Note: Last edited 4/17/22.

Audie stared up at the trees. Could he do it? Could he walk forward into the unknown?

A moment’s thought would dissuade him, he knew. He lunged past the first trunk, and the forest appeared behind him.

He had done it. He had taken the leap, forward, into that one place worse than the outside. Perhaps, he thought with a smile too tight to be glad, but a smile all too real, ‘perhaps I shall wake up a mad man. Perhaps I shall never wake up at all.’

No use lamenting now. ‘Oh how I wish I had not.’ That said, no use lamenting. Audie considered and dismissed the idea of gritting his teeth. He’d just look silly. ‘And only the fog will see you, you ponce.’

He strained his eyes for a moment, trying to see through the gray, but he might as well have matter grey paint layered over his eyeballs and lit by his pupils for all he saw. Where were the vast expanses of greyscale grass the sleepers had mumbled of as they lay? He needed the peace he was promised; he could deal with the dangers. Of course, the victims of this place never complained once, Audie knew. Only the outside world could see the effects of a missing mind.

‘Maybe here,’ he thought, ‘I can think in peace.’ Peace was supposed to be the only upside to this place- at least until death came out of nowhere. Right now, he couldn’t find it in himself to care.

Audie saw two ugly choices in front of him like the choice between rolling in green mud and red mud. He could recant and embrace anathema or get himself kicked out of the walls, into the ungoverned wilderness. ‘The question is whether my faith overcomes my fear, and we all know how that ends.’

Audie closed his eyes for a moment, opened them, and stepped forward. Instantly, the plain came into focus before him, and he stood before the unbounded grassland. He could pick out any blade of grass from the rest in the instant he focused on it, for all every blade had the same color and same lighting, but Audie’s attention was not on the grass. He was watching the dim outlines of men wandered through the grass, their edges blurring as the fluorescent red wisps licked them away. He stepped forward.

He tumbled forward an instant later, his entire body spasming. A second later, a hot flash of cold pain shot through his legs and up his spine. Audie leapt to his feet and stood hunched over, his head darting around rapidly.

To his left, a flicker. He turned, sharp, his breath hissing through his teeth, and saw a shade dissolving into the dust, the greyscale mist of his existence shivering on the sharp red edges of the rain-gray leaves.

His muscles tensed, and he pushed forward, his bare feet dispersing the blades of grass into ghostly fragments as he passed, fragments which floated where they had been and reassembled when he looked away and back. He had to get through all this; he had to pass through the tree line. The stories agreed on nothing but that: the tree line was the only way out. He hoped to God it was not a lie.

Audie didn’t think he feared death. Execution, even, might be born. Audie feared pain, especially the long, drawn- out kind that came with sickness and starvation. The flash he had felt, however, was more than enough to motivate him.

His diaphragm cramped a few minutes later. His feet didn’t hurt, even without shoes, but his legs hurt. He couldn’t sprint any more.

‘What even am I running away from?’ He couldn’t keep running and running and running, at least not physically, and he didn’t have the determination to keep going without some tangible danger. ‘I’ll just have to suck it up and walk. Give me time to think anyway.’ In this land from a thousand thoughts, he could think for ages, he knew, so long as he did not succumb to sleep before he reached the forest, before he left. ‘Coward I might be, but I’ll be pragmatic while I’m at it.’

He blinked, intentionally. He wasn’t sure he’d had eyelids before that blink, now that he thought about it. He froze, watching something red out of the corner of his eye. Audie whirled to face it, only to see a mere wisp, floating across the plain just above the grass and occasionally dipping to lick the tips of the grass. He reached out to touch it, just one finger extended, his shoulders almost leaning away, and then his finger dipped just skin- deep in the light. Each muscle tried to pull in a different direction; each nerve tried to call for a different feeling. His eyes fluttered, and the red wisp, insubstantial as it had been, was gone.

He stood and shivered- no more touching the red wisps. His skin though, that was bothering him. His finger hadn’t looked right. He should be about the color of a pear’s bruise, but he wasn’t. He held his hand up and contrasted it with the bland, powdery sky. Brown had been leeched off him; he was more grey than brown now, only a few shades of brown from not- brown.

Audie shook his head. He had more important problems, and he’d known this place would be fey and unnatural. He’d just have to walk in a straight line till he found the forest, if he found the forest. He had more pressing issues, even if they were farther off temporally speaking.

He shivered. If he didn’t give in, if he didn’t forfeit his faith, he would be exiled to the wild lands outside the walls of the Eight Cities. Inside the cities, Audie could make a fair living, when he was left alone. Outside the city? ‘I might as well be a babe in arms, stumbling and hoping a fresh corpse to drop from the sky, sans attached predator. Might as well ask for some fire to go along with it, and a stack of firewood leaned up against a house for all I could do.’

