The black sun in the sky had moved now, and sat at eye-line, a spheroid of pulsing purple and red. It was before Emily now, beyond the edge of the cliff. Its underside vanished, as the cliff rocks did, into the clouds below. The arms still probed and twitched. It still had no eyes, no face. It was just an organic, cancerous hunk, but somehow it must have been watching, must have been able to see, because it knew she was there, and was still desperately intrigued.

She could not wake up. She knew she must be asleep again, because she had just been elsewhere, talking to someone, and still she could not force herself to wake up.

It didn’t matter, because if she woke up the pulsating arms of the thing would still be there, just eating her from the inside rather than the outside. It looked too much like the sores on her hands and legs to be anything but the parasite, made somehow manifest by the sleeping mind.

The ravenous arms reached for her, and even though she knew she was no better for it, there was still that instinct to run. She would be running into the waiting vines that tunneled through the sand before her. She was in a snare, and it made no sense to try, but she did, just the same.

She made it about three steps before one of the vines caught her ankle–the same ankle that she could not fully decide was there, but was solid enough now—and it dragged her back to the cliff face. This was the point where she was sure she was supposed to wake up. The terror was supposed to cause a jolt. It was supposed to be so unbearable that she simply had no choice but to wake up, to stare once again at the artificial light of the strange ceiling and wonder where she was.

She didn’t.

She clawed at the ground, may have been screaming, had the sensation of screaming but could not hear the sound. Her fingers only found sand, she left tracks in it as she was dragged, and all the effort meant nothing. It was too big.

Half the terror was anticipation of the end. She waited to hear the cracking sound that would signal her death as it had for the others before her, imagined it a dozen times as she was dragged and it still didn’t come.

Why was it taking so long?

The dragging stopped, and in the sudden stillness, there was still the whisper of the sand falling off the cliff side around her. She could feel herself breathing, could even feel her heart racing. Prone on the ground, she stared at the sand, transfixed, as if the tumor had forgotten about her and moving would draw its attention again. The vines still slithered through the sand, she could see the waves as it moved before her. The grip on her ankle had vanished, and it did not return, no matter how long she waited.

She looked over her shoulder, and sure enough, the mass was still there, and it still carried the unmistakable presence of watching her, despite having no face.

It made the sound that she had heard before, as if in acknowledgment of her attention. A swarm of insects, a million angry, stinging insects, or an electrical monument gone haywire, or maybe a jet engine, or maybe all of it. An encompassing, everything sound that vibrated and meant nothing. It seemed to her the terror within her subsided, as if it had managed to escape and leave her behind, and instead it was replaced, irrationally, with an overwhelming sense of relief.

Trying to make conversation was better than being eaten, so she fully faced the thing, an eye still on the cliff edge, and occasional suspicious glances behind at the vines still scouring the sand around her.

“Hello?” she asked it.

The surface of the tumor roiled as it hadn’t before. It was a distinctly alien thing, beyond comprehension, and yet there was the impression that she couldn’t quite shake, that tickled the feathers at the base of her skull, that suggested something similar to….delight. Joy rolled over her in a thrashing wave, immense and out of control, alien and from somewhere else, and pushed out the things she knew she should have been feeling instead.

“What are you?” she asked, knowing full well that it would not answer.

This apparently made the tumor chatty, and it responded with more buzzing and some waving arms. They undulated along the body in a way that, sickeningly enough, reminded her of an excited crowd.

It reached for her again, in its delight, the trunks of arms splintering again into thin tendrils, a thousand tiny fingers reaching for her face, and again instinct told her to scramble back, protesting as she did so. Her shoe must have pushed a loose stone, and it fell over the edge, slipping downward along with the sand, disappearing into the gray mist soundlessly.

One of the tumor’s small arms appeared from below, clutching the stone, and held it before her face, pushing it ever closer, until she cautiously opened a hand, and the massive creature dropped it delicately into her palm.

Hope roiled through her now, so strong that it felt as if she were part of the undulating crowd.

Curious, she threw the stone over the cliff face, and this time the vines caught it within her line of sight, brought it back, and held it up to her to take.

She frowned at the arm, and then the creature itself, unsure how to address it. “Are-are we playing fetch?”

The swarming noise seemed to respond, and the crowd within her became elated along with it. A surge of absolute joy that was so unlike anything else she had felt in years, it nearly swept her over the edge of the cliff as she staggered through it.

