He fell empty and unknowing upon –

he didn't now but it hurt, and it was poking into him.

Swearing, vague imprecations to himself, he pulled himself back up upon his feet. Looked around.

A grey, miserable expanse; various reliefs – a single bush and a sickly tree, accompanying. The rest was – the same colour the sky was; grey, ashy, ruined, in some ineffable sense. This landscape was sick. Perfect, he thought – so was he.

He felt, in fact, beside terrible – that that landscape was a projection – but this was a silly thought; he'd just fallen, woken up, been born, and – he laughed and swore to himself again and coughed, unknowing. But this was perfect. This place; because this place, was exactly how he felt.

Head thumping, mouth dry, desperately – strangely dry, with a strange metallic taste that he'd – never experienced.

He moved towards the first outline of a repeated bush/tree ensemble. It was merely something to aim at; so he did that. Repeated. Because there was this same strange couple. Repeated, elsewhere, and he didn't know why he thought – deliberately.

A taste he'd never experienced, except that he knew it was metallic. – That he'd never experienced.

Because –

What could he say that he had experienced?

At least he had a mind capable of posing logical questions. He knew what logic was. – His thoughts were ready and pretty fully formed. He could confront the fact, even with the strange taste and the thumping headache, that he had never experienced before – that.

And indeed this was a phrase: that he had never experienced before; that would have to, could, necessarily become a refrain, an endless one, in his head. – Or even aloud if anyone else existed in any sense he could recognise or experience in any describably normal fashion – he'd have to repeat this phrase – that he had never experienced before – because what could he say that he had experienced before?

… He couldn't say that about anything.

The plain, extending from beneath his feet, was in some sense entirely eradicated. He bent to pick it – he supposed – up and let it – it was sand; a grey sand, run through his fingers.

He couldn't say that about anything. That even this texture he had experienced, before; this landscape, any other.

He fought momentarily with his mind – he had access to certain abstract concepts, these apparently never left – so something had left? Well obviously something had left; he had had an identity, he was unmistakably - he was a person. Obviously he was a person of some kind. It was just that he couldn't remember... who.

Who/what kind/who/what.

– Reaching the first feature, upon the eradicated plain, he touched the tree as if for comfort – another life; the first in fact he'd ever encountered. He imagined a field; coming off this tree; some kind of form of communication they could share. He imagined, he thought it was this, its enveloping him.

He wished the tree well and set off, towards something in the distance; it was higher – that was good – from a height he might see something – toward the next thing.

From the summit he saw something rather more... of existence.