He rubbed the knuckle of his pointer finger into the palm of his hand, glad that his sensation, at least, was not dampened. ‘I might wish it was, later,’ he thought.

Audie didn’t have any desire to pursue that line of thought.

His skin was the skin of a dead man now, leeched of enough color to fit him for the grave. When he held it up against the backdrop of the grass he strode through, he could see no difference in color save that his hand was a bit lighter than the rain-cloud gray of the grass. Even as he watched, the pallor of his hand seemed to flicker with its old brown color, surge in one fantastical moment, almost burst into discorporate fragments, and fade again to a color more white than black and without any color at all. He looked away hurriedly, his stomach almost nauseous at the sight. He looked like the ghosts he had left behind on the plain’s edge.

A glaring blot of color caught his eye. Green sap was trickling out of a bent stem nearby him- the only bent stem he had yet seen in this pristine phantasm. Like all the colors which could seemingly persist in this place, the green was an unnatural fluorescence, like his memories of the long-broken advertisements which coated the half- derelict skyscrapers on the side of the road near his home. He looked around for a moment, then looked back at the green sap, almost afraid it would have disappeared when his eye did not rest on it. No other green in sight, nor any color beyond this and the red wisps which even now haunted him.

Dared he touch the grass? The red wisps had sent him seizing to the ground, and green might do the same.

‘I can’t be a coward, not here.’ He reached out. ‘Just pretend you aren’t afraid….’

His finger brushed the grass, and the grass was gone. On his finger was a thin green, glowing line. He shrugged. ‘Not worth worrying about.’ His other problem was more important now.

The next few hours, or minutes, he could not say which, ran by in a simple sequence of stepping forward, looking up, and seeing the grey horizon. His skin felt like it was constricting around him, and he felt things crawling up his spine at a thought. The only solid touch he could find was himself and the ground.

Even the ground wasn’t much by now. His feet had never bruised, not like he might have expected, but he couldn’t tell whether he was moving his own toes or no without looking at them, and his feet were no better than his toes. He might as well have wood floppers for feet, so far as sensation went.

He couldn’t think properly. His emotions didn’t roil in him, like he would have guessed. They sank in him, an anchor to the grassy sea floor, a nauseous, slopping mess in his gut. That he could no longer feel his feet didn’t help, for all he could not bring himself to feel surprised.

What was he supposed to do? He couldn’t survive, and even more he couldn’t recant. This was too important, too vital to the Word of God, for him to succumb.

He walked farther ahead.

It all came down to nerve. ‘Nerve to do what was right in the face of what I know will feel eternal in its moment of beginning.’

Did he have it?

Audie wished he could ask somebody for an answer. He also thought he knew what that somebody would say: you just have to keep going.

Audie darn well knew that. ‘I won’t listen, and I have no idea how to keep going.’ He stopped walking and held his hand out in front of him. Could he face suffering and trials?

His feet started up again, but a second later, he pulled up sharply.

Had his hand looked odd? The green glow was obviously normal, even though it was a bit surprising that he had managed to stick his arm deep enough in the meager amount of sap to cover it up to the shoulder. The loss of feeling in that arm only did mildly concern him, but his legs were long since numb, so it seemed fairly par for course in this place.

He moved forward still. The mist of the grass no longer stood out against his feet as his feet passed noiseless through its discorporations. As far as the eye could see, the only color came from the red wisps wending their slow and purposeless ways across the plain, one just out of Audie’s reach. Even the mist these red wisps touched lacked the slightest blush or tinge of the chemical light.

‘Grey grass, grey land, red wisps- that’s the land- and grey mind, grey fear, red anger- that’s me.’ Audie chuckled. Red anger, anger with an object but not action, like light with presence but no effect, like his feet in the grass.

Nowadays, Audie couldn’t really tell if he was still walking or not. For all he knew, without looking straight at his legs, he might be floating like a ghost, legless and half- dissolved into the mist. The grass, at least, was passing by. He closed his eyes, grit his teeth, and looked down.

He couldn’t see his legs. He could see the grass, he could see his torso, but he couldn’t see his legs. For goodness’s sake, he couldn’t even find where his legs disappeared- just that between his waist and his thighs, something happened and he was no longer looking at anything but grass, grass passing underneath him at a smoothly slowing rate. He made to reach down and touch where his legs should be with his fluorescent arm, but he could not.

Audie looked around, his eyes suddenly wide open, his former fears swept aside.

