5

The sunlight woke me up today. Although my eyes were shut, the brightness bored through my eyelids and now all I could see were crazy spirals of Iridescent splotches. I tried to ignore it.

I had another dream last night. The memory was broken and garbled and faded away from me whenever I tried to concentrate on it. But I could just barely remember the most vivid parts. There was a Great stretch of land, then something to do with riding a meteor to arrive at an unclear focal point in the sky, and finally an awful burning sensation. But I'm not doing any of those things — I was in my bed, with nothing but the sunlight and the vibrant patterns behind my eyelids to keep me company. I wanted to just lie there and think about the dream for a while, but the patterns pulsed and soon grew unignorable. I couldn't think like this.

So I got up. My eyes pried themselves open and I sat up with a blurry surreal sensation. I climbed out of bed unsteadily, but I got the suspicion that maybe I'm not alone today. I certainly wasn't yesterday, so I should atleast check for any unwelcome guests. So like I always do when feeling suspicious, I began to search the room. Same boxy interior, same featureless clay walls, same smooth floor, same single rounded window. No furniture, no material possessions apart from what lay entombed under the floorboards in the far left corner, but I haven't touched that in millennia nor do I ever intend to again. I checked underneath my bed and I saw nothing but its dark underside.

There's nothing here. The word Paranoid echoed in the back of my mind. I ignored it.

I moved into my sparse little bathroom. There I tended to myself, performed the morning routine like I always did, then stared intently in the broken mirror at the frail reflection of myself. Despite the horrendous cracks that haven't been repaired I could still see Solomon, split up between jagged glass shards, looking all too much like a living mosaic. I said Hello to him. Solomons mouth moved silently in reply. I put my hand up and did a peace gesture. Like a kind partner, Solomon returned the gesture and I beamed at him. So for a while I talked to my own reflection like a mental patient, rambling on about every inane thing I had on my mind. But eventually the charade ended and I just searched the mirror with accusation in my eyes. I saw nothing except the bathroom reflection and Solomon looking awfully suspicious all of a sudden. Thankfully there were no unwanted surprises in the mirror today. That meant less work to do.

I didn't say bother saying goodbye to my reflection. I moved onto the next chore, but for this one I'll need to go subterranean. So I bounded down the staircase and went behind it. There was another staircase down, leading below the house and into the cellar. I took that path, travelled along crudely moulded steps, watched how the pale red clay walls gave way to thick earth archways and pillars of wood. It came to an end and I found myself standing at the foot of my expansive cellar. It was unlit and the darkness seemed to flood from its edges only to be battered back by the dim light from above. I didn't like how dark it was and I began to feel paranoia return, so I waited a few cursory moments to listen for anything.

Nothing.

So I went inside the cellar and slowly my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Through the musky darkness, the bare outlines of furniture was revealed to me; waxy candles with their heads gnarly and burnt; shelves etched deep into the walls or molded from earth and clay. I walked through the cellar, passing shelves stocked with preserved meats, honey, clumps of wrapped herbs, pots of spices, jars of salt, even a circle of crudely made cheese which to this day I still don't know what sort of lunacy possessed me to make such a decadent thing. Midway I felt my arm brush against something and looked down instinctively, only to make eye contact with the fishes I had gotten from the sea yesterday. The salmon, the haddock, and the little mackerel. All of them lying next to the jagged wooden spear that slaughtered them. Their glassy eyes all glared up at me in cold judgement but the Mackerels gaze was what got to me. They were going to be my lunch today, but I don't think I could stomach eating the small one. Not after hearing the way it cried or seeing how it stared at me. Hopefully, I'll feel better when I prepare it for my lunch later.

It took only a few more steps and the cellar ended. A cold stone wall faced me. In the darkness it looked featureless and sparse. I needed light to see what I was doing. So I waved a hand and one of the candles on the shelves flickered, then a flame blossomed on its wick, and its surroundings were illuminated in a soft orange glow. I picked it up then carried it over to the wall. The darkness cleared and now I could see that the wall wasn't bare and featureless, but rather covered with tiny charcoal markings. I brought the burning candle along one section of the wall and it only showed more tiny charcoal marks. I looked closer and examined the many notches inscribed onto it, then painstakingly counted them all. This section been filled, with every inch of it having notches of charcoal scratched in. Already I could see dozens of tiny markings.

