Layne's Writing: The Waker

I have to find the Waker. But how? How am I meant do that when my informants are either mad or useless? I flip through the reports on my desk. I paid for these. I traded secrets and artefacts; the talisman I was given by the seer who was my former employer. It saved my life multiple times and I traded it for twenty pages which amount to “The Waker might be here, but it might also have been the echo of a long-dead monstrosity. I really don’t know.”

The data is too conflicting: while one person writes, “the Waker is long dead, only her ghost remains,” another says she makes regular trips out to drag the Old Corpses back to her home.

After all this time, I know nothing more than anyone else; The Waker woke them up, the world suffered into its current sorry state, and then she vanished.

Not that knowing more about what she was like three hundred years ago will help me find her now. Not that finding her now means I’ll be able to kill her. Not that killing her will help anyone at all.

Not that any of this is worthwhile.

But what else is there to do? If all the options are futile, might as well pick one.

I find myself staring out my study window into the soggy garden Rowan and I share. It’s been doing better lately. The shrubs are getting bigger, the weepers have leaves for once, and we had to cut the grass for the first time in years. There’s a particular patch that grows teeth and we don’t trust it. One time we found a mauled cat next to it. We burnt it away and collected the teeth in a jar. We were disappointed to find new ones growing a few days later.

There’s a strange child—well as strange as any child—beneath a willow, poking a bird with a metal rod. That’s the futile thing the child chose to do today. The bird might be dead for now but it’s as big as the child is. It’s folded awkwardly, and its long neck snakes into a nearby shrub. The child lifts its black wing up to inspect its side. They stare for a while before letting it drop down.

The child is almost certainly emptied, but they might not be, and I’d rather not have a death on my property. I get out of my desk, take the shotgun down from the wall, and hurry down the stairs and out the front door. Cold from the wet grass seeps through my shoes and I shudder at the sudden change in temperature.

I beeline towards the child who looks up at me only when I’ve nearly reached them: they’re wearing an oversized shirt and torn trousers. They don’t shiver and their face is slack.

“Oh, I came out for nothing,” I say. The child looks away, back at the bird. I point the shotgun at his head. “Well, get gone you. You can poke dangerous things to your heart’s content, just don’t do it here.”

And as if it was waiting for me to say that, the bird snaps its neck out of the shrub, crashes its beak into the child’s head. Crunch. The child is flung to the ground with a half-imploded face. The bird points its almost spherical, armoured head at me.

I fire. Holes are blown in its neck and its wings spasm in an attempt to fly. It’s almost in the air when I fire again, and this shot destroys its left wing, forcing it to the ground. It charges towards me, dragging its head with it like a ball and chain. It’s disorientated and veers off to the left where it runs into a weeper. Confused, it lashes out again, but the strain must be too much for the weekend limb because its head separates and goes flying to who knows where.

It runs around for a little while before it bleeds out.

I put hopes of organising my papers away for the time being and go yell into the house to ask Rowan to help me before the garden gets overfed on corpses.

She emerges after a few moments and isn’t busy so she carts them away. According to her they’re good enough quality for her dilution tank. I’m not comfortable with eating an emptied body even if they’re not a person anymore. They were one once.

If Rowan wants to eat them, though, I won’t judge. Apparently, it’s socially accepted in some places; their diet is mainly emptied rather than mags.

Once the bodies are disposed of Rowan lets me know about a new lead on the Waker. A seer has come to the village, asking for me. Or rather, they’re asking for the one who’s stupid enough to gather so much information in one place. It took them long enough to notice.

The slender figure in a black hoodie lets themselves into the house. Before I can question who they are—of course I suspect them to be the seer—they lower their hood. Their face is young and their eyes shimmer prettily. So prettily

So prettily

Blank

They blink and I snap my head away.

No eye contact. I forgot the first rule for dealing with seers.

As I rub my head to calm the growing headache, they gesture with their hands. “Well? Are you the one being so reckless about your information storage? If you weren’t at the edge of the town, I’d have reported you immediately.” They might be trying to raise their voice at me, but it’s soft. Soft and pained.

“But you didn’t?” I say, looking out the window. I can see their eyes in my peripherals and it makes it hard to think. But it’s not as paralysing as direct eye contact.

