"This would be much easier if you had a mouth. Are you sure you're my brother?" Yiddek asked, leaning against the counter as he took notes. The nightmare in front of him stared blankly into the distance. A faint squeaking cut through the sound of voices coming from the garage.

"I don't know. I'm still thinking." Yiddek read aloud, shifting the polished steel sheet Harvel was holding to get rid of the glare.

"That's... a lot less reassuring than I had hoped." Yiddek commented, shaking his head while he typed another note. Harvel truly wasn't sure if he was Yiddeks brother anymore. He knew he was Harvel, but what being Harvel meant became the new question.

At the moment what Harvel was doing was closer to computing than thinking. To break things down a little easier he was concocting a series of "If _ ,then _." statements. At the moment most of them had to do with his humanity.

'If I still feel pain, then I am still partly human.' He thought, setting the steel sheet down on the table. He grabbed a metal pipe and handed it to Yiddek. Harvel pointed at his arm with a chopping motion. Yiddek eyed the pipe.

"What? You want another whooping?" Yiddek asked, pulling the pipe out of Harvels claw-like hand. Besides the fact that the entire idea was a little odd, Yiddek wasn't even sure he could do it. Before there had been a sort of primal rage behind it. Something he couldn't quite describe anymore, as if he'd forgotten.

"Need to remember if I can feel pain." Harvel scribbled, putting the marker down when he was done. Yiddeks heart sank. Over the past few minutes he'd truly felt relieved that his brother wasn't dead. In the moment he had forgotten that his brother might not be alive in the same sense as he was.

This wasn't untrue. Harvel, having now settled into his new body, was feeling much less Harvel-like. He wasn't angry, or anxious. He wasn't afraid of what was happening to him. There was just a sense of what was and wasn't, no in between.

The world no longer shifted violently between his human perception and the one the fungus gave him. They were one now. One view, augmented by trillions of nerves that ran through the very ground itself. As Yiddek stared forlornly at the pipe in his hand, Harvel looked up towards the stars.

The understanding that dawned upon him should have been the greatest revelation of their time, yet he felt as if he'd known it his whole life. He should have seen nothing. The corrugated metal roof of the garage perhaps, but beyond that there should have been only darkness to him. Instead, bells rang from the heavens.

Life without measure, endlessly stretching out above him. Bells, minute in volume, but countless in number rang out with joyous zeal. They were so vivid that Harvel felt the urge to reach out and touch them. It was the second most beautiful thing he had ever seen. For some reason he couldn't remember the first.

Harvel looked at his brother again. The pipe slammed into the side of his face. Ah, he could feel pain, just not very much of it. Harvel peeled his head away from the table, leaving an impression in a sticky patch of half dry blood. Yiddek shivered, and handed his brother a rag from a nearby workbench.

"Well, I felt that. I want to try something else." Harvel wrote, waiting for his brother to read before erasing it and starting again. Yiddek leaned in to read mid scribble.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Sure, but don't make me throw up like Parker. And Harvel, the rag was for your face, not the steel." Yiddek answered, holding his arm out in front of him. Harvel nodded and wiped some of the congealed blood from his face and head.

For the first time in both this life and the one he'd lived before, Harvel wrapped a single set of spindly fingers around Yiddeks forearm. He pointed at Yiddeks open hand. Yiddek anxiously obliged, closing his hand around the gnarled fungal appendage.

All Harvel had to do was think. Yiddek and he were suddenly standing next to the docks, a half a kilometer from the house they'd grown up in. It was a little inlet that branched off of the Rossford Canal. They were a stone's throw away from the boat their father used to ride out to his trash barge every morning.

"It's early. Like, dad heading into work early. I remember this." Yiddek said, mystified at the detail. He could smell the gasoline from the engines, and feel the chill of the morning fog in the air. He'd been here many times.

"Yeah, it's a very vivid memory. It's yours, and apparently mine as well. I don't remember it like this though." Harvel said, taking in the beauty of the memory. He knew that it was a shared memory. He'd picked it because the version he'd seen had been like a melting claymation of this. Most of the memories he tried to remember right now were like that. Some weren't.

"You were there with me every other Saturday. Dad would have to do a mandatory shift but he could go in later than normal. We woke up as early as we could so we could walk down to the docks with him before he left. Things were like that for a few years. Don't know how he did it." Yiddek reminisced, shifting his weight so he could feel the wooden planks beneath his feet.

"With Parker I wanted someone to see things through my eyes. I wanted to see if it could go the other way." Harvel said, a little impressed with himself. Yiddek looked down at him. Harvels form was human at the moment. Human, but off in a relatively noticeable way.

"Harvel you don't have a face." Yiddek pointed out, slightly more concerned than he was frightened. He was all beard and eyebrows. Harvel nodded in acceptance.

"I don't think I can remember what I looked like anymore. I know I had a beard." Harvel explained, rubbing his non-existent chin. The two sat in a sullen silence for a few moments, the sound of water lapping against the wooden beams beating an uneven rhythm.

"What can you remember? Is it getting worse?" Yiddek asked, preparing a mental pen and paper. He might as well get the details while Harvel could actually speak.

"From what I can tell, the memories aren't really gone. More like, washed away with the current. This thing that I am now. It's like a massive computer and every square inch of it can store data. I don't think they're gone, just put away somewhere. There's not a lot left." Harvel explained. He squeezed Yiddeks forearm for a moment.

The docks around them faded, replaced by complete, oppressive darkness. The smell nearly made Yiddek wretch. He held his free hand over his nostrils and tried not to think about what was running between his toes.

"So, this is the sewers? Dibbuk told me there were usually lights. Why's it so dark?" Yiddek said, looking down each end of the tunnel. Harvel didn't answer. A sloshing sound started to echo around the curved metal walls.

Yiddek looked down. Harvel was dressed in his wastewalker suit, a shotgun slung across his chest. Before he could ask why they were here, Harvel pointed down the end of the pipe his eyes had been glued to.

A figure came into view. At first it was just an outline, but as it drew nearer Yiddek could tell it was Harvel, dressed in the same clothes as the one gripping his forearm. There was something about the same size as himself draped over his shoulder.

"Who are you carrying?" Yiddek asked, noticing a growing warmth enveloping his back. He turned again, an orange glow was coming into view at the other end of the pipe.

"Sulby Klagbender." Harvel answered. Yiddek waited for him to continue with some sort of explanation, but his brother remained eerily reticent. A few moments passed before the two figures broke the edge of the light. They were maybe five feet away when Yiddek noticed something was off.

He could very clearly make out the details of Harvels face now. They weren't the ones he recognized. Yiddek had once heard that desperation truly changed people. If that were true, his brother must have changed more than he'd ever known down here.