IX.

I woke up a day later.

"There you are. I was getting worried!" Sefgh said. She was sitting beside me, leaning over me with a concerned look. "Are you OK?"

I blinked and rubbed my eyes. "What time is it?"

"A few hours after noon. You've been asleep for almost a day."

"Well, I feel alright. Not tired at least," I said, slowly stretching and sitting up, "so what happened? Where were we, how did we get out? Did you carry me or what?"

"We all fell asleep. I woke up first, and we were all right back here. You and Matt were both passed out hard, but he only slept for a couple hours. We were all totally safe, totally unharmed, or uh, mostly. When Matt woke up, he noticed the sun's position in the sky was all wrong compared to how long we'd been in there - it's like we'd gone right back to the moment before we started walking down the path."

"But we weren't dreaming?"

"No. Matt had the exact same experiences I did, and I'm guessing you did too. An hours long walk through a downwards path, dead bodies, swallowed up?"

"Sounds about right," I said, wincing. Thinking about it all again made my head hurt. "So what the hell happened? I mean, are we sure it wasn't just... a shared dream?"

"It wasn't a dream," F.P. said. I hadn't noticed, but he was sitting on the couch across from us, looking quite tired. Matt and M-Bot weren't in the room. He gave Sefgh a look, and she sighed. She lifted up her shirt to show her stomach. It had a scar in the shape of a cross.

"It was bleeding when I woke up," she explained. "That was it, though. There was nothing on Matt at all."

"Took a lot of energy to fix that," F.P. mumbled, "but I did it." He looked satisfied.

That night, when we stopped to camp outside as usual, I decided to leave the group. I had too much on my mind and didn't want to be around anyone, which they understood. They knew I did things like this by now, wandering, going out on my own. I needed a lot of space some nights. First off, I had to write down everything that happened, which I finished doing inside the vehicle. Now I'm laying in a field writing by moonlight. We're getting near the edge of the forest, and there are some points where the trees have started to thin out, spaces we can camp out a little further from our vehicle than to the immediate side of it in the grassy stretches where the trees hold back from the road. Now though, for the first night in maybe a month, we've come across some actual fields, nice open spaces where the trees hold themselves back at the horizon. I'm in one, and everyone else is in another, separated by a veil. I wanted to be isolated and have some time to think by myself.

We've been hunting Sefgh's shadow, and now she's had an ominous symbol carved in her. The world might be trying to tell me to be scared of her. I don't care one way or the other, though. If she's to kill me, then let her kill me. I can only hope we'll forgive each other, and she can be friends with my corpse.

The world right now is a dark, dark blue. The clouds smother the moonlight, but they can't erase it entirely. I'm able to see well in the dark, and only need a tiny amount of light to see, so the little moonlight getting through is more than enough. The others are probably having to use lamps, though. That's one thing I don't miss right now! I've always loved the dark blue look of natural night, and the lamps they use burn my eyes. I've read that thousands of years ago, when electricity was much more common and people burnt it with the ease they breathed air, they would keep their bright electric lights on almost constantly at night, and it caused a strange effect called "light pollution". The light would fill the night to the extent that it completely blocked out the night - the stars were rendered practically invisible, and only the moon might be visible by the skin of its teeth. Most people react in shock when they hear this, but it's been about a month since I was able to see the stars, and I don't mind one bit. Some nights I would scream up at the sky and curse them for what they've put me through, and what they will put me through yet. They can burn out, for all I care. Sefgh and Matt say that the stars created us, that we only live because of them, and so we should be grateful. I'm not grateful at all! Why should I thank them for this awful world? Why should I thank them when I don't want to wake up in the morning? They say life is a feast, but the food all dissolves on my tongue, and when I bite down I only make my tongue bleed.

What a miserable life.

Later, as I was close to falling asleep, a gray wolf snuck out of the trees and walked towards me. I heard his light steps and turned to look. He was large and handsome, with a curious look in his eye. He was slowly approaching, and I relaxed my posture to indicate a lack of threat. For some reason, I had a way with wild animals - I'd spent a lot of time outside, and never in my life had I been attacked. Some animals were scared of me, especially more naturally skittish animals like birds and squirrels, but most would just let me approach, or even come to me themselves. The wolf came to my side and sniffed me for a time before sitting down and settling. I ran my hands down his fur. He was soft and fluffy. He laid down, and I came and laid beside him, petting his head and neck gently. We fell asleep together, snuggled side by side.

That night, it finally rained, and the rain fell like tears.