“No. And if you immediately disperse your data then I won’t have to.” They look to the floor giving me a moment’s relief. I hear their boot crush something. “This place is already infested with infomites.”

“Would you like some tea?” I ask, and head to the kitchen.

“No,” they say. “Disperse your data.”

I enter the kitchen (a narrow space too small for both Rowan and me to work in at once) and put the kettle on. “Certainly. It’s useless anyway now that you’re here,” I say. The tea-leaf bowl is in corner of the ceramic counter. I check it for mites while I wait for the seer.

“Now that I’m here?”

“I’m sure you’ve pieced together what I’m doing. You’ve seen the sort of data I’ve been gathering.”

“Bits,” the seer says, now at the doorway to the kitchen. “You’re looking into the Waker. Why?”

I keep my back to the seer. It’s uncomfortable—it goes against my instincts to let myself be so vulnerable. “I’m going to kill the Waker. And I need you to help me find out where she is. I need you to see for me.”

The seer laughs. It’s a hoarse laugh that dips in and out of soundlessness. “Don’t mistake lunacy for hope. You think you’re maybe the last person in this undying place who believes things can be better. That you’re the only one willing to try something—anything—to make things better. Maybe that would be hope in another time, but not now. It’s too late for hope. They took that from us too.”

“Then you won’t help?”

“I didn’t say I was uninterested. I just said not to misunderstand that what you’re doing is lunacy.”

The kettle finishes boiling.

We carry a heavy, sloshing box into the living room where the seer is sipping tea. Rowan pauses before I open the box. She’s wearing thick-rimmed glasses so I can’t see her eyes. There’s a long, slimy worm stuck into the left lens, wrapped around the rim. It twitches.

“I want to test something out,” she says as she approaches the seer on the couch. I don’t stop her; she won’t have much time for experimenting once we leave. That is, if this leads to anything.

The seer looks at her and she looks at them. I have to watch out of the corner of my eye, so I can’t be entirely sure, but it seems like they’re making eye-contact. Soon the seer realises this and leaps to their feet. “You can look me in the eye? Those glasses? No—your sight must be blocked.”

“It’s not,” Rowan says. She’s rises quickly with a wild grin. “Hold up a number of fingers.”

The seer, still shocked to make eye-contact, complies. Rowan says four, the seer changes the number, Rowan says five. It goes on like this until the seer is satisfied.

“Amazing,” they say.

“Isn’t it? The worm here is an infoeater—dead—but I hooked it up to a battery to keep it functioning. It’s sucking in information just like your eyes do—”

“It’s eating it?” The seer throws their hands over their eyes and backs away. “No, no, no, no, ….”

“Relax! Relax!” Rowan says. “It’s dead. It’s not digesting it. It passes straight through.”

The seer calms a little but refuses to look at Rowan. “Take them off.” Rowan is about to talk— attempt to explain how the device is harmless—when she sees me watching her, my brow furrowed.

“We should leave it,” I say, and nod towards the box. She accepts this.

The seer sits down again and goes back to sipping their tea. They sit hunched now, tense. Rowan places the glasses in a small case which she puts to the side. She sits on the opposite end of the couch to seer and I open up the box.

An animal corpse floats on its side in a vicious liquid. Its dog-like head is hairless, and its fat body is very human. Its arms are tiny but its legs are thick, powerful. Its bulbous, milky eyes and its engorged tongue bob with the little waves.

The seer leans forward to look at the body. “Disgusting.”

“I’d like to think we preserved it pretty well,” Rowan says. “Will you be able to work with it?”

“The eyes are inctact, so yes.” The seer shakes their head. “This thing has seen the Waker?”

“It’s been into the Land of Old Corpses. That’s where we believe the Waker is hiding. We sent it there with a message on the tag—,” Rowan points to the small, blocky device strapped onto the dogthing’s left leg, “—and when we got it back the message was scratched out. We think it made contact.”