The sundial on my front porch was helpful when it came to the little things, like the immediate time of the day, but it was useless at measuring any longer stretches of time, like years or days. I had realised this when I first came to the valley, thousands of years ago. If I wanted to keep track of the passage of time, I'd have needed something more reliable. So I dug the first tunnels underneath my house and created this calendar, underneath the earth so that it could not be eroded so easily. All it really consisted was of me inscribing every day a tiny circle onto the far corner of the stone wall. I'd continue drawing circle after circle, until they numbered three hundred and sixty five. Then, on the other side of the wall, I'd etch a single dark notch into the stone. Then I'd clear the circles off and start all over again. As the years passed and the decades turned to centuries, thousands of notches began to cover the wall. The whole thing was rudimentary and primitive. Probably inaccurate by a few decades. But it gave a rough estimate of the time and that's all that really mattered to me.

I walked back with the candle in hand and surveyed the wall altogether. I had to count every individual notch, writing it in charcoal on my hand so I wouldn't forget. Then I crossed my sum over with the number of circles. After ten minutes, I had it.

It is now exactly one thousand, nine hundred and ninety nine years, and three hundred and sixty four days since I first came to the Valley.

I laughed at that. To be truthful I hadn't even realised this year was the final one before the beginning of the second millennium. Maybe once, the notion that I had spent nearly two thousand years in the same few dozen square miles would hurt my mind and make it twist with claustrophobic revulsion. Now I felt nothing. Today could be considered a special occasion; they used to celebrate every new year back on old Earth. I could do that. Except I don't have fireworks... Then slowly I focused on the empty sensation broiling from my stomach. I was quite hungry today.

Despite having a secure supply of food, I rarely ate. In truth I didn't need to. The only reason I even remembered to eat was to keep the hunger pains away, and prevent malnourishment from turning my stomach into a cauldron of acid. But even if my body withers away and my bones make jutting patterns through my skin and my stomach becomes a scalding cauldron, I would still live. I am kept alive by other things, now.

But still, I glanced at the stockpiles of food on the shelves out of the corner of my eye. I felt urges of greed pull on my heart and stomach. My stomach demanded to consume... And I conceded.

Just not now.

I won't deny myself this. I'm not an ascetic. I'll have something nice for tonight, seeing as it's almost my two thousandth year anniversary in the Valley. Maybe... Fish and meat, with spices. And a slice of the cheese wheel. Or maybe two. I laughed again at the thought. How decadent.

Staying inside the cellar no longer served any purpose. So I extinguished the candle with a harsh blow and placed it aside. I went back upstairs to eat a humble breakfast of bread with salted gravy. Then I left the house.

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The sky was the typical morning shade; the faint orange-blue pigment that spread like liquid over the sky, but from the furthest corners small streaks of deep blue could be seen. I looked further, and wedged between pink-yellow clouds the sun glared at me with dominating indifference. Judging by the sky and the position of the sun, it had to be around dawn. Maybe seven in the morning at most.

I was sat down in the loamy earth of my front porch, doing nothing with my time but counting the clouds and periodically checking the sundial next to me. So early in the morning the sun cast a dark shadow against the prone stick in the middle of the sundial. I counted the charcoal etchings among gentle green grass carefully and deliberately. It read to Seven O'clock and I couldn't help but smile, and I felt proud that my assumption was proven correct. Then I sat there and simply thought about things for a while. Mainly the passage of time.

The Antumbricane, in its brutalising of everything there ever was, did not spare time. It could have been a drawn out process, or maybe it was an instant action with the Antumbricanes formation, but the coherent passage of time had been destroyed. Now it could move at a snails pace here but eclipse millions of years in seconds elsewhere. Before I came to the valley, I had tried many times to measure the passage of time. But with every attempt it became very apparent that my attempts were useless. A measurement took in one place would be a million years inaccurate elsewhere. When space and time is no longer a concrete factor, any measurements of time could never be even remotely accurate. How would one be able to determine the passage of time when the forces behind the concept were now swirling, molding subjectivity? So why bother.

