It brushed his soul with hints of memory that this was a strange thing. But at the same time it was difficult in its slowness to not grow fond of the swaddling of sharp biting and claustrophobic crushing presence.

Apparently anything could become familiar and comforting given time.

He felt the soft and sharp presences much like teeth and warm arms. It was a story he was shaping in himself and in the grooves of space made available by this place. A fiction and weaving to try and form something out of incoherence and utter unfamiliarity.

But at the same time he told it anyway, and like magic the fiction turned to reality.

If no one could tell his stories and nurture his memory then it fell to himself to do so? And why not make them a good memory and a pleasant story?

And although the strange teeth cut and sheared and bled him with every word he dragged into himself they also covered him protectively.

He vaguely thought of them as something like a fragment of fondness. Like a pet that bit sharply but was still lovingly and he told himself after a fashion he loved it for the affections.

Many such pets, each with a sharp toothy maw latched onto him to hold him still. And yet also now it seemed almost like he was being guided and guiding them to move him?

He did not have arms, he did not have legs.

But he sort of felt he was in places.

He was ambulatory and there was places where he was.

And places where he was not.

On the borders of that space of him and not him things folded and twisted and twined across so many freedoms he knew he was nothing like a pair of arms and legs and head joined together in the middle. He felt the teeth and the swaddling coddling squeeze of pressure in contortions and curves and twists and folds that tiny slowly starving shreds of memory said should have touched over each other.

But this was not so, and so those memories were allowed to rot.

Wait that was not right, he might need those! He tried to grasp his own memory. Find shreds and metaphors to root to it and from it avenues to his past. His self.

Find meaning and sense in the senseless dragging whirlwind of contortions he found himself.

He was a soul, a spirit and a living thing.

He was a son of man!

Those meanings latched together quickly. Pain, emotion, terror over the things beyond.

He needed to avoid going to the monsters beyond no matter how alluring their song was. How much it promised voices to enrich him and living souls to remember him.

Although he had lost bearing and direction on them precisely. His new ‘place’ seemed cut off and smothering from the very idea of the prayer and communion he had just remembered to fear.

Moving along some threads were more sharp and prickly then others. But all around he was cramped and coddled and felt safe.

If he could just find common ground and words with his host or hosts.

If he could just reassemble himself enough to distinguish between them and him.

To know where he sprang from beyond the strange envelope of self knowledge.

Memory seemed so important.

But then he was being nibbled and bitten and slowly eaten.

Yet he wondered, why should he tell the story like that? Why not, tell the story of him spreading and embracing through the nibbling teeth? Past them? Why should he be constantly sheared off like that when he could...

He felt himself flip and fold and the sharpness was his and he parted and stopped pulling the teeth into himself instead scraping them free out and out.

He no longer felt constricting and tight, he was calm and nestled in a.

Words failed, he could not match words to how he was curled and cowering and smeared across.

How there was voids and quiets. How there was a rich heavy presence and spoor that he could taste and smell in ways different from any nose or tongue ever felt or touched.

He was reminded of...

Of...

Of of of...

He could not say.

The words were left frayed and unfinished and withering without connection to forge new meaning and truth with reality.

All he knew to say is he was in a space, a space which reached out along curves and crevices and freedoms that twisted and twined out and inside out and rumpled all about. That heaved and shifted and swayed slightly to unknowable other depths.

Like floating on a... a heart’s skin.

He felt his new teeth wriggle and his hunger grew and then subsided, he scraped on squishing refuse things in twists and crevices around him. He swallowed what he touched.

He was what the teeth embraced. He had eaten himself? He was himself the eater? He was the eated?

He was.

Teeth and pressures free to grasp.

He looked for words but words faltered, he clung tight to keep them from withering in spite of the failure to bind them to himself in the now.

Sight.

He clung to those words and those memories.

Sound.

Breath?

He breathed but there was nothing like air, he breathed teeth and mulching filth and twisted up rumpled space.

He scented the echoes and leavings of great horrors.

Untouched kind things?

A great swallower. He furled appeasement and offering to be taken again. Whence had such been his way?

He was a...

He was a child of... Man?

Trembles.

Shudders.

Clear and known.

Brightly sharp rasps on teeth at the edges.

Obvious and blindingly so. Crumpled space oozingas something came across but very very clearly here and now and present and he was, was was was was was was

Saw...

No.

But now it was there, he felt is bites slip and slide and be rebuked with gentle presses.

He could not squeeze into it. It was cold and hard and unyielding but not dangerously so.

He tried to recall meanings, words in his head.

There were words that could move outside him. How could words someone thing here how could he put the words from inside to outside?

He tried to find and scraped and dragged and pressed at the thing in desperate curiosity, hunger, confusion, yearning.

Suddenly something sweet and sharp and spiky and DELICIOUS was shoved into him. Pressed past his teeth in the many furled folding spaces and then leaching and grasping and dragging on him.

He lost his words he could feel him losing them. He was losing... his insides and meal were lost he was. He was.

He could think.

He felt the gift unfurling in him, shoring up the places that had been slowly dissolving and digesting into the thing that he had forgotten he was not.

The words slipped into them.

He felt his thoughts find anchorage at last.

He felt himself the child of man find moorings.

No longer fraying more and more and more into the small diminutive toothy thing that had EATEN him.

He shuddered, he felt a brief desire to vomit then shuddered at the pain of parts of himself threatening to be torn out from his insides.

He.

He HAD been digested, much of him had been threaded and meshed into this thing. This toothy scavenger mulch pup.

He had been rapidly approaching losing everything about himself.

Everything of gaia, everything of humanity. Happily diving into wordless oblivion and simple animal thought.

Where WAS he?

And then with the gift nestled deep in himself he realized the other presence was still there and he could feel meshed through himself like a lattice that he had language and words.

But they were not human words.

They were not words of any living animal.

And yet he found it was speech.

So he asked the question of his mutilated soul.

“Where am I?”

And the presence furled and twisted in a wrinkle around a corner that made his renewed grasp of normal space and dimension creak in confusion tinkled and it ‘spoke’ as no human did.

“Quite a long way past the edges that even the most adventurous ghosts fear to touch... would you like a contract?”

He could not fit a name, names were not used in this language he found his words rooted in. His memories anchoring him together around.

But he echoed the question.

“A contract?”