The seer shakes their head, either in disbelief or disappointment. They tell us to stand next to stand in front of them and to either side. “Look into my eyes while I see.” We nod to each other and watch as the seer closes their eyes and lifts the dog thing out of the water so they are face-to-face with it. Then their eyes open—

“Hello, little puppy,” a bubbling shadow with a bright smile says to me. I blink and bark at the creature—it does not smell like food, it smells like nothing. It is dangerous! I scream at it. I run. I run. I try to run but I can not run. The creature laughs at me. “Oh, look at this? Someone trying to talk to me? You’re a mailperson.” The creature laughs more, so brightly. What is funny? Why do I make it laugh? I am no comedian, you asshole!

The creature lifts me up and I try to bite at it; my mouth goes numb. I try to kick at it, to rend its flesh—if it has flesh—and my leg goes limp. I cannot hurt it? I cannot save myself? No! No! My eyes grow wet then water pours from them, my screams become whimpers. Where is my pack? All dead and gone. No more. I’m the last one left. It is my duty to found a new pack but I will die at this monster’s hand.

Yet it lets me down on the ground. I am still numb. It looks me in the eyes again. It hurts. “You want to talk to me? I’m honestly delighted to hear that,” the shadow tells me. “I’m in the place where the oldest have died. The ones who lost the fights over this world when I first woke them. If you come here, you’ll find me.” The shadow stops smiling and my hearts pump ever faster. What does it mean? Is it mad? Will it kill me now? “I welcome you, but it might not be easy all the same. I regret that I cannot meet you anywhere else.”

The creature stands up. “Go back to your master, puppy. Show them what I told you.”

My legs tingle and twitch and then I’m running, thundering against the curly black grass away from the place where the old corpses lie—

The seer closes their eyes and plunges the dog-thing back into the solution. They collapse onto the couch, covered in sweat, breathing deeply. I feel my own legs, barely, and they fail me. I fall to the floor. Rowan is beside me, holding her legs close to her chest.

The Waker has invited us over.

The first few days can only be described as quiet. Rowan and I walk together at the back, the seer stays in the front. They seem to know the pace Rowan and I are walking and keep a fixed distance. We say when are tired, where we should rest, and the occasionally thought Rowan shares a thought. I don’t quite understand what she’s on about. She doesn’t expect me to—she just wants to air the ideas, see if they can survive outside her mind. She often ends her sentences in quiet mutters, descending into silence for hours before she next speaks.

There is a constant wind. It’s not too strong, but I can’t ignore it. I feel like if I stood in it long enough, it would wear away my soul. It isn’t a feeling I’ve felt in a long time.

Whenever we stop to rest, we play cards. A new game every few nights—we have no shortage of them. We know the rules well enough that this happens in silence. I invite the seer to join us on two occasions, and they decline each time. They prefer to enter some sort of trance when we’re not moving. I haven’t asked about it yet. Is it a form of relaxation? I’ve heard that seers need to sleep, that it’s the source of their power. Or one of.

I’m not sure why they are travelling with us. I’m glad they are: they don’t eat, and they don’t mind carrying a third of our rations. Also, they’re the only one who seems to know the way.

Eventually, as we come over one of the few hills, we notice a shape growing at the horizon. It’s indistinct but we know it’s city. It’s almost exactly in the direction we are heading too, a few days travel away. Our rations won’t last us at the rate we’ve allowed. Since we’ll need our strength then, we hold off on eating until we are close enough that our rations will last.

As the days pass, I feel my muscles begin to ache and spasm. I grow tired more frequently, but we know we must push through. If we were to be attacked now, we would struggle to get away. We aren’t defenceless at least: Rowan has packed the contents of both an armoury and infirmary in her backpack, albeit most of it isn’t as reliable as it is experimental. I have my rifle. Perhaps the seer would be able to defend us—I don’t know if they’d be inclined to.

When we are at the point that we can start eating again, the seer is the one who tells us. Apart from their declining to play cards, this is the first they have spoken. I don’t ask how they know we are close enough—Rowan seems to agree so I take their words for it. I eagerly consume a sizeable portion of broth. Even hunger doesn’t make it good but it’s certainly more appreciated.

That night, we celebrate our progress so far. The seer agrees to play cards with us, and also partakes of Rowan’s homebrew Dizz. It doesn’t seem to affect them much, although they claim to enjoy it.

