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Apparently the idea of eyes were very different to souls and spirits.

Also apparently these kinds of things could be bought and sold. Although he felt uneasy about the price. It just did not seem right to not remember what was paid and lost for this.

“So now that you can ~see~ where shall you go?”

Memory and words fell into place, collapsing over themselves till he was sure something must have suddenly snuck into himself and yanked out his proverbial insides.

The horrors, the monsters, the loss of everything.

Everyone.

He spoke to the presence.

“I need to... ~see~ the surface, what happened to everyone. What is still happening to everyone... when I died I heard them... what has happened to them?”

The presence that had made the deal with him singsonged and swayed. It was a kind of meandering tickling over his surfaces and furthermore the echoes and ripples it left further out signalled its presence. And there were even hints of other presence further from that.

He decided that the thing was bright and light colored and so told himself the fiction until it was so to his senses.

“That is foolish silly pratful thing to do. Doomed to slay and shred you to tiny little tidbits and leave you wispy wine and screams! I will happily assist you in this endeavor for the short list of first call on your carrion!”

It was delighted and polite.

Or the things that had been latched like thorny roots to his words thought they were polite.

It was strange to feel himself bleed and blend into knowledge and senses that were never him.

Was this what being reborn would be like?

Attached as appendage to someone else?

He was not sure he liked the idea.

The presence stopped bobbing and dancing in the crannies of the world long enough to brush over him with its own sight and feelers.

Its eyes were cloying little touches to confirm his presence.

Honestly it was obvious when he was seen, it was like being groped.

And likewise he understood that his own sight was not much better if he looked to close at things. To see was blatant. Only when he ‘squinted’ and let just the echoes and evidences of things passing did he not risk being discovered with the merest glimpse of a thing.

The presence spoke.

“We have a bargain as such? A guidance to the surface and into the maw of the far-terrors in exchange for the first claim to your corpse in that inevitable doom?”

He felt around his proverbial tongue for the right words. Precision was important, meanings he had once felt were merely one had dozens to hundreds of nuance for exacting location and dealings.

Conditionals and precise statements.

It was familiar to something from before but the memory of such seemed gone and raw somehow.

“A condition that you only lay claim to it after I have been torn with mortal wound or imminent capture and to last for only as long as you should live. And a furtherance that you guide me to vantage that I might yet hide from the doom but still engage and peer myself upon the far-terror. Not direct to my own consumption upon them!”

The thing burbled with agitation at the alteration proposed. It seemed dismayed that it would not be given a certain meal but a mere probability. But then it flumpfed over itself and raised up high and bright and loomy.

“A stricken truth it shall be that we accept it hence, now twine ways this to the surface! To the fruits of doom and quickness to your bursting! Let us open upon you the vista of your demise!”

And then they were moving.

Dancing.

Twisting and threading.

It was like being made of something like water? Strings of yarn? Being knitted and woven and unwoven from one ‘place’ to another. As they traveled the figure, the thing, the being and presence chattered and yammered at everything as they passed.

It gossiped of the goings on around them. It seemed almost to proposition and gloat to random emptiness.

“We go and song and sing and prance! Prance to dance and whit to be as one you will be slain to thrive and grow fat to you as well! I bring bridges and seeches and speeches and sneeches to far! Pras pras be onto you solitude! Return with giblets for harvest time songs I will veriltude! “

They twisted and split and merged back into themselves and then in a heavy gasp the space felt suddenly thin and narrow. The world sparser and harsher and somehow harder to breath and feel. Or at least the metaphor of such things he had made for himself were harder now.

Fizzing foam and froth at the edges of warmth and safety.

He could see something here, edges, fringes, and a churning frightful something.

It was.

He squeezed words for memory until he had some.

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It was Like a river falling off a cliff.

The presence was crouched and furled into thousands of crevices at this border, hidden from inference by himself blotted and clogging the ways. It had not followed further ‘out’ towards the border. Even if he was grabbed by something it would not be able to catch him.

He felt almost like he was a thinnest of margins from something.

But he could feel in himself a sign of sweet memories and promised remembrance beyond that last step.

Something welling up in him from a place that was not toothy grafts from the strange mulching pups or the eyes or words gifted by the bouncing joyful presence next to him.

It seemed to be eagerly awaiting him to throw himself off the edge. Or to peer over it. Honestly he could feel a knowing in his eyes that the two acts were much the same.

But instead he turned to the view of the border wider and sparser. He peered and in doing he reached and stretched himself. He bordered things along fizzing frays and strange new deep wells of space that yet were full to bursting with yammering chattering beings.

He stretched his view along the border.

Never turning enough of his gaze to actually peer ‘beyond’ the edge and reveal himself. Never touching the unknown that roiled with thick syrupy lures.

His guide yammered and hissed and chattered impatiently.

“Eternity von bouy! Reach and slitting somethroats now so I might be felt the carcass sweet and be rich and fat!”

He however shook his head and merely waited. Peering around and around until he finally found the hint of what he wanted.

It was familiar, it was achingly familiar and drew on him like nothing had yet. Not even the endless promise over the edge of the precipice.

It was a soul. A living soul human. He knew what it was deeper then he knew anything.

But it was frayed and panicked.

It was starting to lose its grip on life.

He could see its presence, he even dared to gaze a little closer and touch the confined edges of it where it furled and folded in and out of its living shell.

The soul spasmed and whirled but seemed to not recognize whence his brief sight had brushed it.

He withdrew far enough he could directly observe but not so much that anything within the soul would be able to find him. Even if it had somehow obtained the gift of sight he now used. Instead of being some blind writhing blob slowly leaking up and out of its shell into the exposed wilderness around it.

He waited.

And then he saw what he had been waiting for. It turned towards the warmth of promised prayer. He followed along its path as it swept to the precipice.

Hiding his sight in the wake of its passing as the toothsome pups and the gift of words suggested he could.

His eyes all but promising he would be undetectable from this vantage.

He followed the shape of the soul as it dove deeper past the precipice. And then suddenly forms and things unseen lashed it. He could not and did not dare to perceive the things doing it. But he watched as the soul was lashed, parts of it torn, shredded. Bits of it being unraveled and pulled in thinner and thinner threads in every direction until he could no longer perceive it for it was unmade to become else.

But in the moments before that he saw it framing a shape. A thing in the vastness beyond the precipice. And with the shape of the precipice itself he perceived a hint of the horror there.

It had EATEN the soul.

Torturously so, he had watched the living essence of a human die a final death screaming.

And the thing that had done it was vast beyond all reckoning.

He withdrew tightly into himself. Pushing back against the presence of his guide much to its dismay.

“Wot wet whot why?! Why no look! Promised to bring to sight thee onto the far terror and have ye torn asunder and your vittles fattening mine!”

He turned back to it and nodded.

“And you did and I have sawn and seen it. Thank you, you may have of my corpse once I truely expire as promised. Or until you are yourself undone”

It thrashed at him but the words he used could not be untrue, it was a quirk of the way they moved. It knew he had seen and apprehended and yet not been seen by the things beyond. The deal was met and it was agitated all the more for it.

“Well! Von be to I follow you tether so by my word so that I will sup on the foolish waif whence thou stupid foolsome lends self a final mistake!”

He laughed a bit.

“Well as promised when I so fall you may have first sup of my remains”

It fizzed and bubbled at the edges of him at that.

“But as we agreed you cannot have even a nip before that”

The keening wail made him laugh even more. But he felt the stinging pain in his not-eyes from phantom tears.