Above me was a sky bleeding cobalt, and as far as the eye could, a field of white flowers on a hill overlooking the ocean.

The wind brushed against my skin, leaving my body and mind calm and refreshed.

Sensations that I hadn’t felt returned to me at long last.

The ground against my back. Air, cool and clean, cleansed the impurities from my lungs and nose.

The smell of soil and ozone after a long and heavy rain.

The gentle applause of waves breaking against a distant shore.

When I relaxed, my fingers touched the soft petals of a flower. I recoiled away and stared at the right hand I wasn’t fully aware of having — what stared back at me was an ordinary hand, though the fingernail of my ring finger was completely onyx.

Was this the end?

It was the end. That I was sure of.

This couldn’t have been anything other than a dying dream. Figuring that this was it, I reluctantly reached out towards the clouds I could never touch, accepting this brief moment of peace.

“—Oh good, you’re finally awake. Took you long enough.”

There was no peace to be found. I rolled over and pushed myself to my feet, assuming a defensive stance.

“Can’t say I agree with your methods, but you did it. You survived. Technically speaking.”

Sitting against a nearby rock was a man with short, choppy hair and hazel eyes. He was a mostly unfamiliar face, but I knew his voice.

Samson waved at me in greeting, making no move to get up.

Beyond him was an overlooking view of a sapphire ocean. On the crest of the gently sloping hill we were on sat a barren tree, short and stout, looking older than the land itself.

“Before you ask,” Samson said, “This isn’t real. This is the deepest part of your psyche, which people like me call the Id Vault.” He rested a hand on his nape and stared quizzically at the vista before us. “This is a first for me as well. Usually, this part of the consciousness is a primordial goop of repressed madness and other terrible things. But there’s actually… stuff here. A pocket dimension, almost.”

That didn’t make any sense. If this was in my head, why did this world feel so real?

“No clue. And yes, I can still read your mind. No, I can’t turn it off.” He looked at me, then grimaced. “Change of topic before we get stuck in a recursive thought-response loop: How much do you remember?”

Ignoring the fact that a mind-reading ghost was apparently stuck inside my head, I scanned my memories at his request.

There was a distinct fog that distorted my recollections after I engaged the three guardians at a temple of some kind. I got my ass beat, that’s for sure.

“That’s because you very nearly Inverted.”

Excuse me?

“You lost control of yourself and turned into something you don’t wanna spend a day with.” He sighed and threw up his hands in defeat. “Something real important fractured and it hasn’t healed up yet. Better watch yourself from now on, since you pushed yourself too far. Make sense to you? It doesn’t to me, but nothing seems to make sense anymore — logic itself quit and let the interns take charge.”

Grunting, he pushed himself to his feet and began to take off his shirt.

I covered my eyes, fully expecting him to do something indecent, but he was only showing me his back.

Problem was, he didn’t have much of a back left.

Most of it had dissolved, and the parts that remained were coated with a corrosive white light that was slowly eating away at his form.

How long had he been holding on? How much longer would he last?

“After I gave my life for you and came back in your time of need,” he said with a scowl, “and this is what you did to me. You’re like a goddamn black cat, you know?”

That didn’t look good at all. I bowed my head in apology, but there wasn’t much I could apologize for.

Samson put back on his shirt and sat against his rock. “I was thinking about idling around here in this head of yours for some time to come, but it seems like that won’t be possible. Was already a man on borrowed time, so what does that make me now — drowning in time debt?”

I tried forcing a laugh at his joke, but it came out empty, strained. He looked away.

The moment stretched on. I didn’t know how to act in the presence of another person; I had a feeling anything I’d say would be taken in the worst way possible. Though I couldn’t remember it well, it seems like I was the one who tore away the last vestiges of his life.

Think. You have to talk about something for the sake of appearances…

Oh, yeah. Samson dragged me back out of that jungle, I think. Figuring this was my only chance to learn about the world in the near future, I worked my vocal chords with a light cough and asked, “How did you find me?”

That got me a strange look. “You mean now, or way back when?”

If he was running around inside my head, he’d have to run into me eventually. I was much more interested in the miracle that brought him to me, and why he thought taking his own life for my sake was a good idea.

“Transport failure. Pure, mechanical oversight.” Samson looked towards the sky, then pointed at the sun that was hiding behind the clouds. “AP round got me and the onboard computer, so I guess the navigational system locked onto an Etherite beacon — only the nearest beacon was a bunch of unrefined ores in the middle of nowhere. Just my luck.”

As he spoke, I took a seat in the flowers at my feet, idly inspecting one that grazed my hand. It was an orchid, a blossom of white petals and a golden pistil that gave off a scent reminiscent of a freshly peeled orange.

“I was pretty sure you were a Spirit back then, and I didn’t want to bleed out while thinking of things I’d rather not. Glad to see I wasn’t too far off the mark.”