When the effects of the Dizz wear off, we begin to move again. The city has begun to take shape: its buildings reach too high, the sky above it is too cloudless, too bright a blue. It’s the Carrion city, and it will be crawling with mags, just as our stomachs hoped for.

The few of them that live near the outskirts are regular citizens and are too preoccupied with their own lives to bother us much. They either don’t recognise that we are different from them, or if they do, do not realise we are a threat. It will make hunting them easy.

I feel sorry for them. The next by Long Town where I usually hunt fights back.

But the hunt doesn’t need to start just yet. It wouldn’t be sensible to provoke now. We will make our way through the city to the other side, and there we will hunt, then leave this place behind.

We arrive at a mostly deserted park. I haven’t seen grass this shade of green in centuries. Or perhaps ever; the grass seems healthier than it should, like it’s been overfilled with life and it’s spewing it out at us, eager to be rid of the excess.

“How far?” I ask the seer.

“The city stretches continues for about ten miles in the direction we’re going. Afterwards, it’s about half the journey we’ve taken so far before we enter the Land of Corpses proper. From there, I don’t know. We might spend a long time looking for the Waker, or she might be there to greet us.”

Rowan nods. “We’re making good time. We also have enough food to spend a day or so here. I want to explore a bit before we go.”

“I don’t mind staying a day.” Rowan’s curiosity is infecting me.

I notice she is staring at something in the air. I follow her gaze to a lump dangling off the side of an apartment building. It’s red and fleshy, merging seamlessly with the concrete. It drips some kind of blood down onto the street below. Mags—mostly young ones—stand beneath it and let the liquid drench them, laughing and splashing each other. After a short while the dripping ceases and the lump, now shrivelled, repairs the hole beneath it.

Following Rowan, we approach the mags, now in some kind of giggly stupor. They pat the liquid around them, inviting us to join them. Rowan shakes her head. She puts on a pair of gloves, then takes out a few vials and a syringe. She fills each of the vials and disposes of the gloves immediately. She places the vials in a box filled with grass from our garden.

“Okay—” Rowan begins. She is shushed by one of the drenched Mags. A female with wide eyes.

“You’re going to tell the storyyy, huhh?” they say. They shake their head. “No, no. It’s my turn, my turn.” They whine and keep shaking until Rowan concedes that they may tell the story, at which point they burst into a fit of giggles. When those subside, the mag begins.

“Okay, ‘kay, so what story do you want to hear?” the other mags seem to be almost asleep and do not respond.

Rowan decides the onus of answering the question is hers and so she says: “Do you have any about the Waker?”

“Should we really be talking to them?” I ask. No-one is paying us much attention, but I doubt we’d blend in if we had to talk with a mag for too long.

“I don’t think they’re too guarded—”

“No! I will not speak of it? Whyy?” Their mouth hangs open, the raw flesh around their eyes twitches, frightened. I’m about to apologise but they shake their head. “The Waker—the fucking Waker of Gods—The Heathen Beacon! Corrupter of Wastes—she does not exist here. We do not accept her gifts as those wretched souls out there did.” The mag stares at Rowan then at me and it starts to sober. “You are one of hers, touched by her, given your life to the beasts she called. Out!”

The mag lethargically pushes itself to its feet, using its brethren as to support its slippery body. We do not wait for it to come after us.

It’s a day later and we’ve find ourselves on top of a hill overlooking a river. We set up the mobile dilution tank in the evening and let the shreds of maggot meat stew overnight. The mobile tank is less powerful, and we were unable to preserve their glands. Rowan used the fluid we found, and it revived them, though not as effectively as she hoped. She doesn’t understand the mechanism by which they process whatever the hell it is the Old Corpses give off, so her calculations weren’t accurate. That’s what she tells me.

It works well enough, though. The mag flesh should be (mostly) free of toxins. Or at least what’s toxic to us.

Us. Rowan is checking that the meat has been processed enough, and the seer is in their trance, although they’re doing it in our company this time. Who are we, exactly? The survivors from the old world, Rowan and I, although I hardly remember it. I don’t know what the seer is. Are they human? Are they old or young? They are a fellow resident of Long Town but separate from the others.

