In the void, how do you find a home?

There is plenty of nuance to void navigation, for the unaware—for the enigma and the monster, adrift in the fragile mercy of a curse. It's rather difficult for the uninitiated. Perhaps the lost find their way through cunning, parsing truth from snow and static dust. Simply triangulating and circumnavigating until the destination lays at hand. Maybe the void is a little more personal, raw to the touch, for your windswept traveler—maybe your monster knows it blind. A thousand treadings of a single path, all leading to home. There might be something to that: a story, perhaps.

The answers change all the time. It's rather fickle in that regard.

But like all things, it begins with a wish.

As Leah journeyed to the west, dipping her toes into the earthen crust, jolts of static reached her with every other step. With experience, the nuance of her perception began to... sharpen. She begins to notice the displacement, the ticklish bubble of resistance that her bare feet settled into. Biting yet soft. Crisp yet light. It was the world's most outlandish riddle and one she had to solve, in light of recent events.

Leah instinctively knew her body had nothing to do with it, just like a whale knows it cannot fly. The bramble-vine was of no concern: she did not ask for such things, and supplication is usually honored. Her Hunger had little to do with itchy feet. It could only be the world itself.

<..?>

Neshza's Neck. Of course, it was snow all along! Less dense than the earth by far and molecularly distant, there was indeed 'nothing' for her to grasp.

Perhaps, then... She could make use of it. Leah remembered how the whole shack seemed to freeze over, how the rain trilled into ice, striking the earth. Mama should have gone out and tugged it loose so the straw wouldn't rot or cave in, but she had lost more of herself as the winter months stretched on. Leah was, of course, in no state to do physical labor back then.

Theirs was the only real place in the area, shrouded in so much snow and old ice.

She could really, truly find it.

Leah remained on the path. It was nice to have a plan, to know what she was doing, but she felt herself being guided by intuition more than anything else. It was a strange amalgamation of human memory and something more primal. The familiarity of habit—the patterns she'd walked in life—blended together in an animalistic sense of distance and direction. Leah was malleable now. Other. With focus, the static boomed louder in her body, like the etch of a second heartbeat.

The static snapped louder for a split-second, resonating in the hollows of her chest, and she couldn’t help but feel a little happy.

Here it was.

The door was ajar.

Leah entered the shack that had once been her home. The darkness lingered, but something more tangible pressed against her rapidly sharpening senses. In there, somewhere, was something of hers. Her old body. This close, she was sure of it. The mythical connection still held strong between her human body and her soul, so strong that it was as simple as slipping in. This was not a resurrection, after all, but reanimation.

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She could possess her corpse.

Rather anticlimactically, it was instantaneous.

Leah snapped into place, her awareness flooding back. The sensation was disorienting—an abrupt, suffocating burden. She was no longer weightless. The pebbles in the dirt pressed against her back, cold and unyielding. Every fiber of her being screamed against the invasive weight of the physical, the sheer presence of matter. The smell was nauseating in the way only the dead could be.

The cold returned with a vengeance.

Oh, how it burned. Rigor mortis held her in an iron grip, locking her joints and twisting. Leah’s mouth would not move; her eyes could not blink. She wanted to shiver, to breathe, to laugh until she screamed. It was as overwhelming as it was soft, this human way of existence. Breathtaking in its obscure sorrows. And now, it was hers. This dead-life was Leah's only.

She would never share it again. Couldn't.

Leah threaded a bit of her essence into the sluggish gray tissue of her old brain, pulsing along the tracks of the olfactory lobe. The bramble-vine had parasitized her true form, but that had no bearing on physical reality. There was a degree of separation between the real and the mystical—which could be merged easily enough, of course—that let her hold onto the distinction. Leah's hunger returned with the final spark that set her brain alight.

All at once, she could see.

Staring eye to eye, nothing more than inches apart, was her mama.

“My baby...” the woman whispered. "I saw that. Your pupils moved juuust a little. They're all of bunch of lying bastards, telling me you're not here anymore. But I know better than to trust the likes of them."

Leah drowned out a gasp in her still, airless body. That odd sense, the weight... she had never been alone. Coiled around her dwarf-like frame was her mother. She laid her head in the crook of Leah's neck, peering down into her eyes. Her thin bony arms awkwardly cradled Leah to her chest, limbs entangled together, reedy fingers twisted in her hair. Although unseen, Leah could feel her toes being bent up and down, kept flexible, as she molded Leah's body like a doll. The whole of her hovered like a predator, an animal in mourning, cornered and rattled dumb. Like there was nothing more that she wanted than to crawl inside her corpse and die there too.

A dangerous animal, she couldn't help but think.

Leah could not move.

Mama inched closer still until their eyelashes brushed. Her eyes were a jagged sea-glass-green with not a single light.

“They told me you starved to death, told me to bury you, but I knew... I knew. You wouldn’t leave me, not my sweet girl. Always so considerate.”

Grabbing Leah's wrist as if to find a heartbeat, the frail woman began to shake around her bones.

Her mama’s voice rose higher and higher, rising in hysteria like the waves. The snow seemed to fall harder.

“You’re all I have, baby. All I have left. They don’t understand—not a one of them! They think they know suffering? Think they can tell me what’s best for you, for us?”

Mama's tears spilled down into Leah's old, dead eyes. Her home felt so very small. Noise was everywhere.

“They said to-, to throw you away. Said it was unnatural to keep you here. But I told them—I told them—you were just resting. That you’d just take a moment to rest. And you did, didn’t you? Didn’t you, my little girl?” Her voice rose, sharp and accusatory, as she whipped her head toward the figures in the doorway. “You saw it too, didn’t you? Her eyes moved! She’s alive! She’s alive! Her father damn well lives through her!"

Leah sank deeper into her unmoving body as two men approached her corpse.

“Merra.” A older man muttered, deep with disgust.

Bright, cleansing fire danced upon the torch. The smell of smoke mingled with the decay, acrid and sharp.

“It’s worse than I thought,” The other man growled. “The whole place reeks of sick and death. We should’ve burned it days ago.”

"Her mind's been twisted by something dark, no doubt. Let's just leave."

The two men let the torch fall, and walked away.

The room grew thick with smoke, the flames licking closer, but Merra didn't seem to notice. Leah... could do nothing. It was too soon, too late, and her body wasn't functional. The process had already begun and she couldn't halt it now. She, too, had no recourse but to burn. Merra didn’t flinch. She seemed entirely detached from the world, now that there was no one to listen. Her Mama merely closed her eyes and laid over her body, more careful and gentle than she had ever been when Leah was alive.

The flames drew closer, their heat warming her cold, human flesh, and Leah’s mind screamed with the raw, desperate need to move.

But her body remained foreign.