anything of forged metal or plastic.

Simple knives, cans, utensils and ceramic plates.

Bram had stripped himself of any clothing that he could not confirm was wholey free of synthetic fibres after he had watched the tendrils from a crevice carrying off bundles of laundry.

It did not matter how the horrors could track the cloth fibres.

It was not worth the risk.

He abandoned the caches of tools and goods and sealed packages of food. Because he often saw them being plundered by the tendrils.

It was not worth the risk.

He remembered the last time he had seen worked glass or the shine of mirrors. That had been three uncomfortable naps wedged in stone cracks ago.

It was all not worth the risk.

He through sheer terror and panicked observation added to the slowly growing list of rules enacted by the monsters in the sky.

He had not spoken to anyone in three or five uncomfortable naps in his crevice refuge.

He had not gone near anywhere that seemed like it shined with the song of prayer or signs of habitation or even fire.

He remembered how congregations of people drew the groping mass that looked like animate black silk hair from a distance.

Bram stayed away from everything he saw were draws for the monsters.

He hid and watched the things collecting and sifting and stripping the landscape of every trace of civilization.

Humanity was being erased from the hills of Gaia.

Not merely killed or driven to extinction.

There was not going to be anything left to say they were ever there.

These monsters were stripping every hint of evidence and slaying memories at their roots.

Killing the cultivation of ancestors and signs of prayer, destroying the memory and record of the souls that huddled in camps of survivors.

There was already no sign of any form of wire records that had seemed a foundation for all of life.

Bram suspected that the books would soon follow if they had not already.

No sign or word or sigil of human civilization would remain.

Humanity would be gone like a dream.

The only thing that would persist was the memory of the living survivors if this went on.

If they could survive.

If Bram could find a way to not freeze to death.

And to get enough fresh water to drink and food to eat.

It was so hard to find the time to scavenge food in the sparse times that it seemed the churning sifting tendrils were far away.

A fools desperate hope that. The tripods were always over head, even if the fringe of their grasp was far away they probably saw every desperate idiot scavenging to survive and simply were intent on more vital and durable records of humanity’s existence.

No point in bothering to kill fools like Bram who were too stupid to survive without the swaddling of nations and countries and air conditioning and heating and markets and restaurants.

He worried he was already dying, his breath felt short and yet his strides were long. He stumbled and things seemed to be off balance.

He felt hollow and ill coordinated.

He found himself trying to step and tripping down a hill.

He caught himself and over pulled.

It all seemed like vague signs in his fuzzy exhausted thoughts that he was dieing.

Perhaps many years later they would delicately pick up the bones of the fools like bram after having ensured all the competent populations had been scattered or killed.

He tried to make sense of their plans, assigned some malicious hate of humanity to the black near featureless shapes looming over head.

Something to explain the intense and thorough obliteration enacted upon them.

But these musings came to flit and drift between the pressing concerns of hunger, thirst and trembling cold when the wind became harsh.

The only blessing was there was not the chill of night or Bram would surely have died of exposure before the second day.

Although the constant sun beating down like that had already burnt his skin to peeling when he did not shade himself properly before sleep.

There were so many easy ways to die alone like this.

He felt a pain in his stomach and wondered if perhaps those berries would be the death of him.

Perhaps he had already poisoned himself?

Or gotten sick?

He was so light headed and fuzzy feeling.

The berries had smelled and tasted good but who knew?

Bram certainly did not. He had just been so hungry he could not stand to not eat something that smelled sweet.

He cried for himself then, shed precious tears full of water he did not know he could replace.

The monsters did not need to do anything to end his little mote of humanity.

They just had to let him wander around and poison himself to death in desperate starvation.

Bram felt himself starting to laugh even as the terribly wasteful tears passed his lips and teased his tongue with the sharpness of salt.

He had survived the apocalypse only to die to berries?!

He finally let himself settle to sleep with his stomach ache not expecting to ever open them again.

Not expecting to ever be born for his second life given the way the world was turning.

So much for life eternal being the birthright of every child of man.