Of course, Rowan and I are separate too. Rowan is an engineer, one of the rare few who can understand this world, and I am an outcast. That it is by my own volition doesn’t change the fact.

I have been unable to stop thinking about what the mag said; that we are one of hers. I can guess at what it meant by that. They think about us the same way we think about them: they have been corrupted by the influence of the things she brought here, ruined and no longer human.

No-one—no thing—has been untouched by that influence, but least we have clung, desperately, to what humanity remains.

It’s not the first time I’ve wondered about mags. It’s the first time in a long while I’ve felt uneasy eating their flesh.

We have clung to our humanity haven’t we? I realise I haven’t thought about humanity for a long time—it’s been a triviality—and maybe it rotted away while I wasn’t looking. I don’t want to check.

But that’s why we’re doing this; we’re off slaying the thing that all-but took our humanity from us. Maybe this is about spite. That’s very human.

I look at Rowan. Of course, she’s human. She’s curious, joyous, and doesn’t give up. She’s often selfish, too, yet generous when the whim takes her. Her whims. Her whims are undeniably human.

“Are you looking at him?” Rowan asks, gesturing to a figure by the river. It’s a young man dragging a body to its edge. He looks exhausted. “Or just spacing out?”

“Just spacing out,” I say. I come over to sit by her and watch the young man. “What’s he doing?”

“He’s been dragging that body for a long while now. He came from the direction we’re heading.” She stands up. “I don’t know why though. Let’s go ask.”

I’m about to protest but considering I was just lauding her for her propensity to whim and curiosity, I go with her instead. The man sees us coming and lets go of the body. He’s covered in drying blood. He doesn’t run. I see as we get closer, he’s simply too tired to. He’s not quite starved, but he’s close: he’s lean and shivering.

He gives us a weak smile and a weaker wave. “Hello! Sorry to bother you strangers, but as you can tell I’m in a terrible state and still have the herculean task of hoisting this fellow over that river.” He points to both the body and the river as if we might have confused them with another body and river. “If you’d be so kind as to help me?”

“Sure,” Rowan says. “But I do have a lot of questions.” She grabs the bodies legs and I take the shoulders. I feel his warmth and this close I can see his slow, shallow breaths.

“I’ll do my best to answer them,” he says. He follows us as we shuffle down to the thinnest looking part of the river. It’s flowing faster than I would like it to. It doesn’t seem too dangerous, though.

“So, why?” Rowan asks.

“It’s a gift for my love. I’m not sure what he likes exactly, but I saw him drag a body into his home there.” He points to a large mound of dug up earth with a hole in the front which I hadn’t noticed before. “I do hope he likes it after all this.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” I say as I dip my hand into the water. It’s shallow enough for us to wade through, not quite fast enough to take us off our feet unless we slip. We should be able to do it if we’re careful. I relay this to Rowan, who agrees, and we proceed cautiously into the river.

“And who is this fellow, as you called him?” Rowan asks.

For once, the man hesitates to answer. When he does, he says: “He’s my brother. You have no reason to believe me, but he did try to murder me first.”

Rowan and I whisper to each other to coordinate our movements. The rocks in this river have been ground down and are more slippery than I expected. We decided we would move by keep at least three of our legs on the ground at any one time.

As we cross, the man goes on, “I confided in him about my love. I trusted him, I always trusted him, and he’d never judged me before. But why now? Why with the first person I’d ever felt true love for? If he had been uncomfortable or didn’t want to hear about it … I would have understood. I would have been hurt, but I would have understood.” The man stamps his foot, although in his state it’s not a very impressive display. “He said such hateful things! I can scarcely recall them without the rage of that night pouring back into me. Why, if you were not holding his body, and if it were not a gift for my love—and if I were not so weak I might soon seize up and fall over—if it were not for all that I would be furiously beating his treacherous body!”

We deposit the body on the opposite bank and return to help the panting man across. He’s frailer and lighter than his brother, and more cooperative on account of not being dead so the task is a lot easier.

“I can take it from here,” he says. “I must apologise for my outburst, especially after you’ve been so kind to me. I’m afraid there’s no way I can repay you now, but should you ever find yourself in the area again—or if our paths cross somewhere else—then know that I will do my utmost to show my gratitude.”

