Now I know there is a life after death for surely I have died. There are "gods". There is magic. And I am stronger than all those around me.

But I am alone. Surrounded only by creatures as different from me as they could possibly be.

I doubt my sanity. Maybe I am a lone crazed hermit. How could it be that I alone am so different?

I found myself laying on the ground looking up at the roof of a cave. Not far to my left there was light from the sunlite world. I was close enough to the entrance that it wasn't really dark. It was slightly cool.

I realized that the sensation of my body was somehow very different. I was almost afraid to understand how but eventually as I became more awake I flexed my hands. There are things we don't notice about how our body feels until it's no longer there to feel. The stretch of my tendons and skin was absent. That stretch I think is a large part of how you tell how your hands are positioned. It was gone yet I could still tell how my hands were and when I was moving them.

In position did anything feel like it was stretching. I could hold any position without any effort. And again, you don't realize the difference here between the usual very very slight effort that one normally feels and no effort at all until you experience it.




Absolutely nothing but a skeleton. No muscle. No sinew. This filled me with terror. Was the afterlife that of a rotting corpse? Yet I could move. I could lift my hands despite no biceps. I could sit up despite no stomach muscles. I dared not feel for eyes. But I could see. I realized I had no tongue. No lips. And this especially distressed me. I could not speak.

But I felt something. Something beyond that of a skeleton. And though I had no lungs I felt some kind of ebb and flow like that of breath. I tried to concentrate on it. It reminded me of the ocean. Something vast and eternal.

I tried to control it and found I couldn't.

o tongue. No lips.And I could feel myself in some sense. I felt something beyond my skeleton.

But having no tongue. No lips. with a bone white ultra tough skin. So tough and hard I thought at first I might be an exoskeleton like an insect or crab. But when I flex my muscles they move beneath my skin. Seemingly very large and strong. My muscles seem are different but they ultimately protrude more than they did in my previous life.


So I capture one. I hide behind some rocks and it runs by coming or going from some errand that I cannot discern. When it's ten feet away I jump up. It sees me and runs. But it hits its top speed in a second. I just keep going faster and faster and snatch it up. It's more a problem of stopping my bulk and changing directions. Takes a second or two. It tries to bite during this time and I see it can't even bite through my tough skin. I think I could crush it with one hand. I take it back to my cave in the cliff and put it in a hole from which it appears it cannot escape. There it scowls at me with a look intelligent malevolence.

"Can you speak?" I rumble in my extremely deep voice. No response. Continues to stare with a look of hatred.

"I'm sorry that I have captured you. I will let you go once we have spoken some. I must know, why are your kind so mean to one another? Why do you torture and eat each other?" I continues to just state with hatred. I think I may start to get annoyed about that.

I throw fruit and edible flowers in the pit. It ignores them. For three days it eats nothing and just states hate. I wonder if it's a carnivore. I will not kill for it.

Here in my cliff care my mood swings greatly from day to day. I watch these little bipedal black creatures do horrible things to one another on the plain and I see how precarious my position is. The trees I eat fruit from barely can support me. I only get liquid from the fruit and it seems to never rain. They must get water from underground I assume. I hope.

I am completely alone.

But my existence has continued after death. And I must admit being the only one like me strangely has made my happy. In life I recall that when young it made me happy that I was different. But that quickly got old. I wonder if this is the same. The only difference being I'm seemingly a lot more different. In life I worried about being fired. Now I worry about a mob of these black creatures attacking me. Not terribly different.

I decide to capture a second black creature and see close up how it interacts with it's fellow. I decide to call them imps. The capture goes just like the first. The new imps look at each other with suspicion for a moment but then both just return to looking at me.