But things were different in the valley. The days were eighteen hours long; the valley revolved around a sun and a moon; every hour lasted forty-five minutes; time didn't flitter wildly from one O'clock to half-past eight thousand. Everything existed and passed, to my senses, just like how it used to before the Antumbricane. So, this made reliable timekeeping a possibility. It kept me sane and happy. I could always know how much time passed. That was enough control for me.

Eventually the thought of time began to make my stomach twist, so I turned my attention away from it all. I got to my feet and did my chores for the morning. I labored under the sun to maintain my front porch, ripping weeds and slashing the grass to shorter lengths. I went to my garden to chop down a tree and harvest the wheat, which I stripped of its berries and stored deep within the cellar. I took a trip across the fields, heading to the monument and soon enough I saw it; above the hills, the rocky sides etched with countless faces and lines and poems and landscapes. I climbed up carefully and I deepened what was already etched; there I worked and the world crawled from the early morning to the hot blue afternoon; ignoring the blazing hands across my back and the sun. I deepened a line, checked everything was in place, etched out one fifth of a letter, until at one point I was struck with a sudden paranoia. So I scaled down across the monument, climbing precariously past passages from the Qur'an, past the drawings of barely remembered landmarks, until I reached the crude portrait of Thomas Sankara. I hung awkwardly across the bridge of his stony nose and thick gray brow, and very carefully reached below. It wasn't noticeable at a distance but the left eye was hollowed out. I reached into the stony eye of Thomas Sankara and checked what lay inside.

The book was safe. It had been safe for hundreds of years. I let out a sigh of relief I didn't realise I held. The word Paranoid echoed in my head, again.

I continued my work. At the end of it all, my joints ached, my vision dotted with splotches of sun-blindness. I barely had enough strength to climb back to the monuments top. All I could do was just lie limply across the hard stone. Now that it was around one in the afternoon, the sky had darkened from pale cyan to a deep blue, and the wispy pink clouds were pushed away by thick fluffy white clouds that took up vast portions of the sky. The sun shone through the thick clouds but thankfully its light was dulled. Good. After hours of labour I had grown sick of it anyway. I blinked away the sun blindness, then looked over at the far corner of the sky, and there the second sun just stared passively-

Wait.

There was a second sun. It was far smaller, not choked into submission by drifting clouds, instead plastered alone and contrasting vividly against the sky. I tried to focus on it but the light stung the eyes to look at and the spots that dotted my vision only grew more intense. There was only one sun just a while ago. There should be only one. There's only supposed to be one. But despite the impossibility it was still there, glaring down with fiery apprehension. Something was wrong; terribly wrong; but I didn't quite grasp what was about to happen until a few seconds later when it grew from a soft dot to a blemish. It shivered for a few seconds, growing bigger and bigger until the valley began to be lit up in baleful light. That's when I realised the sun was falling.

The skies had brightened with its approach. Soft orange was dyed to a fiery yellow. The wind began to pick up. It was a meteor. It had to be. But I hadn't seen a meteor in millennia. For a while I just sat there, eyes wide and fixed upwards at the bright focal point. My jaw was open and my lips were quivering in overwhelming disbelief. The blemish was bigger than the sun now, and it had become a violent searing mass that barreled its way through the atmosphere, crossing countless miles in seconds. I guessed through wild terror that it was only a dozen more seconds until it hit. Eventually I got my act together and did the only thing I could, being run for cover. But I was not fast enough. The meteor shot its way through and for the most terrifying few moments I fully expected for the meteor to smash through the barrier and vaporise me in cosmic light, or smash me to bits.

The clouds parted with the violent boom of the sound barrier being broken. I fell onto the ground and everything had been pushed violently by a violent gust of energy and wind. I watched helplessly while the meteor screamed over the valley, towards the oceans and the archipelago in a tunnel of blazing fire and light.