She turned the stone over in her hand. Just another piece of the black rock, near as she could tell. The sand continued to slip by in the wind, and the tumor waited for her. She had still not felt or heard the cracking of her own bones. It felt important, like she should have been able to say something to the creature, and maybe reason with it. To look death in the face and talk her way out of it. Make it understand, that today should not be the day, maybe tomorrow, or maybe not tomorrow.

But it was an infection, a parasite, an infestation. It literally could not have understood. The place she sat was a hallucination at best, as it was for Ariana and the others before her. An infection does not dream.

“What are you?” she asked it again.

The mass hung in the air, silent for a moment. The arms twisted around each other, then untwisted, and then re-knotted in another configuration. Confusion, was the word that came to her, this time. Discomfort. Fidgeting?

She sat on the cliff face, and the despondence she felt was at least partially her own, she was sure of it. She tossed the rock again. She looked away towards the roiling gray clouds, and the walls of red writing that still existed beyond, caging them both in. She thought she could still feel those words, too, like stinging scratches, but they hardly seemed important, right now.

Overwhelming emotion came back, tickling the back of the skull and then pushing fully inward, and this time it was something entirely different. Curiosity.

Emily stared at the tumor, and found that the mass had brought itself closer, now giving the impression of a pet, waiting for her notice. The swarm buzzed at her acknowledgment, and the tumor held up the rock with one of a million arms, holding it out to her again. She hesitated, and it offered a little more forcefully. The sand whispered as it danced off the edge, the clouds roiled in gray, and the horizon remained unmoved, and the light still came from no where in particular.

As she had many times before in the past year, Emily found herself surrounded by problems, and utterly alone in the middle of them. She did not know where her friends were, where her mother was, what had happened to anything that mattered to her.

The creature made a low noise this time, not quite a buzz, closer to the rumbling of an avalanche, and that mournful sound heralded a doubling of her sense of isolation.

She looked at the arm still offering her a rock, and was struck by the impossible idea that this thing, this creature that was going to tear her apart at any moment, was just as desperately lonely as she was.

She took the rock, cautiously.

The tumor buzzed in response, and the sense of overwhelming delight came back, flooding over her, and again it was like being in a roiling, jubilant crowd. It was so happy for the interaction, but perhaps more worrisome, what it felt blended so easily into her, that it again became hard to discern what was the simplistic, animal desires of the creature, and what was her. Perhaps that was why the victims before her had babbled; they had drowned in this torrent of emotions, not understanding where it came from.

An arm came up and grasped her around the waist, and immediately her own thought process redefined itself, cutting through the jubilation as a knife through cloth.

It picked her up, as easily as she had the stone, and lifted her above, ignoring her struggling, her entreaties to be put down. Her full authentic terror came back, along with the desire to wake up, to please just wake up and let this remain a dream. Its many extra limbs seemed to quiver in an adulation as it swung her about, deeply pleased with itself. Her own fear was tiny and inconsequential.

Then the surface of the sphere began to part, as arms and veins pushed away, and the purple bruised color gave way to a brilliant warm light of pale yellow, as the sun shining through the dark branches of a tree in the wind. The seam resembled nothing so much as a brilliant, glowing eye. If it hadn’t been able to see her before, surely it understood her in perfect clarity now, even as her own limbs felt sluggish as she tried to struggle.

The yellow light split, giving way to a brilliant cyan center. That color she recognized, she had seen it plenty of times, over the last year, upon looking in the mirror. At its very heart, the creature was made of the same unnatural light. It leaked somehow, she thought, almost delirious in her fear and adulation. Leaked out into her, made her glow, sick. She was lifted into it. A giant mouth, a maw, and light from all directions.

The hazy feeling from her limbs lifted away as she was simply separated from them. Her hands stripped of flesh, the flesh turned to dust, and the dust disappeared into light. Then the sinews of tendon. Then the bone. Then the arms, and that searing fire worked in until it burned away everything, and she thought finally, finally, this must be what destroyed them all, this is what turned them into nothing. There was no more heart left to race, and no stomach to tie in knots, and no lungs to scream. It finally ate her away, and the sensation of a body was simply gone, and all there was was the blue light, and awareness of still falling towards it.

Finally, finally.

Fear burned away, too, and the anger, and all the rest of it, and then a brief moment of relief to find those things gone, before that burned away as fog in the sun, too.

And then just light, and maybe a comforting warmth, and

she could have sworn

one last tickling thought, that itched the spot where she no longer had a neck

that said, or maybe thought, or maybe just intuited the abstract concept of

hello