Behind him, at the edge of the forest he came from and dared not turn back toward, the dissolution of a thousand half- seen shades whisked on apace. Perhaps even to these he was yet another in the atemporal annals of this place’s ghastly occupants, forgotten and unnoticed. Perhaps, in all his running and walking and floating, he had reached merely a few inches to their perception.

He had to move faster. Had to move, period.

Audie reached down with his other hand, the one that worked, that wasn’t paralyzed at his side in a phantom cast. With an explosive sigh he grasped his own limb. Still, however he strained, he could not move the limb he now knew still existed.

A scream of grinding blades ripped through his gut and almost through his mouth before he lost his breath to the pain. His spine almost ground against itself as he arched back, legs suddenly corporeal. They shone a chemical red, like the exaggerated depictions in an anatomy book, flayed of skin and painted with the red of a child’s balloon. All around him swirled the long, hanging strips of grey skin and flesh which had torn from its place in an instant.

For a few moments of almost calmness, the long, broad strips of human bacon hung in the air, flaring out around his hips like a ballerina’s skirt mid-leap, even as his head and shoulders crashed into the grass. Then, in a sudden spasm, he fell flat on the ground, each slice of his skin rolling and slapping back down on his bared flesh an instant later.

Audie lay on his back, his eyes staring at the sky. ‘I can’t move. I physically can’t move, this hurts so much.’ His gut quivered, and his gorge tried to rise, but he refused it, desperate not to move, desperate not to reawaken the agony in his legs.

‘I can’t move, and I can’t hardly think. I won’t even die, not in this place of prolonging. Is that how they all went insane?’

In a cold flash, all sensation ceased, just for a moment, then returned. The pain was gone. Audie stared at the sky in disbelief. Was he whole again? Would he be punished for trying to check?

‘I have to risk it. I cannot chicken out here.’

His legs were whole, corporeal, and grey, a few shades off from the rest of his body, but workable. He clambered to his feet, shivering without ability or will to stop, looked at his whole body with wonder, and took a single step forward.

He stumbled, fell, and a long low whine escaped from him as he lay, face hidden in the ghastly grey grass.  He pushed himself up onto hands and knees, not breathing through his open mouth in an attempt not to whine, and peered back at his leg.

A single long cut ran down the front of his thigh, barely a half inch deep, and blood dribbled out of it. He might have vomited there, he thought, had he anything to vomit up in this hellish place.

He stood up again, leaning on his other leg. He had to move forward or go mad with the agony of this place.

His first step forward, and a matching cut adorned his other leg, with a perfect drop of blood on it. The tip of a blade of grass touched the drop as he wobbled, and the little sphere of blood rolled swiftly down the flat of the grass, disappearing into the grey foliage even before rest of the grass could obscure it.

“So that’s how it is,” he said. Audie closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and stepped forward again, clenching his teeth so hard he wondered if one would crack. How odd a thought that seemed when all the rest of his body was focusing on the red line that had just appeared in his calf.

He stepped forward.

He stepped forward.

He stepped forward.

One leg gave out. He pushed up off the ground, clamped his eyes shut for a moment to squeeze any tears out, opened them again, and stepped forward.

He stepped forward. His right kneecap shone through the split in the flesh. A red wisp licked around his legs, just barely failing to touch. A drop of blood fell through that mist and didn’t come out the other side.

No waste here, just as nothing thirsted and nothing felt the loss of blood. Even the suffering was doled out with an economic hand- those who submitted felt no torment, nor, presumably anything else. Though, who could say what a man nearly comatose could feel? At any rate, the few who spoke in their dreams did not speak of pain.

He stepped forward. Those men, he knew, had stayed lying down. They never reached the forest.

He stepped forward. “And is giving in so d*** bad?” His exclamation almost startled Audie himself. Had he said that? Had he dared admit it? He couldn’t take it back, not when he had heard himself.

He stepped forward. How could he face exile, years upon years of hardship in the potential. ‘Who am I kidding, I’d be uncommon lucky to make a week.’ That might be an upside, if you looked at the problem one way.

He stepped forward. Audie could barely bear these scant seconds of agony with lying down, giving in, and feeling the painlessness of oblivion (he hoped). How could he bear a week of it, even if exile were not as intensely painful as this?

He stepped forward. The back of his calves could not be seen beneath the blood now.

He stepped forward. That last bit wasn’t true, actually. You could see his calves where the grass had brushed through them; you could see his skin where the tongues of red light were flickering and prodding, just a hair’s breadth from the skin. Where these two passed, the blood disappeared.

He stepped forward, not looking back, forced think of the trail of dribbling red his passage had left in the grass. He knew now where the ensanguinate wisps came from.