All I wanted was consistency. All I wanted was-

The meteor slammed down with the force of a falling world. The whole world seemed to jarr in motion, then there was a deafening boom and another shockwave which violently pushed me over the edge of the monument, and I was only seconds away from falling down screaming until I clasped onto an inconsistency in the stone ground and held as tight as I could. Underneath me the world tremored with pain and the plants shook wildly in their roots and in the far distance I thought I could make out the outlines of trees on the farthest end of the valley being violently blown backwards, shredded of all their leaves. I scrambled and didn't dare to look down at the hundred-metre drop, clawing out from the edge and onto the monument top again. I rolled on my back. I couldn't breathe.

Then slowly, the world began to recover from its shock. The tremors stopped and the trees stilled in motion. But I took longer. I only managed to even think coherently after a full ten seconds of laying limply on the stony ground. Only then could I gather my thoughts then try to calm down to the best of my ability. I stumbled to my feet, breathing raggedly but my lungs still felt like they've been pushed to the limit and every desperate intake felt like I was pushing screaming iron needles out through my chest. I shivered violently where I stood.

That was a meteor. That almost certainty couldn't be explained away as just an act of nature, or even just a one-in-a-million chance. I wasn't stupid. In an instant I understood the correlations between the strange dreams about meteors, and this. This was deliberate. It absolutely had to be. Whatever this was, it was predetermined to happen. I should have known from the start.

I was feeling tired only a moments ago. But this was my wake-up call. It didn't matter that I was tired anymore — a meteor had just landed. Sleeping will come later. Now I must investigate. If I had to, I'd spend days awake. Every plan was to be halted; every chore was postponed; every worthless pass time and distraction will be placed aside; the world itself shall grind to a halt until I have found out whatever that meteor really was.

Every floorboard in my room was laid meticulously and rigid. But I knew that somewhere in the far corner there was a loose few. They hid what I needed.

I was knelt down, palming the floorboards for any inconsistencies I could find. The Floorboards were firm and unyielding, but around the third one I heard it squeak. I pushed down on it and it groaned softly. I wormed my fingers underneath the wood and I pulled; with no resistance it gave way and an opening was revealed. I reached into it, mindlessly groping about until my hand gripped onto something smooth and silky. I pulled my hand out and now I had a bunched up cloth mass. So I unfurled the cloth and it became a flowing thawb. I stood up with the long clothing in hand to look at it better; it was pale white, reaching down to my ankles, etched with flowing golden lines and decals around the sleeves. It had been there, hidden underneath my floorboards for hundreds of years but it was as beautiful as it had been when I'd first sewn it.

This is my thawb. It's history was long and violent; it's future is uncertain. It once protected me on my travels; now it's needed again. Hopefully it won't be needed ever again.

I donned the thawb and despite not wearing it for centuries it felt perfectly normal. I pulled over my head and the thawb flowed around my malnourished arms, covering my thin chest and drooped down to my ankles. I took a few steps and I found that It did not hinder me. If anything it accentuated my movements. Moving about came so much easier to me. But I had kept the thawb buried away for a reason, and I had to be vigilant. I hoped it wouldn't make too much of a fuss.

I left the house. The distance between me and the edge of the valley was crossed in half the time it would usually take. I heard no whispering, felt nothing apart from the grating paranoia and abject fear that was a holdover from the meteor strike. Hope began to grow. Maybe the thing inside the thawb had finally died. Good. Atleast there was one positive thing, today.

Eventually I passed by the roiling fields of grass and crossed the snaking streams and groves, then clambered up the the apex of the hill bordering the shoreline. I was here again. The air, like usual, was fresh and rich. A few metres away, the golden beach snaked far underneath me and the deep ocean roiled and frothed underneath the sky. But I couldn't enjoy a thing. All I could focus on was the trail of black smoke splitting the sky apart, billowing from the jagged clearing of fire on the largest island in the archipelago. That must be where it landed.

If I wanted to get over there, I'd have to do something different, this time.

I took the path across the cliff edge, travelling past jagged rock walls and empty grooves, and walked across the golden beach, until the barrier shuddered and formed infront of me. I reached forward and pressed my hand to the barrier. My hand tingled and my palm went burning hot but I persisted.