“Not necessary,” Rowan says. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Mr. …?”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” he says (possibly to himself) dragging the body to the mound of Earth.

Rowan and I return to our campsite and watch. The man drags the body and waits. He waits a long time, collapsed on the ground. Nothing happens, so we get on with our meal, play our card games, but our eyes always wonder back. Even the seer, who has left their trance, joins in after we tell him what happened.

It’s only as we’re packing up do we see something: what at first looks like a person climbs out of the hole. “My love!” cries the distant voice of the man, his voice croaking. The thing which he cries to is not a human: it is a human body attached to a centipedal mass of legs, arms, and tendrils.

It heaves itself out of the hole after them, elongated limbs pawing at the air for something to latch onto, tendrils twitching in the pallid light of day. It curls around the man, obscuring him from our view. The human part leans down, it looks, to kiss the man who called it lover, although I can’t be sure.

After a while it uncurls, and carefully coordinates its many limbs to move the man to a newly formed groove behind the human part. It’s less careful with the brother; it drags that through the ground and is retreats back into the hole.

Then they’re gone and it’s like none of this happened. For us, at least.

“I think that’s a happy ending?” Rowan says.

A heaviness wraps itself around my mind. It pushes and contracts and seeps in through the holes—my senses dull and my thoughts slow. We have entered The Land of Corpses. Their leviathan bodies flicker in and out of existence:

A child as large as city, falls slowly in the distance. Or it gives the impression of falling, but it does not fall. Its body is thin and wasting away, bit by infinitesimal bit.

We pass a million beetles in a quivering pile, melting into it each other. Bubbles burst from the streaming mass, sending a brown fog into the air. We cover our mouths with damp cloth and hold hands until we leave the cloud. It stings our faces for hours to come and the seer breaks out in a painful rash.

We stop when we reach the body of what might be massive worm—it extends as far as I can see in either direction, and is almost ten times my height. It may not have an end. Indeed, it might coil around the entirety of the Earth, or galaxy, or universe.

We come close enough to feel heat radiate from it. It might have been far warmer when it was alive. Its flesh is dried and lumpy and faded pink. Rowan gets up close to it, and searches for something to take a sample with.

But she doesn’t get to. “Don’t touch that,” a warbled voice says, although I can’t tell where it comes from.

Rowan draws back, possibly a little annoyed.

“Thank you,” the same voice says. It appears to vibrate off the entirety of the snake. “Might I see you? You’re so far way, come closer.”

“Who are you?” Rowan asks.

“What is the more pressing question,” the seer says. They’ve grown paler and seem to be fighting their nerves.

“I am a human or was one. Just like you all were.”

“I still am,” I tell it. “Where are you?”

“In front of you, but come further. I can feel you, but I want to see and I lack the strength to come there. Please, come to where I am. Walk beside my tongue, to your right.” The worm is in fact a tongue? Or is it both?

The seer steps back as Rowan and I step forward. “I will not see what lies at the end of this,” they say. “Please reconsider this.”

“You can wait by the border,” I say. “We’ll get you when we’re done.” And the seer does not press the matter further. They depart our company and we travel the length of the tongue. As we near whatever we’re meant to near, we notice it get healthier and thicker, wetter and pinker. We do not engage in conversation with it until we finally see it—at first we think it’s a hill, or a boulder, and when we’re close enough to see the glisten of its eyes we see it’s a face, the origin of the tongue.

The head is lying on its side, half buried in the ground. It’s not as large as you might expect given the length of the tongue, but you could still build a small house on it. I’m astonished by how very human and very old it is; apart from the tongue and eyes, it is merely a large old man’s face. It can see us now and I feel heavy when its gaze finds me. Whether or not it’s malicious, it is unpleasant.

“I’m sorry for my state. I’m sorry about many things, but right now I’m sorry that you I’ve made you walk all this way to see a dying thing like me. What brings you to this place? Seldom anything so alive as you comes here.”

“We’ve come to kill the Waker.”

That was the wrong thing to say.

It blinks and I feel like I way three times as much as I did. I’m forced to my knees. Rowan is similarly afflicted and masks a gasping sound as the breath is drawn out of her lungs.

“You cannot. I won’t allow it.”

