He was so lonely.

The monsters had stopped churning over things.

The ache in his bones and the fuzzy cloud over his head failed to smother that pain.

The scratch of his dry throat, the burn of his exhausted arms and legs.

The clenched cramp of his stomach.

All of those were slowly but surely being smothered by the wonderful light blanket that filled his head like a big pillow.

But the ache of being alone was sharper than ever.

He stumbled in a loping swaying skip along the hillsides.

He had learned that if he moved like this, if he swaggered around like an animal and hid in the mulch and dirt the tendrils seemed to pass him by.

Or that could just be wishful thinking.

He could sometimes not even clearly see a tree or his own feet.

It was like the vision slipped away from him.

Spots danced over his vision.

When was the last time he had eaten? How long since he slept?

The sun hung still and the shadows did not turn.

Time stood still and there was no rhythm of city, no clocks, the animals seemed to have changed their daily rhythm.

Daily.

He laughed until he was gasping in the air.

He felt so weak and yet so elated. His limbs were frail and yet he could skip down the hill as if he was light as a feather.

He was so lonely.

He wandered aimlessly down the hillside listening to the silence and the distant rustling roar of the wave of grasping tendrils elsewhere in the valley.

Going lower and lower to where rivers once flowed and pools were built to hold water.

He yearned to meet someone.

To talk to them.

To tell them who he was, to speak his story.

He felt a whisper of a thought dance up and down his spine.

To leave a memory for his wake.

The colors of the sky seemed to be going gray and he felt his eyes burn a bit when he peered at the balefully still sun.

His lids closed a moment.

“DO NOT LINGER!”

He jolted awake, his blood feeling lethargic and gummy in his hands and neck. He felt new stings and pains from where he had fallen on stones and roots and cut or bruised himself.

He wheezed but words would not come to his dry throat.

He felt awe and delight and song tickling his spine and flushing his face even as his skin felt like it hung on his bones.

“You must not stay... go... flee deeper... If you fall here... just GO Go please! I don’t care who you are you don’t deserve it... none of us deserve it....”

It was someone he knew? A voice in the song, a ghost of a friend? Mother? Father? He could not say. He could not articulate and the world seemed so dark.

Had night finally fallen?

No there was a lightness straight ahead of him. Did he have a light?

A light in his head and eyes making everything soft and funny.

“Come! This way! Go deep... go low... find the dark places”

He heard someone, it was a voice like a touch up and down his spine. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever heard in his life.

It was someone else, a voice after so long hearing nothing but wind and churning doom echoing in the distance.

He stumbled to follow the direction, meandering, falling, rolling down and sliding across gravel. He crawled.

“This way... please! Hurry... HURRY! it will find you... Oh, Nonononoo! NO! they are here, they found me... Go deep I will try and draw them off! When you part... DO NOT TURN TO THE SKY”

He nodded into the gravel and smiled a bit.

Followed the words of the beautiful wonderful friend.

It had to be a friend right?

Who else would have come to talk to him after...

He could not quite remember.

Something.

He crawled down lower, managed to get himself up onto his knees and then shamble...

He stood upright for a moment then tumbled and fell forward, the impacts were softened and dull.

He could not follow what he was seeing.

It was a jumble of confusion.

Leaves?

Dirt?

Rock?

Sky?

Huh...

Trees were not supposed to be so far below.

Oh the rocks were coming up to meet him.

That was nice of them.

And then everything was gone.

It was dark? Numb all over. Jumbled up confusion. Couldn't remember what seeing felt like. What feeling looked like. The voices of even his own mind were gone.

Wait. there was something. An echo of wordless emotions. Even something that was almost like a sense, that had always been there and never noticed because it was static but first now noticed because everything else went away instantly but this was going away *slowly*.

Something he was clinging to instinctively, and always HAD been holding onto. Something that was slowly shrinking and dissolving, pushing more and more of him out into... something else. With everything else gone, these sensations were maybe becoming clearer, although it was a painfully slow process.

