On the hunt for wounds in the wood, for the grain that hurts—for a sour ichor oozing from the in to the inner and back out into the inmost—a wild wind has the leaves shuddering like mad today, a terrible wind I have missed for so long.

Life litters the world with her seeds, her many greedy seeds: the desperate, willed, unwilling seeds of the several creatures, tumbling headlong into unknowing. Life leaves her petals strewn about like so many caltrops for the hooves of feral swine and the wheels of counterfeit chariots. They did last for a time—an hour or a day, perhaps two or two hundred thousand—but who among them rose to the challenge? Who was risen? Was there any rising to be had for the petals fallen from life's frantic calm?

Life is the queerest of all queer things and I can find no firmness nor certainty about her—about any of her: what she is (really is), whence she comes (truly comes), why she was so wrought (or wrought herself so), or what sort of (un)creature would be so utterly strange as to enflesh such stuff, concoct such a notion, such as she is, such as the Smith is One about Whom one can speak (is allowed to speak).

The leaves change. The wheel is fixed. I spin.
The trees shudder. The world is fixed. I spin and faint.
The bark grimaces. The snake is fixed. I spin and dream.
The sap speaks. All is fixed. I spin and turn and spin and fade and fade.

I have been at this precipice for many years. I can feel the eyes of the chasm moving over my skin and I can hear its mouth murmuring every awful thing I have ever thought. I am afraid because I cannot see the bottom. I do not know if it has a bottom. It is dark below when I manage to open my eyes in the unremitting, freezing breeze, to look down into the below. I see on occasion that in the uncanny murk below, there is also a faint glow: far below all belows. I am afraid to fall but I am far more afraid that I might jump—indeed, I am most afraid that I will jump and not notice until I am suffused with the dark below—no, that is not true—

—I am most afraid that I will begin to rot—or begin my rotting, or that the rot might take the better of me—before I learn to pass over the gape of the chasm, against the chill gale, to arrive at the Other Side whole and unscathed. That I might fall into corruption before that moment when I look behind me and back below to behold the whole of the abyss aglow with that infinitesimal gleaming I once saw and about which I for so long wondered. That the below and the below beneath that below might itself be the answer to the maddening, fatal riddle it has been these many years, were I only able to see it from the Other Side—

—No, no that is not true, either—

I am most afraid that the heart of the void might be as rotten as my own. That the rotten heart which is empty within me is the very same at the great crossroads where all paths meet (where all paths begin and all paths end). Or worst of all: possibility will give way to necessity and it all sets sail for the Island…