I’m silent, trying to think of how to not provoke it further. It might be dying but it’s still far more powerful than either Rowan or me. The seer might have had some idea, but that doesn’t matter now.

“If you promise to go,” the thing says eventually, “you can live. But don’t return. The Waker is not your enemy.” Here its voice is far louder, and I can see the vibrations travel along its tongues. If it were a normal volume coming from a normal person it might have been smooth and charismatic, like a singer’s voice.

“Fine,” I manage to get out. “We’ll go.”

“You do not mean that,” it says, and with more strength than I gave it credit for it opens its mouth wide.

Darkness and music pour out.

I try to run. Rowan does too. She’s even less successful than I am, barely moving an inch to my two. My muscles strain heavily under the confusing new weight. I do not get very far at all before the dying thing’s strange emissions catch up with me.

Trills of impossible voices invade my ears, and the darkness seeps into and behind my eyes. I see red outlines of arms and scowling faces. They grip my limbs. They scratch and envelop me and grow more numerous. And they drag me towards a great red hole I know to be the monster’s mouth.

I cannot let them stop me. I tear at the hands. I bite them and try to grip their wrists. When I can remember prayers or powerful words, I scream those over the voices.

I gain an inch and lose twenty.

It’s futile, I know it is, but I have not cared about futility for a very long time.

An orange light fades in, accompanied by a faint damp smell. It is quiet apart from a faint ringing in my ears. I’m not too uncomfortable. My limbs are heavy but from tiredness rather than malevolent influence.

I sit up. I’m in a single bed in the corner of a small room—in the opposite corner there’s another person, still asleep. The light is dim, but I know it’s Rowan. I watch her for a moment until I’m sure she’s breathing.

I climb out of the bed and stretch. I am not alarmed as I should perhaps be, having been brought so close death. This place feels safe. Which is not at all to be taken as an indication that it is—in fact, quite the opposite. Yet still, I can’t bring myself to panic.

Rowan seems uninjured too. Her breathing sounds normal as far as I can tell. I gently push her shoulder until she rouses. Once she is awake, her mind switches on immediately, though I can tell by her eyes she is as tired as I feel, and she begins questioning me about where we are, what happened, where the dying thing is, and all sorts of things.

I answer all her questions with a single, “I don’t know.” I suggest we look for our stuff.

Rowan nods, then makes her way to the window on the opposite side of the room, from which the orange light is pouring out. She pauses for a while before muttering, “You have to see this.” And so I come over to look out the window with her.

There are trees and grass—but not as we’ve seen them before. Or not as we’ve seen them recently—for hundreds of years.

Somewhere slivers of recognition—more from pictures and the odd video than from what I had actually seen as a child—come to me; this flora is ordinary. Young oaks spread out in rows, and birds—birds whose heads are not weapons, who don’t feast on children who have lost hold of their souls—fly between them. A breeze ruffles their leaves.

Rowan opens the window and the air—oh the air! It is a pleasure to breathe, it makes my throat tingle. I inhale fast and hard to get it all in, to let it clean my lungs, and I become dizzy and have to sit down. All I can do is stare into the blue sky. Rowan is breathing and laughing and she can’t stop. She sits next to me, grinning. Even she is rendered speechless.

This is before the monsters were woken up. The light too must be what we had only experienced for that brief fraction of our life before the sun was eaten up—it is off because it is unfamiliar. For a moment, I wonder if we succeeded in killing the Waker and the world is restored—only we can’t remember.

This speculation is soon proved wrong.

“Do you like it?” a familiar voice says.

Rowan and I look behind us to see a shadow with a glowing smile.

The longer I look at her, the less like a vague shadow, and the more she seems like a person. A very indistinct person. I can make out thick, dark hair, and the suggestions of her head and facial features.

For some reason, I can’t bring myself to attack her. I know that’s what we came here for but it’s an inappropriate response somehow. Instead, she takes us to her living room. There we sit on beanbags in her cabin and sip orange juice she provides us. It’s so good I gulp the lot down at once—like I care what the Waker thinks of my manners—and ask for another. The Waker refills our mugs and seats herself down in front of us, on the opposite side of a glass table.

