Obsessing over the perfect face of the divine avatar of Goddess Ishira was easy. It was a nice distraction from my dark thoughts about the people that my viruses killed in USSR. Daydreaming about the most perfect, the most beautiful girl I've ever encountered was relaxing, pacifying.

I stopped moving, slowly sank into the embrace of the bone-mesh, grey wall.

One by one the light of my tentacle-threads faded away and I became one with the wall, my mind slowly drifting away into various imaginary scenarios of holding her hand, walking with her on the beach, kissing her... on and on it went, endless scenarios of our love unfolding... endless, infinite variety of ways in which we could meet, in which I could make her happy.

I didn’t know how much time had passed.

Maybe an hour, maybe a thousand years. Time was meaningless in the Astral depths where nothing moved. Time was meaningless to me, because I was a lost little soul without a home, with no way to return to earth and no future. Only the daydream of the perfect girl kept me alive, kept me focused... focused on dreaming about her.

Something flashed in front of me.

I awoke.

A strange, fractal jellyfish was roaming the wasteland of broken men. Its tentacles sucked the remnants of life and memories out of the hollow, dead things. I tried to move and found that I was fused into the wall.

The silver-blue jellyfish reached me, grew in size as it got close, increasing ten, then hundred, then a thousand times in size. Its threads grabbed at me, sliced me out of the wall of corpses and flung my body into its gaping maw.

[THE END]