Then suddenly there was a warmth far far away, a sensation he DID recognize; prayer. Instinctively he yearned for it, like hunger. But to go there he'd have to let go of the thing he'd been holding onto for years and years to get there.

Then some memory snapped into place, although the half of the memory that had been made of words was gone. Senses suddenly gone, wanting to go towards prayer? That was how being dead had always been described.

Ok there had been preparation for this, long ago, although most of it had been words he couldn't think now. Think. The first step when you died for the first time was you needed to learn how to think without a brain. This could take days, or years. That was unacceptable for some reason. Fear... Oh. The horrors. Wait. The prayer... that much prayer, there was no way there were enough people left alive to generate it... something.... Subtly off about it. And it felt far away, as if on the other side of an impossible gulf, but spirits could travel all over terra with but a thought right? But they couldn't bridge... air. The chasm he felt must be air. With the prayer on the other side meaning... Oh shit.

It was a lure. The ghost before he died had made word and there was a feeling the words were relevant but all words were gone but now he could feel it had also left something else. Down. What was down? He couldn't remember. But it been because "down" was away from the horrors, further away into the starving infinity away from the sweet scent of prayer and promise of comfort and memory that must mean doom.

The thing that was different and was away from the air must be... stone or dirt or something. Or maybe plants. There was no way to tell which was wich, or even any sense of shape to it or clear distinction into different types. There WAS a density or something like it, that he felt he could cling to if he wanted. Maybe the higher density things were plants? It didn't matter. The thing that he was clinging to was even thicker, what was it? His own corpse, clearly. There was supposed to be a memory of if you should let go of your corpse or not but it wasn't there.

He felt like maybe he was curled up.

Or maybe drifting with every limb stretched taught.

Trying to move did nothing, but the intention to move? He felt something there densities reaching up to him. Things shifting and grinding around him. It was ‘away’ from the sweet promise but in the same way that everywhere could be away from it.

He felt himself trying to cling tighter and yet his grasp was crumpling and slipping away and leaving him even more unmoored.

He could not go towards the only familiar and comforting thing. He could not stay here clinging to dwindling crumpling substance.

He tried to reach, to look, grasp, stretch.

None of these words were right or true, he could not orient any action to match with any other. Suddenly there was a catch, a hook, something slippery and yet solid. It was not-cold but in a way that felt frozen and slow and panicked something nestled deep within him as not safe.

Like the sting of pain he was warned off from embracing, becoming the unknown. It was not quite entirely unlike the ghostly hint of unworded cold.

A not-cold-still.

He felt stretched and shredded just from the briefest extension towards it, into it as part of it? Tried to find something else. Buzzing, confusion, flexibility, unknowns like... like so many things like thin and sparse and small and bursting and so tiny and narrow and empty and brief.

He felt himself spindling off in all the not directions and bleeding away and hunger paining him until suddenly he was hard pressed to something soft.

All the minute shredded thinness of him was enfolded and pushed back.

No not pressed, but it was there, presence, warmth, buzzing and fizzing and admonishing, pushing him out of the fizzy spiral and somewhere?

It tore stinging bits of him away as it pushed. He stung from the loss.

He lost the grasp of the presence as suddenly as it had occurred but now noticed something not like the not-cold freezing shearing of before.

It was like the thing he could feel all bit slipping from his...

It was his something. He could not find the words, he had the briefest feelings. Confusions, prodings. Wasted away edges.

But now he was slipping into something else, something almost graspable? Or was it grasping him. It was cloying, sharp, clawing and prickling him. It dug furrows to drag him in a direction?

It felt like it was away from the sweet call of community, but so had the not-cold and the spindling twisting.

Every direction was equally a direction and seemed just as opposed and not directed as any other.

He had no bearing.

As he felt the clawing dragging pressing presences close over and within him.