“I’m sorry to ask again, but I really want to know. Do you like it? What you saw out there?”

Rowan nods and takes a sip of her orange juice. “It’s … stunning. That doesn’t do it justice, but it is stunning. How … is it real? Or an illusion?”

I make a small noise of agreement.

The Waker gasps, laughs, then covers her mouth, flustered. I’m caught off guard by the sudden change in demeanour and stare—although I believe I might have been staring for a while anyway. “Yes! Yes, it’s real! I’ve … I’ve been working really hard on it.” I’m about to ask for clarification. She stops us. “But don’t get your hopes up, please. It’s not stable. The world out there is encroaching on it and it might not last.” She breathes slowly, composing herself, though she can’t rid herself of the grin. “Still, if you like it, if you really like it, then that’s a good sign.”

And now it’s the Waker’s turn to stare at us. She looks at each of us in turn. It’s silent—and I feel uncomfortable—but she doesn’t look uncomfortable. Eventually her face lights up in realisation. “Oh, I’m sorry. You’re the people who sent the messenger, right? You must have wanted to meet me for a reason, and I’ve been asking you about your thoughts on my project—please go on ahead and tell me what brings you here?”

Rowan looks at me before she says, “Could we hear a bit more about this project first?”

“I really shouldn’t waste any more of your time, especially after the ordeal you went through. I have to apologise for my husband—he hasn’t been well. I’m hoping he’ll get better if the project works.”

“What is the project?” I ask. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

The Waker purses her lips for a few contemplative seconds. “If I tell you—and I’m only doing this because I really, really want to talk about it and you seem so curious—will you tell me why you’re here? I don’t mean to be pushy. It’s just I feel very bad about what happened and wasting your time—even if you don’t think I am—just feels awful. I’m sorry. It’s terribly selfish of me whatever I do here.”

“We have all the time in the world.”

For once, the Waker has no hint of a smile. “Yes. I’m sorry for that too.” She perks up immediately. “But the project? You might have already guessed, to be honest; I’m trying to restore the way the world. I started a garden using what I could find in the corpses. Whatever they had eaten that hadn’t been digested or contaminated yet—and oh, the things I found were awful. Have you ever seen half-digested sadness? Or a sludge of liquified personalities? It was so confused, it just didn’t know who or what it was, or what it was doing, and it couldn’t decide if it liked me or wanted to kill me. But it gave me an orange seed and I managed to grow a tree from it.”

The Waker hmms to herself.

“Anyway, I started the garden, pruning away all the contaminated bits as they came up. It took so long to get all the bad bits out. I was so worried it would die: life is so fragile—it expands, it preserves, yet when it is small it is fragile and I don’t know if we’ve yet reached the point where we can be sure it will go on expanding.”

The Waker takes a long sip.

“Is that enough explanation?”

“No,” Rowan says, “but it will have to do. We ought to tell you why we came here now.” She looks at me.

I nod. It is fair that she knows. So, I stand and look at her. I don’t owe her courtesy after what she did, yet it feels wrong to sit in her seat, in her cabin, sipping her beverage when I tell her. “I came here to kill you and Rowan was kind enough to help me. I hoped it might … restore the world.”

“Oh,” The Waker says. “Yes, I can understand that. I wondered once if killing myself might help. But by that point too much damage had already been done.”

“I don’t forgive you,” I say. I’m not sure why it. She’s considerate and she saved us and she’s trying to restore the world, but that’s not enough for me. And I feel like I should let her know. Whatever she’s doing—for us, for the world—isn’t enough.

“This might sound cold,” the Waker says, “but I don’t really care about forgiveness at this point. I’m doing this to make amends, not to be forgiven. And for my husband, specifically. Despite everything, I don’t regret my choice.” The Waker me in the eye and the Rowan. “Tell me, do you think people can be happy still?”

“Yes,” Rowan says quickly. And I agree. I don’t have to think about it; despite everything, I have been happy.

“Then you believe you could be happy again. If you’re willing to postpone trying to murder me, I’d like to continue with my project—if you could, I’d be grateful for your help.”

I sit down. Rowan agrees and then she and the Waker both look at me, waiting. Again, I don’t need to think very long or hard. I choose to do something not futile.