I was hanging in the open air, above a desert, holding onto thin air like it was the bottom of a doorway.

“That,” Lilly said, “Is rather unbelievable.”

I was straining my arms to hold on, but I had gotten to the point where I didn’t know how to proceed from. I had literally jumped at the opportunity, and now I had run before I walked.

“Yeah,” I grunted out, “I’m a bit confused as to how this works. How are my arms so much weaker while being so much larger?”

“Most of the size is subcutaneous fat, not muscle. So, what are you doing? How are you going to get through? I can’t see a way, but I can’t feel a soft spot either.”

I reached a hand up towards the rest of the soft spot to try and find a better handhold, and while I did, it felt different.

The lower ledge felt like more of a solid thing to my mysterious sense, while the more central area felt more like… More like a scab.

Like a wound that had scabbed over, the edge was easy to grip, but the rest was a rough, bumpy barrier.

I brought my hand back down, and with my other, more tired hand, I reached around to find the edge, looking to pick at the wound so I might crawl inside, and I passed a few moments by talking automatically.

“So, do you see anything here Lilly? You said you could see trees, what else can you see?” I asked her before my brain caught up to my mouth and continued, “And why am I talking without thinking about it? Fill me in here, partner, its kind of freaking me out a bit.”

I found the edge with my fingers, the feeling of the rough texture fading to a smooth, texture-less feeling right before finding the ‘edge,’ as it were.

Less like a door, it was more like a window of some kind. Less the kind that you might put a pie on, and more a kind of barely recessed or more industrial kind.

Could I fit up there?

I felt around at the bottom to see if I had enough space, and Lilly started talking.

“Well. I can’t feel all that much. The space here is all… Wonky. I guess there's a small fold or wrinkle here, but compared the everything else here, I wouldn’t have picked it up,” she told me in a tone that told me she was unsure of what she was talking about.

“A like an edge or a corner?” I asked her once again without thinking.

It was starting to trip me up as I felt around and almost let go, latching on with my fresh hand and beginning to check with my left again.

It felt about right to stand on, though narrow it seemed to me like it was about four or five inches, and I would rather take four or five inches standing than hold myself up by one hand as my arms burned as if I had never lifted a weight before.

“Yes, in a way, though it is recessed,” she confirmed.

“Figures… Stupid dogs. Stupid corners that float in the air.” I grunted as I started pulling myself up and in to offset my weight. When I was up I did my best to hold myself on one arm, and sent my other to the side, and pulled myself up. My feet fumbled uselessly before they found a purchase on the lip.

It was a hard squeeze in the shallow little rectangle of space, and I had to crouch, but I found that I was more flexible right now than normal anyway, that and my low height made all the lower with the change was as much an aid as my useless curves were a detriment.

It was incredibly tenuous, but I got my footing and found my point of balance. My shoes took to the ledge well, practically griping the invisible ledge on their own.

“Ohh Kay. So what about the talking bit,” I asked her intentionally before I followed it up automatically with, “It's honestly freaking me out, Lilly,” and it made me want to pull my hair out.

I didn’t like it one little bit. It was a further loss of control.

I had already lost control over how I looked, even if it was for now, but now I was losing control over my speech.

Lilly had told me that I was going to gain more control over myself, that I was going to be more aware of myself or whatever, but it felt like I was just… losing what little I had to begin with. I had only ever had control over myself. It was all anyone ever had, and I didn’t want to lose that.

“You’re not speaking without thinking, you’re now aware that you were always speaking that way. You’re now aware of the way your subconscious has been weighing in. The difference has always been there, and now you can work on it, and make your subconscious conscious. The fact that you are aware of it while jarring will let you bring it under control.”

She said it with intent in what I felt was an acknowledgement of my underlying question. It was minorly said to appease, but beyond that, it was also to try and calm me. I didn’t understand what she meant by ‘subconscious,’ but I could ask her to explain it to me, she was getting better at explaining stuff, but the technical stuff still went over my head.

Notably, she phrased her answer in a way that boiled down the jargon into you can control it with time. And that helped immensely with my edged out, overstimulated, recently nightmare-panic attack, fever dreamed ass immensely at the moment.

I was solid, so I needed to focus on the task at hand. I could worry while I was dead, I had a job to do right now.