He gestured towards the weapons and gears adorning his body, saying, “As you could probably tell, I didn’t exactly live a life free from regret.”

A sour note. Deciding not to push it, I asked him what happened after I lost myself.

“Somebody else helped me drag your ass back. Didn’t get a good look at them, but apparently they left a message for you somewhere here.”

They? Was it a woman, by any chance?

“Hell if I know, man. I did as they asked of me, since they said they had a way to save us both.”

I sat there, trying to wrap my head around what he said so far.

Was it possible for an entire world to exist within me? I wasn’t entirely sure, but maybe the presence of this strange place explained my lack of imagination. My subconscious could’ve been too busy doing flips and tricks creating this place, so there was no space for me to visualize anything.

Further, I could confirm that the four guardians were gone. I didn’t sense anybody else other than me and Samson in this mental world.

Was it that woman? Was she still watching over me, haunting me at every turn?

“Back then,” I wondered out loud, “you said something seeing the sky. What did you mean by that?”

Samson scoffed. “Ah, that. I remember — it had to do with the mission I was on. If the sky is clear and blue, then we did our job right.”

Was there something wrong with the sky, then?

“You could say that, but it’s not worth remembering. Everything’s on that beacon if you want to learn some history, though. Personally, I’ve had my fill of trying to tamper and toy with history — hasn’t really gone well for me, as you can tell.”

“You’re stuck with me,” I muttered. “I can’t possibly imagine anything worse than that.”

A faint smile flickered on his dry lips. “I was a mercenary, back then. People started putting the supernatural to a science, and were scrambling for a unified theory of everything. Turns out the human mind goes a lot deeper than most hoped.” He gestured to the world around us. “Case in point. I specialized in messing with people’s heads, making them dance to my tune. I was pretty good at it too.”

“Sounds like you were a terrible person,” I commented.

“Terrible as they come. Fee-fi-fo-fum, about to turn your brain to gum.”

He snorted at his own joke. I rolled my eyes and continued staring off into the distance.

“I did a lot of bad things back then,” he continued. “Honestly, being able to just sit here and relax in such a nice place, it’s like I tripped and accidentally fell into heaven. Don’t really deserve it. But I suppose it’s up to you to judge.”

I turned to Samson for further explanation. His palms were upturned and his plasma pistol hung limply from his right.

A familiar pose.

He was calm now as he did back when he hedged his bets on me. It made me a little jealous, not having all that liquid cool to myself.

“Listen,” he said, barely moving his mouth, “I think I’m at my limit. I’m going to fall asleep again for some time, so feel free to use anything I leave behind. Think I got a few tricks you might find useful, assuming the world isn’t entirely destroyed by now.”

I had enough social tact left to realize when somebody was about to leave.

If this was a meeting three hundred years in the making, it was terribly disappointing.

Despite our conversations, Samson was a stranger to me. He had other places to be, mentally speaking, and he dumped all his baggage onto me before disappearing into the night whence he came.

Were it not for him, I would’ve never woken up to endure this nightmare.

At the same time, Samson stepped in to save me hundreds of years after his death. That was an impressive feat for anybody, really. Without this jerk’s help, who knows what would’ve happened to me.

Back when we first met, I had no capability for speech. Though my sense of self was still shaky and incomplete, I could do something now that I couldn’t do before.

Slowly, I bowed my head and muttered words that were three hundred years overdue:

“Thank you.”

Samson smiled, bidding me farewell with a finger gun.

“I’ll store the password in your memory. You can’t miss it, probably. Talk to you later.”

Such a cool voice. I didn’t understand why he was so calm in the face of certain doom, but he was a career psychic soldier, and I was…. Well, me.

What I did understand, however, was that some people would rather die standing on their feet.

Prideful bastards like Samson lived prideful lives. I bet he was one of those types that would rather explode into chunks of guts and blood than show any sort of vulnerability, but it wasn’t my place to tell the dead how to regret their lives.

Plus, he did me another solid favor with all this by giving me the password, so he deserved to go out with style.

I walked away, letting him spend his final moments in peace. The ground was firm and gentle to my bare feet, gently leading me away from him.

Then it struck me. A comment he made during the suppression of the four guardians, something I couldn’t ignore.

I stopped in my tracks and shouted, “What did you mean, I wasn’t human? What am I?”

“You’re a Spirit,” came a whisper carried by the wind. “Be whatever you want to be — but don’t expect to get along with the living.”

When I looked back, his body had turned into stone. I couldn’t sense him anymore.

A Spirit. A non-corporeal force. That didn’t seem right.

I felt like a person, and as far as I could tell, I was an ordinary human inside this place. Outside, I was still stuck as a rock, but that could be fixed. Hopefully.

Deciding to not think about it too much, I turned on Samson’s newest resting place and left to wander the insides of my own mind.

There was another message for me somewhere inside here. Perhaps this was the one that could unravel the mystery of the other cranial freeloader inside me.