He stepped forward. To think he had tried to touch the lifeblood of a dead man- dead in spirit and mind, though in not body.

He stepped forward. He did not care look down, though at least the blood laving his bare legs kept them warmer than the rest of him.

He stepped forward. Tears began forcing their ways out of his eyes.

He stepped forward. His hands trembled as his nails dug into his own flesh, and blood welled out of his palm to stain his fingers.

He stepped forward. He looked down. His gorge rose, and he hacked so that he wondered if he would choke on nothing.

He stepped forward. A few strips of his skin, along with the thin slip of flesh, swung free from where they had clung. He screamed.

He stepped forward.

He stepped forward.

He stepped forward. His voice was hoarse already, and he wondered if blood would come out of his mouth too. Though this place would lap it up in an instant anyway, so why care?

He stepped forward. His toes spasmed, curling in on themselves in an instant, and he pitched forward onto the ground. He couldn’t feel any grass or dirt, just a numb sensation of not falling through anything.

“I can’t do it,” he moaned. In any other place, his tears would be long gone, long exhausted. In any other place, his blood would lead up to a corpse a few yards back. He had reached all of fifty feet with all his effort. ‘What’s the d*** USE?’

‘I’m stuck here. Can’t do a thing. Bleeding in a way remarkably non-reminiscent of a stuck pig, though uncommon like a flayed long pig, to borrow the auld fairy tale terminology.’

Despite himself, he snorted, but the movement disturbed his legs. He gasped, froze, and slowly relaxed.

‘I’m utterly pathetic, though I knew that. Also, small fact, I’m facing an impossibility I should never have expected to survive.’ For some insane reason, he had once nurtured hopes of beating every other person who had entered this plane by waking up from his sleep at the end. ‘Well, hubris is its own reward, I guess.’

Audie stared at the monochrome ground. Eventually he would fade, fall, and never wake again, save as a demented lunatic. All too mundane an ending, and all too easy to walk towards, ‘if I can be said to walk towards anything.’

People, Audie thought, don’t realize how much hurting hurts. At the slightest twitch, he felt an avalanche of some truly pleasant sensations, like an eighteen-wheeler truck with buzzsaws for wheels running up each leg and over his spine. Was this what the highlanders of the Seventh City had felt when Claversham’s Boot met their leg? He’d heard tales of the abominations, and…. He’d twitched again, prompting a crashing attack of pain and a strangled, croaking cry.

Well, pain and agony wait for no man’s thoughts. Or his lungs for that matter- the second strike of that flare- up had cut his shriek short. How had those Dissenter’s stood it? He’d heard the old stories weren’t entirely fantastical, for all the Cities didn’t exist in them, that those stories had come from the world before this one. How had they felt a wedge forcing its way into their knee joint, stroke by stroke, jolt by jolt, hammer blow by hammer blow, and not dissolved, not surrendered?

Audie knew the answer. He wished- ‘perhaps too late?’- that he’d sought the same aid as those story- men.

“O King of Kings,” he said, and clenched his teeth, the keening whine of agony just getting through as another strip of skin ripped itself free, animated by the malice of the place. He continued, “Deliver me in this hour of darkness.”

Prayer was usually a matter of careful consideration and framing for Audie; he didn’t have that time here.

“Help me, please. Just, help me. I don’t have it in me to keep going.” He should have felt silly for speaking aloud to nobody. Heaven knows he had every other time he assayed it.

“God, please, raise me with your almighty hand.”

“Am…-” a lance of agony rammed up through his leg into his chest, and the pain dulled suddenly to a patchwork of agony rather than the blaring foghorn it had been, “Amen.”

He stood up. His legs, he saw, were two perfectly reflected jigsaw puzzles, with thin red lines where the flesh down begin to split.

He stepped forward, and felt his skin tear apart.

He stepped forward, and his throat closed in agonized nausea and a desperate effort not to scream.

He stepped forward, and he could barely make out the forest on the horizon for all the tears in his eyes. ‘Thank God,’ he thought, ‘Thank you God.’

He stepped forward. His chest quivered, and his lung forced out a low wail.

He stepped forward. ‘God give strength.’

He stepped forward, once and again and a thousand times more, even as his throat tore itself apart with his cries and prayer intermingled with hacking gasps.

He stood before the forest’s edge, the edge of the dream. Exile lay on the other side, he knew. He couldn’t choose retraction; he couldn’t choose denial. For one saved by God, such was not an option.

‘It’s strange,’ he thought, ‘I feel fear like I did before. But… I can’t listen to it.’

Who could listen to fear when such joy overwhelmed their heart?

He stepped forward, into the forest’s edge, and he awoke.