I needed that kind of grounding; I could let it go and freak out when I was no longer planeside and had hours to burn. So, carefully and without haste, I reached out and found a stable place to try and grip the edge of the scab. My fingers found the edge, bumping into another solid point in the air and dragging back from the edge I found where the smooth reached the bumpy fibrous blockage and started picking at it, and turned my attention to Lilly.

“The part you were not aware of is not your mind but your brain, which houses the subconscious. Your brain can affect your meat mind, but not your gem and the gem forces your meat mind to follow in lockstep, which is what makes it so stark. You know it's not your mind saying those things.

She said it once again in a way that I could begin to interpret and attempt to respond to. An attempt to verify where she could yay or nay my understanding instead of trying to stick the totality of it in my head all at once. It was one of those back-and-forth things where she could critique me.

“Ok, let me see if I’ve got that,” I told her, ponderingly as I inched my finger slowly under the scab, the smooth, skin-like space around it conforming around my hand in an almost unnerving way. “So, two minds, I’ve got two of those, the gem shaping the meat. I speak through my brain, and I didn’t control that, so there's a kind of missed extra communication that was always there, but I’m now aware of so I can weigh in on it now that I’m aware of it. I’m missing context on the whole body, brain and mind bit, but can I assume it's in the wibbly idea way instead of the literal body way?”

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I asked her while I curved my hand in a cupping motion, my hand finding it hard to push beneath the jagged seam between smooth and rough, healthy and wound. It was grown out of the smoothness, a wall of growth that had grown out of the connective tissue of whatever space was.

“That’s a good enough understanding to say you pass on that subject and yeee- yes, it is, as you put it, the wibbly way. A philosophical disembodied body, brain and mind. Your mind is your personality, you are conscious because you have an ego, and have a personality because you are conscious of your self and your memory.”

I took that in and picked at the edge again, tracing the bits that hooked the wound shut like I was reaching out and trying to snap a thick strand of ossified meat fused to the boundary line by the wound’s own ichor, a thin piece of plastic boarding from a wall.

“I think I get it, although my emphasis is on, I think. It’s a bit fiddly, but I might be able to follow along if I remember it all,” I told her, my voice slipping in with an automatic, “No offence, but I’m a little focused on this scab.”

I felt a very sudden part of the scab give way and grab onto the wall reflexively to steady myself. My hand pulled free a hunk of something, the sudden freeing of my hand from the crevice almost throwing me off the ledge. My free hand flailed, and that hunk of tissue quickly tumbled out of my hand and backwards, off into the desert.

My breathing hitched as my body hung loose before I rapidly remembered how high I was off the ground and focused on remaining standing on the frame rather than falling headfirst into the dunes below.

“Th- That was close,” Lilly said, nervousness returning from below the surface of her words like the shadow of a leviathan beneath the fridged oceans of Remiel.

“You can say that again,” I told her automatically. “God above, I hate that,” I said with intent as I levered myself back into place and back to the wound and more carefully pulled at the next strand, carefully pulling it free while Lilly got her head back on in the right direction.

When I did, I found a handful of rapidly liquifying jelly, the same viscous goo that had accompanied the hounds when they came through their corners.

I chucked the foul goo away and reached back in while carrying on our little conversation about my new motor mouth, which had gotten sidetracked into the underpinning of my mind in a fantastic display of Lilly wanting to teach me something.

I kept pulling and pulling, and bit by bit, I broke away at the seam, opening a wound along the side of reality.

It didn’t take long, not really. Desperation gave me a manic, unrelenting energy that helped me push through the tired strain of my arms.

We were bickering about Lilly getting sidetracked into how the shards beyond self-connected, Lilly finding it harder and harder to explain.

I pulled, shifting my arm back and felt the scabby cover move and ever so minor flexing.

Withdrawing my hand, goo coating it up to my elbow, I bent myself into a shape, flicked the goo off as well as I could before, with my back between the frame and the soft, I put both of my arms into the hole, and flexed.

It was like trying to roll a boulder with a plank of wood, levering the soft spot with my body like a meaty crowbar against the well-affixed scab.

I lightened my pushing and got some breath in before nearly suffocating, and then did it again before I passed out.

Each push felt like it did almost nothing. But the other edges, like a patch on some cloths you kept messing with, loosened, the flexing getting slightly more impressive each time.

Once again, catching my breath and panting, I took a deep breath and put my entire body into it. It flexed an inch, then four, then almost a foot. I could hear the beating of my heart in my ears, my body hot enough to cook on, sweat rolling down my body in a futile attempt to cool me down.

