Time flies when the very basis of one thoughts are ordained by the churning shifts of the elements.

Why it seemed like it was just yesterday that the horrors came and tore apart all of human civilization.

Actually although his slowly expanding comprehension of the material had gaps in it he was pretty sure that it WAS yesterday. But precisely how long the current eternal day had gone on for was muddled and full of a big wriggling gap while he had learned how to recognize the corporeal again.

And now the horror terrors were leaving.

The rippling chasm of their interface with the rest of the world was flowing away. Leaving a rapidly straining and ever more tenuous connection.

The swirling expanse of connection and associations painting a picture that he had painstakingly learned to forge meaning from.

It was so easy to not notice the firmament that seemed to turn at their foundations? Or was it they the spirits which turned the corporeal?

It was hard to tell and so easy to misunderstand the connection. He had found himself drifting off and ‘out’ once.

His curiosity teased by so many rarified spaces to inhabit and stretched times to breath in.

Obbie’s constant nagging had dragged him from the temptations to drift out in all directions like a gently exploding puff of consciousness.

Calling him back from that particular brink to prevent him from becoming indigestible.

But still.

He knew it and he saw it. The monsters that had haunted him since before his death were leaving.

They were almost completely decoupled from any associations with the rest of the world. Their endless culling of the souls of the departed and the bodies of the living finally ceased.

Perhaps they were satiated?

Or perhaps the hunt for the ever sparser survivors had finally grown too troublesome for them?

Either way he kept himself poised, posture furled and meshed across so many thousands of positions.

So many inferences and connections and interactions.

He was nestled in the heart beats of forests.

Supping on the lesser anima of wood pulp and rotten fruit. Slipping beneath the sheathing of earth and rock to wash himself in the deeper pulses of Gaia herself.

He was waiting poised and in hiding.

Just because every sense said that the horrors who hunt were departed did not mean it was safe yet. There could be other horrors. Or local soul grinder could be snuffling about for him. The world after death was a dangerous place. Even with the living organs of slain, consumed and subverted spirits writhing over and through his own substance and soul to expand himself beyond the means of mere human souls.

Worn by him as much as they wore him.

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“Mayhaps you need some to shout loud and clear so you can be certain they are trueish gone?”

Helpful as always that hobbie, drifting around the peripheral like threads of smoke.

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“Are you ever going to give up on getting me drawn and quartered like a piece of meat Hobbie?”

“Never till our compact collapse be I leave some and til then I grip lively to ya like gribblies!”

He sighed and shook his threads out then went looking, skimming along the stone and heat and rock type things. The things that were slow and gradual and practically frozen and yet still teemed with their own slow kind of spirit.

Big heaving lethargic things to those that ran so close to the pace of a living human.

Spry and timid little pups to those that let themselves sink deep and out into the sea of slow below/beneath and behind wise.

And as he had always found them.

He found the scattered knots of living humans.

They were sparse and small and alone.

No souls seemed to linger around them. No spirit of man had survived the culling as far as he could determine.

And they were disconnected from each other.

But they spoke to each other, they murmured in whispers of fear and want. Not of him, not about him.

But the faint presence and blind worry and beseeching was still a kind of prayer. A diffuse nectar he could sup upon.

Furtive utterances and hopes now.

How long had the horrible monsters remained there hanging?

How long had the abrupt wound of their passing in the land of souls been burning?

Time was difficult to count. A moment living beside and amongst droplets on a leaf could grind one's sense of time or stretch it out depending on the contracts involved.

The only measure of time he was certain of here beyond his own death was the final absence of the monsters.

But when that had happened he did not know.

The sun was static and the sky and the rhythms of spirits were strange and inconsistent.

How long had these scraps of humanity lived here squeezed into the crevices?

He did not know, but he slowly let his tension ease around them.

Watching them move about.

Watching them struggle and stumble.

Fumble at singing to each other.

It was delightful to simply be near them. He found himself staying close even mostly ignoring Obbie’s protests and taunts.

Just listening to how they struck the rhythm of his own soul in harmonies with them.

Then one day he felt a sudden stinging pain latching into him. He felt another and another and yet each hook made him all the more lethargic and unable to make himself mind it pulling on him.

Pulling him down and into himself.

He could feel warm.

Obbie’s words just seemed so much less important all of a sudden. What did the mean ole spirit’s jabbering matter to him now that He was warm and safe. He actually felt warmth! Warmth like his soul had not felt since he died.

The sensation washing up over him and through him with a gentling soothing flow. For the first time since death he realized he was drifting off to sleep.

That was nice.

He was so tired.

He would just rest for a little bit and then-