Alfie cried for a long time. He cried because he is naked in a forest, that he doesn’t recognize, he cried, because he is in a body, which used to be older, he cried because he got butchered over and over again. He cried and cried, till his body couldn’t give any more tears, he cried, till all that was left, was numbness. Numbness but not relief. He can't feel the panic, the confusion, the fear, and pain. But they are waiting on the edge of his mind. Waiting to drown him like a flood. Waiting to choke him alive.

Alfie stands up. Still the same damned forest. The sun barely moved. That could mean that either the torture didn’t take more than two hours, or that something weird is at hand. Or he can just be on a whole different planet, where the days are longer, and Alfie can just get stuffed. What does Alfie know.

The big difference that he notices, is that the forest is silent. High likelihood, that it is because Alfie screamed his lungs out. Must have spooked the critters.

Looking down on himself, Alfie looks at the place, the glowy thing is located at. Beneath his heart, seemingly still inside of his ribcage. No sign of it, not even a bump. How it us glowy, when it is inside of him, without any visual indicators, is just one more mystery on the pile.

He starts walking in the direction opposite of the sun, on the simple hope, that it is either east or west. From what Alfie knows, is Nort not the best idea, simply because of the cold, and Alfie is severely lacking in cloths. South could be good if he knows in what direction south is. So having the sun in his back is as good as anything else.

As long as he gets away from that damned clearing, anything is good in his book. His steps are still quite unsure, and he stumbles around like a fawn. He hasn’t even walked for ten minutes, and he fell a dozen times already.

The big problem is also the glowy thing.

It just keeps pulsing. Every few minutes it pules, sending glowy feelings out like sonar, traveling to the tips of his limbs and head. It makes his body feel like it is on twenty cups of some high grade ristretto, while simultaneously making him feel so calm that he should start a yoga class at the same time, it is weird.

It also makes his hands feel tingly. And he is fairly sure it has been tingling for longer than 20 minutes, meaning that he should see a witch doctor. The fact that the bursts keep healing him is ignored, simply because of the implications, that the glowing thing, henceforth called Glowy, could manipulate his body. The jump from healing someone, mending flesh and bones, to puppeteering someone’s body is quite small.

Alfie thinks that Glowy wants to be interacted with. He doesn’t know how Glowy can communicate with him; he doesn’t know what interacting with it exactly entails and frankly he doesn’t know what in the nine hells Glowy exactly is. For all he knows it could be Cthulhu’s stress ball, which slipped and just so happened to land in his chest. It could be a mini star that just so happens to ignite in his chest, which became sentient. Or it could be just the combined good vibes of all of heaven just shoved down his throat.

Alfie is scared what will happened if he touches Glowy again. He might go insane, he could explode with good vibes, he could become a celestial body, or he might get tortured again. The shiver that he felt go through his body nearly made his boney rattle.

The longer Alfie walks, stumbles, through the forest, the clearer it becomes, that he might not have a choice, he must interact with Glowy. The pulses keep coming in shorter intervals, the tingling keeps intensifying, the feeling keeps getting stronger and Glowy keeps insisting, that is not some eldritch abomination. The exact thing an eldritch abomination after his sanity would say. He saw magical girl shows, keep insisting you’re not an eldritch horror, Alfie doesn’t want to end in the hands of some furry alien.

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Alfie resisted for hours. The forest kept being the forest, hells he didn’t even find a single clearing since the one he woke up in. He’s fairly sure that’s not how forests work. In the end the burst became beams, the feelings made him feel like he was overdosing on flintstone gummies and Glowy was starting to sound like a salesperson for used car. Alfie is tired of it.

“Fine, you want to be interacted with, Glowy, fine, damn it all, I wasn’t very sane to begin with.”

It takes more than fifty tries before he can even touch the damn thing. Glowy of is of course whispering solutions to him, the problem is, Glowy is talking like a damned fortune cookie: “connect to sixth heaven, between the wings.” Glowy assures him that it will make sense in “less than one hundred paths.” The fact that Glowy speaks more in images, feelings and concepts doesn’t help the matter.

For “sixth heaven” it sends images of victory, heaviness, sun, sky and contentment. For “wings” it sends things like food, campfire and trust. And for “paths” it sends anticipation, hope, connection and pride. Alfie doesn’t even know where to begin to understand that gibberish.

So, with Glowy being so delightfully unhelpful, he uses his brain for a bit. He imagines that Glowy is an irradiated block of clay. It’s malleable, it radiates stuff, and as a bonus, it glows. He’s a genius. Glowy is not impressed. It keeps insisting to imagine, “sixth heaven” because I have a “bond” with it.

When Alfie finally touches Glowy he freezes, because he can hear it again:

Gong

Alfie stands still, all his muscles are locked in place. If he doesn’t move, the pain won’t come to him, the cycle won’t start.

It takes Alfie a while to notice, that he is hyperventilating, that the corners of his vision are starting to darken and that he is shaking. He is also lying on the ground, having fallen at some point, sending more panic into Alfie. Glowy is sending him pictures of beds and fireplaces, feelings of safety and security and concepts of peace and confidence. It helps a little.

It takes Alfie over fifteen minutes to start calming down. He is laying stomach down on the ground, head on a patch of grass, with sweat all over his body. His first movement is slow, carefully sitting up.

Alfie is starting to feel like a stressed-out cheetah without its emotional support dog.

He starts looking for things the gong changed and immediately noticed threats connecting to Glowy. Thousands of threads coming from inside of his body, twisting and touch each other, most of them the fusing together to create strings. The threats seem to have different types of colors. There are red, green, gold, white, black and many more, but even in those basic colors is diversity. For example, blue had dozens of versions, that all seem different. There is ice blue, which feels cold and detached, there is deep blue, which feels calm and concentrated, sky blue which feels hopeful and free and many more.

Hundreds of threats are going through his body, seemingly fusing with his nervous system, bones, and muscles. Millions more branch out of his body to spread in every direction. A few dozen moving around Alfie, acting like over eager puppies, all vying for his attention.

He sees threats going into every direction, all 360 degrees seemingly covered. Hells, some are floating into the air, stretching into the sky, and some are climbing the trees around him.

The tree climbers are especially interesting, because he sees most of the colors climb the trees and climb back down to scatter in different directions. But some reds are seemingly falling down the trees. They climb up the trunk of the trees but come down away from the trunk. The lighter reds seemingly walk it off, the deeper reds stopping there, ending.

All of this these threats seem eager, all of them send Alfie feelings of excitement and eagerness. They act like Glowy, before touching it. Looking closer, Alfie is fairly sure they are an extension of Glowy. The entire system seems to act like a spiderweb. Glowy is the spider in the middle, spinning its web. The strings are the supports, and the threats are the things that connect the whole thing. Or something like that. He’s not a spider.

Glowy itself seems content, simply producing increasingly more threats without sending anything to Alfie. And even though there are enough threats and string to cover the ground, he can still see everything clearly. One of the green threads leap into his field of vision, sending not only feelings of eagerness, but also feelings of urgency.

The image in Alfie’s head about the clay doesn’t work anymore, but the image of the spiderweb seemingly does. So, like a good human with too much curiosity, Alfie touches the thread. And Alfie saw.