I could feel a vein in on my forehead swelling, my brain felt lightened, the blood rushing through it so hard and quick that not enough air was getting used.

My head lightened further as I got to a foot and a few inches, and beyond that, my head started to feel heavy.

The scab stalled as I pushed, the cover straining against my incredibly lacking physical strength.

And then there was a snap, followed by more and more in rapid succession.

The scab flew free, a wall of goo shooting off before thumping into the sand and kicking up dust.

I almost fell right over with it, one and flying out in either direction to grab ahold of the frame I stood in my body handing out over open air where I got to suck in air, the headrush a welcome sensation.

I pulled myself back in so I wouldn’t fall, face first into a dune and snap my neck, and turned said neck and the head is held on to look over.

Open to the world, and even to my eyes, was a closed vertical slit that oozed the clear goo, about as tall as I was, the same as all of the other ones I had seen the dogs use, just with no dog coming through to bite me. My hand was on one of the folds.

It was an odd sight, the difference between seeing and kind of feeling it was stark.

I pulled back the fold, and the ooze flowed out like a cannon, a geyser, a wall of juice flowing out into the desert like a broken water vein, just thick with ick and light by the phantasmal inner light that wasn’t light.

I held it open for twenty or so seconds until it ran low.

And then, once it ran low and was more a drool, I closed up my buttons and secured my belongings before I pulled the wound as wide as I could, and moving carefully in front of it, I very carefully pushed my hand into the hole.

There were no teeth, no sudden bite or attack, so hesitantly, I pushed in like I was about to pull myself into a tunnel. I bowed my head down and in alongside my hands before I started to pull myself in.

Most of the journey through was a blur from there, the force of the tunnel ever present, the goo that surrounded me surprisingly warm like I was inside a womb. I remember lights, every colour of the rainbow, shining into my eyes, and beyond that, it was just a fever dream again, sensation and nonsense that made my mouth scream automatically, the pull of the tube drawing me in. I stopped needing to be pulled forward, it became more like it was pulling me, contracting to push me forward.

I could hear my voice in the tube from how I was screeching, the voice not mine, but from my lips. The lights swirled, and I got faster and faster, the feeling of being crushed increased, but also became soothing and pleasurable, like a great big full-body hug that made me have a full body tingle.

The lights rolling over me started to go from warm to cool, reds and yellows past green to violet-purple blues.

It felt like I was going crazy, my body moving on its own, screeching and screaming like its own thing, dancing to a song like when I had swallowed the phantasmal rock.

And somewhere between that point, with the strobing colour and the pressure and my body flailing like I was dying, I was lying on some grass, looking up at the base of a tree covered in steaming ooze, having been birthed anew from a rapidly closing cosmic coochy.

There were impressions that stayed, but nothing that made any sense.

‘Lilly? You still here?” I asked, moving to sit up.

I was, in fact, in the forest I had seen, long rows of trees, nearly artificially straight. Grass along the ground and shrubbery all over.

A little verdant oasis.

“Yes. Yes, I am still here,” she told me very calmly before yelling, “And you are so lucky you listened! Because your brain has been in the process of unscrambling itself! For four Minutes.”

“How long was I out, or, it the tube or whatever?” I asked her.

“You came out before you finished getting in, you madwoman, you basically crawled in before walking out through a door and then passed out while talking in a language I couldn’t understand.”

“I don’t know any other languages,” I told her.

“That does not make it any better!” she shouted.

I raised my hands in surrender, “Ok! Okay! I surrender. I’m glad I listened to your suggestion.”

“Damn straight!” she said before making a sound like she was taking a deep breath, sucking air down into her nonexistent lungs.

I also did, just kind of sitting on the ground, arms propping me up as I took a few breaths and oriented myself, mentally checking my faculties to figure out if I had left anything behind, but I couldn’t think of anything.

I looked up and found the weak point, sealing back up, barely a crack of it still visible, leaking its odd light through a crack, like a closed door. And second, by second, the light faded away, back into an invisible scabbed-over wound in the world.

“Do you know if we’re at least closer to the ship?” I asked her, watching it seal over.

She sighed, “Yes, yes we are, its over there,” she said, pinging behind me.

I stood, turning and taking a look.

Far off, way off in the distance, I could see a shape that was not like the others, a shape that didn’t belong in nature and whose tan colour might as well be bright neon pink in the lush greenery.

“Oh, thank god. let's get the hell off of this shit hole.”