Climbing was a frustrating process when bending and reaching for handholds sent motes of ash floating down the cliff face from my joints. Half of it lay piled at the bottom while the rest stuck to the damp rocks like mould on a wall. Without worrying about the trail I had left behind, the climb itself was enjoyable. I wasn’t tired, though it was still a struggle to heave myself up to each new handhold. The porous rock made it more like climbing a ladder, or one of the plastic walls in a children’s playground.

A comfortable warmth suffused my body by the time I reached the top.

I knelt on the rocky ground between the precipice and the verdant green mess that carpeted the descending hillside. Birdsong filtered through the jungle’s vegetation rather than the constant drone of insectile wings. Not taking any chances, I left a semicircle of foliage smouldering behind me to keep any bugs crawling about up here off my ass while I examined the puddle in front of me.

Less the puddle and more my reflection staring back at me.

It was incredibly vain of me, but I’d stared at my own reflection with disgust so many times throughout my life that feeling something, anything else when I stared into my own eyes felt amazing.

I traced a finger along my cheek, where black lines had faded into slight divots in my ashen skin. My features were unchanged, but their otherness made them look regal, where before they were plain. High cheekbones now supported two, bright embers that burnt pale blue where my eyes had been. Small yellow tipped flames flickered from their edges and tickled the ashen hair that hung on either side of my face. It was the same length as before, with more body and a smattering of glowing embers that occasionally spat sparks out into the air. My face was still mine, but it was sharper, more… More. It wasn’t River Alwyn’s face, but maybe it could still be River’s face.

My parent’s sense of irony must have been appreciated by the universe, but I would take an ill-fitting name that I could be Mine over a body I felt more distant from with every passing year.

My smile turned into a smirk as I inspected the rest of myself in the puddle’s glassy surface.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

After a unhealthy amount of admiration – I had years to catch up on – my gaze finally travelled up and out, to take in the shocking view before me.

The hotsprings bubbled away and belched huge plumes of steam that rose to obscure entire swaths of blue sky. Peering Past those great, white columns, I could see where the jungle spread all the way to the horizon. It grew up a slight incline, that rose until it reached the ridgeline I’d seen earlier over the trees. The distant peaks followed a similar arc to that of the cliffs I stood on top of, something I only noticed after scaling it. Peering through the trees behind me, I could just see a smaller cliff further in, anything further past it hidden behind its steam shrouded façade.

The decision I’d have to make was whether I wanted to travel inwards, to where more smoke and steam unfurled into the cloudy sky and the jungle grew thicker and more verdant. Or whether I’d traipse further out, to where I could see several thin trails of smoke winding timidly up into the sky.

The unknown loomed menacingly in both directions, and I fought down the familiar spike of indecisiveness that tried to lock me in place. It was always the same. Making decisions could be hard when the consequences were life changing. I didn’t know which way was better, because I knew next to nothing about either of them.

One might lead towards people – if the trails of chimney smoke were what I thought they were – who might be able help. But they might hurt me as well. The other way could lead to more beautiful landscapes and space where I could enjoy this new reality, or it could lead straight into the fanged maw of some horrible monster that would put the overgrown bugs and the shambling undead I’d faced so far to shame.

I shivered, imagining the army of walking corpses shambling after me atop an endless field of fetid meat again, and instead swiped a flat stone from the ground.

Channelling the heat inside me felt strange, like trying to pee with a fire hose. Except the pee was still a part of me, and, and… When did I lose control of that analogy?

With a quiet grunt of effort, I managed to scorch the bottom of the rock without venting fire from my entire body. A quick blast of blue and yellow flame exploded from my palm and did the trick.

With one side still smoking and coloured soot black I flicked the rock up into the air. I had to overcome my indecisiveness somehow after all.

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If black lands up I go further in. If its unburnt… I climb the cliff… again.

The rock clattered across the uneven ground and splashed into another of the shallow puddles lining the ridge.

Black, scorched stone glimmered through the shallow water.

Turning around, I took in the great plumes of steam and smoke rising over the trees, hearing the distant bellows of two beasts fighting. Then I turned to the thin, wispy trails rising over the opposite ridgeline, where the possibility of shelter and a friendly face hung like a carrot on a string.

Fuck it.

I reached into the pool and flipped the stone.