I closed my eyes and it began. I felt my brain pulsate within my soft skull, then the ripples spread across my body in the form of an unnatural warmth. The warmth grew to a tickling heat, and all I could feel was a feeling of slow, careful strength. I channeled that heat, and let it concentrate in my hand, then I pulled it deep within myself. The barrier shuddered, then became just a bit less solid.

The barrier served as a divider of the valley from the rest of the world. But it wasn't a solid, concrete thing. It was made of energy, built up over milennia, and the energy within it could be transferred. So that's what I had done. I was only taking a portion of it for the time being. I made sure to return it as soon as I got back — no doubt something would sense weakness and try and slip through. But it's been a while since I felt like this.

My awareness of the world had grown. I stood taller, moved quicker, saw leaps and bounds more than I did before. My consciousness ebbed and projected itself further, and all of a sudden everything seemed so much simpler, now. I wasn't afraid anymore. I knew exactly what to do.

I went through the thin barrier. It was weaker now, having a feeling of something gelatinous than the usual thick viscous wax. I trudged across the golden beach until I reached the shoreline and the ground became soft and muddy. The ocean water began to lick at my ankles. I stared out into the distance, and for a moment wondered how I would cross the ocean to the crash site. Then I had an idea.

So I turned and raised a hand. Far above me, atop the cliff-side among stringy grass and thick bushes, a tree began to writhe. Then, like it was being shaken violently by a mighty, invisible hand, it wrenched itself from its roots with the hurling of thick earth and rock. It floated in the air, then the invisible hand pulled it slowly down, from the cliff to the beach. It landed with the soft thud of lumber against countless sand granules. They distorted and reformed around the thick trunk. I waved my hand and there was the sound of wood violently snapping on itself, and the thick tree trunk shedded itself of bark. The thick branches were discarded.

The trunk was now a raft. It was crude, imperfect, but it was enough.

I motioned with my hand again. The raft pushed itself across the sands until it reached the shore. As it went past me I climbed aboard. When it went into the frothing ocean it bobbed precariously and I feared it'd sink like a rock. It didn't. So I went further into the frothing ocean. I rowed the raft slowly and carefully. Thankfully, the ocean was calm today. The most it did was lick and smack dully against the raft. That was ignorable.

I sailed for what felt like hours. And I think it was hours. The ocean constantly sloshed around me and on a few occasions I thought I had saw blurry shapes beneath the water. For a while I had the suspicion that something would lurch out the depths to tear me apart, and I prepared myself for it, but nothing of the sort happened. Eventually the archipelago came into clear view on the horizon, then steadily grew from a far-off splotch of mossy green to an ominous landmass that beckoned and pulled the currents towards me. I saw my destination; the largest island with half its jungles obliterated.

The raft came onto a current and drifted along that, until it dully rammed into the wet island shoreline. I clambered out from the beached raft, then made the first step onto the sand. Ahead of me was the jungle.

Well, there was only one thing for it.

I entered the jungle. I moved through leaves and foilage, heading further and further into the thick jungle. My thin pair of trousers snagged and sometimes caught on the leaves and branches. My robe flowed over them like feathers over skin.

As I walked I realised that my throat felt awfully parched. I hadn't had a drink in hours. So I came to a stop beside a little pond, surrounded by rocks and trees. I stared down at it, then concentrated my stare, and the water began to hiss. In seconds it was purged of all microbial life.

I was going to drink it, but then I heard movement behind me. The sound of leaves crunching and wood being snapped by something very, very heavy. In seconds I had moved into the foliage, going deeper until I was absolutely certain of my safety. I hid there and waited.

A lumbering shape came from the foilage opposite the pond. It's striped fur was matted with dried blood and filth that the original color was almost unrecognisable. It turned its angular head and through filthy matted fur and whiskers, I could see two intense bloodshot eyes, and the glint of many many jagged, broken teeth. Only a few moments later did I realise that thing was a tiger.

