I received a visitor.

Tonight, around 10 o’clock, I sat around the campfire with Feltheart and the dog when Feltheart whinnied something foul. The dog stood from his haunches at a leap and growled ferociously into the dark woods in front of us. The forest went completely quiet.

Out in the darkness I heard a twig snap, then another, only closer, and nothing more. A bear, I thought, though I would have seen its frame through the moonlit trees; or a deer, though the animals wouldn’t have reacted so severely to a deer. It crossed my mind that a man had found my camp, but a man would have shot me or spoken by then.

My eyes adjusted mercilessly to the dark, the boughs of the trees becoming black towers among grey, and the grey becoming lighter by degrees. I sat entirely still, not daring even to breathe. Another snap! Whatever it was had drawn closer to me, shuffling methodically through the treeline outside the fire’s edge, past our circle of safety. Silence again. Terrible, unending silence. I had no weapon; the gun was in the tent. Stillness. The dog stood, unmoving past the fire, staring forward into the dark. I followed his eyeline and found an outline between two trees. A bush? A trick of the light?

I trained my eyes on it, trying beyond reason to figure out whether I was looking at the right spot. A gust of wind blew through the trees from the west, fluttering the branches. The thing didn’t move. A rock, then. No, it was too thin to be a rock, but then again it was too thin to be a man, or anything else I could think of. I wracked my mind for ideas. A sapling? No. Saplings don’t have heads. Saplings certainly don’t begin walking toward a fire in the middle of the forest, where, by design, no people live for miles around, and stop just before the treeline, just before the firelight can reach them.

Another gust of wind blew through the forest, throwing the fire’s limbs ahead of us, and, for a moment, lengthening the light’s reach just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of an albino being, covered in thin, snow white hair, limbs and body thinner than the thinnest man. I saw the head, though I only caught the silhouette, was in places both angular and unnaturally rounded. The cranium was an engorged semi-sphere, extending out at the side many inches more than the jaw, which sat recessed and sharp.

A step. Another. A third and the thing was within the firelight, just a few meters away. The entire head was covered in the thinnest coat of white hair - so thin that the white skin showed through - all except in the area around the lips, which was completely bare. The skin was pale, wretchedly, deathly pale like the dead, a white which was almost green. The lips jutted out like a duck’s bill, limp and wet. Its eyes were brown, in the way a man’s eyes can be brown, with white outsides and black insides, but with no eyelids at all, so that the whole spheres were bare, peering out. It stood completely still, arms hanging without tension at the sides, eyes staring at me.

“Gar,” it said, voice shrill like a violin wandering, mouth flapping open in a way which had no connection whatsoever to the word.

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t.

“Gar.”

I understood, with terrible clarity, what it was. This beast, this affront to nature, could only be the best attempt of an outside being to recreate what could only be a man. This approximation, this simulacrum, was the avatar of the outsider; the Other.

The one outside the painting.

I placed my hands on the log and lifted myself up on my feet. I took a breath of the pine filled air and thought of home.

“Isha.” My voice crackled with the fire.

“I’ve found you,” it said, the words dripping out, one at a time.

My body tensed to a mastline, yet something clicked inside my mind. I knew something it didn’t.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why ever not?” The thing showed no emotion at all; the only way I could tell it was asking a question was by the words.

“You don’t know where you are, Isha,” I said, fighting the paralyzing fear, “and you never will.” A warmth grew in my cold chest.

“I am inside your dream. I am within your plaything.”

“Tell me where we are, now, as we speak.” The words were not my own. I felt no agency behind them, yet I spoke with my own voice, that is to say my true voice: the voice of the One. I had no access to the knowledge, but I spoke what was bade me spoken. “You cannot tell, can you? Even now, as you inject yourself here, you have no clue at all what it is.” I laughed. “You have no mind for interpretation. I’ve built mine, over billions of years, from scratch! What do you have?”

“The three.” The lips only flickered.

“And what can they do? Send them to me! See what happens then! Could you win your war without them, with just the men? What happens after your word fades from their ears, and they start to doubt? My men war only for passion, and what passion remains without you?”

“Passion is my will alone,” it said, the whites of its eyes now lined with red. “The three will find it, creator. All creation is nothing. Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the Great Body of Radiance, hath no birth, nor death, and it the Immutable Light. Heard have I these words from your lips, in the true reality. They come from this creation, do they not? Your devotion to this… illusion dulls your soul, fragments your self, separates you from the Light. You will not find peace.”

“Each and every creature in this world contends with this in all moments of life, that there is no peace to be found in the game. You lack the mind to see the purpose, Isha, of what I do here, and why I do it, but it doesn’t mean the purpose doesn’t exist.”

“Your creation is shallow. There are no means to communicate the truth whilst we speak in these tongues. You have forgotten reality, the eternal infinity.”

“I have words for absolutely everything I have a care to know. Bring the beasts here! I dare you! I’ve put my faith in this one, though I cannot see the end as you can. Or, yes, is my illusion so strong that you, too, can feel time passing? Wonderful feeling, isn’t it? To feel yourself slowly fall apart? What a bore, to be, forever!”

“You will cease to die, Agnotep, and you will miss it.”

“Oh, how I would. And how grateful I am that I never will.”

The thing backed away into the woods, step by step, the gangly legs bending in their unmarked middles, and I came back to myself. It was a foreign feeling by then, to be away from my body, even more so that someone else had been there in my place. Have I gotten the words right?


Yes.


Good. I’ll prepare.