FyreDrop

  Cold, crisp air that bites at your exposed skin, reddening cheeks and noses and robbing fingers of their dexterity.

  A roaring fire that battles valiantly against the creeping chill, armed only with battlements of bark and tinder; their decrees written in smoke and carried out with brutal surges and twisting spears, struggling against the siege.

  A sky, both impossibly empty, and simultaneously glittering with the ghosts of countless long dead titans. Their final eons painted across one's eyes in a kaleidoscope of winking sparks.

  These are the st things I remember. The st bittersweet memories in my book of life, marred only by the blood-steeped page that marks its abrupt end.

  I'd never been afraid of nature. A healthy and wary respect, sure; but never outright fear.

  "Treat it right and don't be stupid and you might just live long enough to reproduce." That was the motto my old woodsman of a father had taught me anyway, and I had stuck to it.

  It just felt right, you know? "Nature in bance" and all that. It's easy to forget the kind of chaos that we were actually forged from sometimes, when we delude ourselves with ideas of bance.

  I found that out first hand. See, I'd been careful. I had taken precautions. I'd set up perimeters, I'd deployed repellents, I'd kept my food secure and away from easy to access pces, I was in a designated (though admittedly fairly unused) camping location, the list goes on.

  As I said, I'd been careful.

  But I don't think the grizzly that is currently muzzle deep in my chest cavity cared too much about all my "precautions".

  She's enjoying her own brand of success I suppose. A pity that it's at my expense.

  I feel my body jostle and twitch as my innards are made much less so. The pain had already began to fade away into blissful numbness while steam rose from the small crimson streams and from beneath my open ribs in curling rivulets, pulsing out into the frosted air to the rhythm of my still beating heart, even as my joints lolled across the pine needle carpet, the rigor mortis not yet able to cim my soon-to-be corpse.

  There was a morbid tranquility to it, once my screams had stopped. The grisly tearing of wet sinew and the cracking crunch of gristle or bone was accompanied only by distant birdcall in the frigid morning air as the sun began to finally crest the horizon. Some still slithering part of my mind noted that there were already crows watching from the treeline. I was strangely jealous- that they will get a fresh, hot meal while my own burns in the crackling embers: a simple can of meat and beans, now left abandoned.

  ------

  I don't know when my heart finally stopped, or if that moment even truly marked my death.

  No life fshed before my eyes.

  No regrets or celebration.

  No final acceptance of my fate.

  Perhaps I could've felt that. Maybe those tales of death would have held true for even me, But I would never get to know in this life.

  I was far too distracted.

  Distracted watching The very stars sugh off the sky like rotten meat from the bone. The void between rippling and splitting into a sea of geometry, awash in colors I knew couldn't be real. Fractal abstractions blurred what I thought was, tearing away my very reality like a photograph thrown into embers.

  Then, I was gone.

  No, not dead. Decidedly not dead. Too many thoughts and memories to be dead, unless afterlives are actually a thing. Honestly, I find my ck of faith wavering in this particur situation...

  I don't know where or what I am at the moment, a disembodied consciousness that is somehow able to perceive, adrift in a sea of impossible colors and angles? Maybe. That's my best guess anyway. It's... difficult to think you see, even that much. As if my thoughts themselves are wading through syrup just to string two ideas together. The very idea of time has become so absurd that it makes my consciousness ill.

  There is a subtle wrongness to it, that I cannot put my non-existent finger on. No, not the immediately apparent wrongness I find myself floating through. A deeper, gnawing wrong.

  An anxiety made manifest, like the feeling that there might be a spider crawling up the back of your arm, combined with the feeling you've just walked into the wrong cssroom on the first day of school. I don't know why, but the feeling that I do not belong here only seems to grow with every passing moment.

  Just how long is a moment again?

  ------

  ...There's a low hum.

  How I can hear it with no ears, I do not know, But it is there.

  It is ceaseless.

  A constantly raising crescendo that seems to resonate within me, shaking my thoughts and mind even further apart. I thought perhaps it was getting closer... but It's not approaching. It can't be. Because it's already everywhere. I can feel it now. And it feels me.

  I do not belong.

  It knows I do not belong.

  It's going to fix it.

  It's going to fix "Me".

  But I am not afraid. I am not allowed to be. Not here.

  It will fix Me.

  Like sand on a sifter, the hum seems to loosen something in me. Breaking it down. Breaking it apart. Do I want to stop this? I did before. But I cannot. I won't. It's going to fix Me.

  ...

  Or, it was going to. Until I fell. I fell out of it's seemingly infinite reach. I fell outwards and through, back beyond the fractals, across paths in geometry that seemed somehow familiar, almost nostalgic, though I'm sure I'd never seen them before the Now. As I fell closer to whatever destination this realm had chosen for me, I felt reality start to swallow me. It felt like peeling the skin off on an onion, but in reverse. Rough, creaking edges coming together to cocoon me in a seamless skin, free from the soul shaking hum. I felt my mind returning to me, bruised and shaken, but there. Intact.

  And wrong somehow.

  I still was. Still me in a way I wasn't sure I should be. But now I was safe... though that's not true. Not now, anyway. I know I'm a mere child hiding his toes from the monsters under their bed, but even that simple ignorance is something I find myself clinging to. Desperation, fear, and shock flood my system as reality begins to crash back down around me. Panic and exhaustion compete in my system for the lead, before exhaustion finally wins.

  My final moments of lucidity before succumbing to sleep, was a boundless night sky. Twinkling stars and distant nebu stretched across the violet void like gossamer, and directly above my barely conscious form, was a pair of silver moons.

  'How strange.' I thought, before I fell into blissful, dreamless sleep.