That thing was massive. On all four legs it was easily as tall as I was. I could tell from its body language and the way it snarled to itself that it was hunting something. Whether it was me or something else, I didn't know. It snarled and trundled for a few moments, pacing along the edges of the pond, then when it saw that whatever it was looking for was no longer there, it moved back into the foliage. It didn't even touch the water.

Only after a minute of waiting did I have the nerve to leave the bush. I approached the little pond, dipped my hand into the clear water, then gingerly took a few sips.

Then I moved on, as quietly as I could.

Two hours into the journey and it had begun to rain. It came light at first but picked up, swelling into a violent thunderstorm that whipped at my feet with harsh rain and blotted out the skies and smashed the land with furious bolts of lightning arcs that splayed across the sky like glowing spears. It made everything so much darker. With this, I wouldn't get back home before dark. That was a shame. I always hated being outside my home at night. The skies would become pitch black, everything became unrecognisable and blanketed in darkness. Only the night skies remained visible.

The wildlife had become sparse as I went on. Sometimes I'd see birds flying south above the trees, away from the impact site. Lizards crawled south. I felt something move around my feet and I saw great hordes of ants, all moving south. Everything I saw on the journey was going south, west, south-east, but never north. The further I went, the more sparse everything became. When the smoke columns grew close enough to smell and I began to see debris among the trees, the wildlife had vanished entirely. There weren't even ants anymore. Everything had gone.

To be alone in the deep jungle was an unnatural experience that made the hairs on my arms stand up on end and tiny goosebumps to bloat from thin ebony skin. I felt suspicious of everything, and I wondered with wild suspicious apprehension that the great tiger from before was trailing me, sniffing my distinct scent among the foliage and the thick trees, tracking me down relentlessly until It'd pounce on me and tear me apart with teeth the size of machete blades and-

I breathed in very deeply, cutting off my worries, then exhaled. I became calm at once.

I continued on my way through the jungle, stepping over burnt out tree husks and avoiding still flickering fires that had been half-extinguished by the relentless rainfall. The gnarled trees became more and more common, appearing overturned, the way forward became clearer and clearer with the decline of upright lumber and thick green foliage. Then, when by now everything had become the burnt out husks and dead soil I had seen from afar, I saw it. A wide clearing in the distance, brutal and ugly and so obviously not natural. That had to be it. So trudged my way, overstepping the trunks and the dead bushes and the twisted wood, until I got into a wide, smoking clearing.

Ground zero. This was it. Burnt tree trunks dotted the clearing, still flickering with barely alive flames, where they formed a ring around an expansive crater deep into the ground. In the very bottom of that crater, following jagged skid marks across its surface, was the Meteor. It was not what I expected. It wasn't a big lump of scarred rock and iron. It wasn't even in the earth. It still moved.

Five metres from the air it hovered, perfectly silent, perfectly still, was a shimmering golden sphere. Spanning fifteen feet in every direction. Perfectly smooth, perfectly golden, and despite the downpour of thick rain and the clouded sky, it glowed like the sun was permanently shining on it, and its shine reflected onto its surroundings in an Ethereal glow of gold light. It looked so gorgeous.

And In that moment I realised that something was very, very wrong.

For a while I just stared in silence. I wasn't sure what to say or do. The golden sphere didn't seem to care - It didn't move or turn or even show any signs of sentience. Then, dully, I remembered my cryptic dreams. An interstellar superconsciousness had rested its million eyes on my home and infiltrated my dreams, speaking in a language of surrealism and cosmic symbolism, and pushed a meteor forward with a hand of dying stars, where it travelled millions of millions of miles across the Antumbricane until it slammed down here with the force of a falling world... And it was all to give me a ball of gold. What was this even supposed to be. Was this some sort of cosmic insult that I'm too underdeveloped to understand? Do I need to transcend my physical form to understand it? Should I reply to it? The questions filled my mind but I could discern no answer. Maybe it had no answer. The Antumbricane doesn't have an answer. Once I had not, and now I had a ball of gold. It was here, and although it hovered and glowed with ethereal wonder I don't think it'd be going anywhere. Gold. Thanks.