-=:=+=:=-

Keeping the view from the clifftop in the forefront of my mind, I cut my way through the jungle like a wildfire through long grass, quite literally. A long trail of blackened and burnt underbrush led from the edge of the hot springs all the way to the next peak, where I stood looking out over another expansive view.

The constant venting of heat and fire felt good, and I felt fresher than I had earlier. I had been right to assume that most things didn’t like the heat and I’d been snacking as I travelled, enveloping the odd bushel or overconfident beetle in a short conflagration. Gobbling them up to my heart’s content. The flames had kept the large bugs away for the most part, although I flinched whenever I caught sight of one skulking off into the trees.

The short, green creatures made a reappearance that almost triggered another panicked explosion of fire. One of the creatures burst from the foliage ahead of me. I’d expected an ambush from the awful little bastard, but It had sprinted in the other direction as fast as its wobbly, boneless legs could carry it. I’d watching it go, too shocked to do anything and doing my best to calm my breathing. I was as real and viscerally here as everything else in this strange place and watching it run from me was grounding. The feeling of intense density of the world around me was beginning to feel natural, as though I was becoming a part of it. And the little monster knew as much.

I’d eventually settled for a satisfied smirk aimed at its fleeing back after my panic subsided.

Of course, the little bastards who clawed my stomach out are timid as field mice when I’m not stumbling half blind through the fog. Its always the same.

Standing at the peak of the next ridgeline, none of the jungle’s denizens bothered me. The sun was setting to my right, a blazing, orange-red ball of comfort on the horizon, while overhead the night sky darkened to reveal an alien glow. Impossibly long and swaying like a stand of ferns, glowing tendrils bathed the land below them in an eery, pale blue light. They were impossibly long, branching over and over, until they covered most of the sky.

An uncomfortable feeling grew in my stomach as I took in the impossible thing hanging in the night sky. The stars back home were tiny pricks of lights, representative of a star billions of kilometres away. This was… something else… something alive. Something that had wrapped itself around this place and wasn’t letting go.

I shivered, there was beauty in the thing’s alien tendrils. Something amazing hidden in their perfect smoothness. Their immense length should have had them crashing through the atmosphere like the leather cords of a flail. Instead, they hung overhead, gently moving back and forth to send shifting waves of blue light down over the landscape, like rays of sun beneath the ocean’s surface.

I tapped my own cheek, put out that I’d been so easily distracted and turned my gaze downwards, to the expansive, gently rolling landscape below my vantage point.

Where the land behind me had been broken, cracked, and slanted, the land ahead looked pristine. Short hills bordered small plains where the forest had been cleared and grass grew in pale swathes. Structures, tiny and indistinct in the dark dotted the landscape, trailing thin wisps of smoke up into the sky. Though they only shed the slightest dots of light, they shone as beacons of hope in my tiring mind.

In the distance, almost invisible against the dark horizon, a large plateau rose over the rolling hills, topped with faintly glowing lights and trailing smoke into the night sky. Beyond it was a thin line of blue ocean.

Confirmation that there were people here made me nervous. Here I was, standing naked on a smouldering clifftop with a trail of charred vegetation behind me kilometres long. Back home there would be police investigations, trespassing and arson charges and probably goal time. I would have to try to explain how I got here and how I became… the way I am.

Here though, I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t know the status quo, whether a person would answer the door with a shotgun pointed at my stomach and introduce my insides to sunlight before I could even say hello. What happened to me could be the worst thing anyone here had ever seen, or something that happened every Tuesday. These people might – were likely to – speak a completely unrecognisable language. They might be fundamentally religious, and I might be a walking image of their messiah, or their most hated enemy.

My breaths sped up without my noticing, and I slumped down dangling my legs over the cliff.

What do I do?

That was always the question wasn’t it, all the way through my life, that had been the question. When my parents left me to move back to Wales halfway through high school, when my Grandpa, who I’d cared for and lived with got sick, when I found out Business was an amoral, twisted mess of a degree. Just like always there was only really one answer. There was no one to fall back on, no parents or friends here to take the lead. There was only me.

I let out a long, slow breath, watching a few sparks that slipped from between my lips as they danced across the rocks.

If only I could trust myself not to fuck everything up.

Looking out on the broadness of the world, filled with so many and yet so few possibilities, I lay back on the rocks. I would decide in the morning what to do.

I clenched my pen between my fingers, unbothered by the rocks beneath me as I stared up at the gently shifting night sky.

At some point during the night, I managed to doze off to sleep.