I watched it for a little more. While it didn't react in any way I couldn't help but feel enraptured with a sense of primitive awe, like I'd imagine how an animal feels when they see fire. Something so pretty that they'd never ever ever ever understand. Or maybe it couldn't be a random occurrence or a brutal cosmic insult, and it could come here with an actual important meaning, like as a reminder of the past. But I don't remember having a golden ball in my past. I had other, darker thoughts but I expelled them; I hadn't seen the Corpse in hundreds of years. It doesn't know where I am; It never will. So forget it.

Ten minutes passed and I grew brave. I dared to approach closer and through the pouring rain, in the far-off jungle; thunder boomed and lightning branched across the horizon. The golden sphere remained still as I approached, crossing ten metres, then five, then two, until I had entered the glow of ethereal golden light that bathed its surroundings. It was warm and welcoming and felt like hot sunlight. Out of suspicion I decided to wait and nothing happened. Closer now, I saw that it wasn't smooth; it was etched with strange calligraphy and flowing lines that seemed to extend all across its surface. I reached forward and my bravery reached a crescendo; I dared to run my hand along it. It felt hard and warm and the countless tiny etchings made the surface bumpy. Then, the sphere began to shake.

I backed away immediately. The golden etchings morphed and disappeared as the golden surface rapidly became less stable. When I reached a dozen metres away, I dared to look back at the sphere. It shuddered silently and violently; pulsing and frothing like a liquid, then a skinny shimmering appendage emerged from its surface. The appendage twitched and for a brief few moments I regretted ever approaching it. Then it spoke.

UR-MAN.

It moved faster than I ever could. The appendage shot out in a wide line, crossing the dozen metres between us in less than a second. Whatever defense I put up in that moment were overwhelmed in the fraction of an instant. It struck me in my skull and I stared, wide eyed, gibbering maniacally, and then collapsed against the wet ground.

The dark clearing was flowing away. All I could focus on was the sphere of gold and the thing stabbing my skull. The world had became a screaming downward spiral where everything was melting and receding away, until I couldn't feel the harsh rain or the thick mud against my face or hear the thunder in the far distance. I felt everything burn in my mind, and then, there was information. It flickered and shuddered in motion like a corrupted video file.

The world had become screaming and living and snapped at my body with fleshy jaws and screamed at me with bloody phlegm and thousands of wide bloodshot eyes and sagging skin and melting muscle and a temperature like the inside of a furnace.

Ur-Man.

I had turned to Ash. Everything froze over in seconds and became expansive living breathing permafrost.

Ur-Man.

Planets bent themselves into rings, twisted like dough. Suns swallowed themselves and bloated into bigger suns which swallowed and bloated until they spanned astronomical units and swallowed orbiting planets in screaming gaseous fire.

Come.

A vile marsh of seeping black water and drooping dead trees and droning mosquitos that screamed and amphibian things that ate themselves, split apart by a river which flowed into a vile marsh of seeping black water and drooping dead trees and droning mosquitos that screamed and amphibian things that ate themselves, split apart by a river which flowed into a vile marsh of seeping black water and drooping dead trees and droning mosquitos that screamed and amphibian things that ate themselves, split apart by a river which flowed into a vile marsh of seeping black water and drooping dead trees and droning mosquitos that screamed and amphibian things that ate themselves, split apart by a

Ur-Man.

Next to a wall that spanned galaxies, Civilizations of stars that formed infinite paisleys in the night, who spoke and worshiped at the feet of the final man to ever live.

Come.

At the centre of hell, among the collapse of everything there ever was, a gorgeous blue planet in third orbit of a sun that no longer existed. A land of gorgeous fields and flowing rivers and from the killing fields under the red oak tree THEY beckon for me and me only-

Come to me.

And finally through it all there was something not in the abstract and understandable to the brutalised human mind. In the darkness was a light, and it spoke with a voice like dying stars.

Ur-Man.

THEY have found you out. You must go.

The Sphere will take you. It knows the way.

Come to me.

The message was completed. It told me what it wanted to. The Light blinked, flickered into darkness, then it was all over.

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