Thomas, who had come before, had died. Thomas now Bluebrim struggled with this for a time, but it was the only conclusion he could reasonably come to – he couldn't remember names that had been important to Thomas Before, he had a different set of priorities, he had different life experiences. Oh, and parts of his brain had been overwritten with something entirely new.

He wasn't entirely certain how he felt about this. It felt wrong – somebody or something had killed him, and done so in a manner that he found violating, repulsive, and repugnant. But it also felt like maybe just a faster-paced version of something that could have happened anyways – people changed, their attitudes over time as they aged anyways, the only real difference here, arguably, was how quickly it had changed. And that seemed like it shouldn't matter, but also that it should; like gradual change was acceptable, led to some kind of continuity of existence, whereas the sudden change wasn't continuous, and was less like one person turning into another, so much as one person disappearing and another reappearing in their place. Then there had been the rage he'd experiencing seeing the – the bandit dogs. That hadn't been his either, and it was entirely new – Thomas Before was dead, and Thomas Bluebrim could die at any moment, replaced with somebody else. Might have already died. How did you even measure this kind of death?

Thomas walked up the river, barely aware of his surroundings. He didn't want to investigate the strange twisted trees that appeared to be spawning the horrible flesh-puppies that might be some kind of juvenile form of bandits that were not quite human. He didn't want to investigate the goats, either, whose voices filled the air in an endless braying.

The existential dread piling onto him, in spite of whatever stoic and the buddha had done to prevent him from collapsing into the kinds of despair he actually expected to be experiencing, was just another misery at the moment, however. His mind drifted from the horror of the sense of the discontinuity of self, to the pain radiating from almost every part of his body, to the peculiar physical horror of being aware of specific injuries. The physical horror was accentuated every time his tongue brushed across the gap in his teeth, which added visceral terror of new changes; he had never been so acutely afraid of an infection as he was thinking of the chunk the bite had taken out of his penis.

Existential dread, physical pain, visceral body horror. He moved mechanically as his mind slowly swapped back and forth between these experiences, walking up the river without conscious attention being paid to his footsteps. More of the strange twisted trees. He didn't look at them, didn't want to see them moving, didn't want to look at the goats. This entire world was a horrifying nightmare; he was just one of the bandits, a thing that looked like a person, but was following a script. His script said lust and stoic and buddha, and so that's who he was.

It was a nice complicated script. Had Thomas Before even existed? He wasn't a real person. He didn't have memories of a real place. He was in a nightmare where he didn't belong, and he was probably fake; whoever had created him hadn't even bothered to give him real memories, that's why all the names were missing.

It wasn't a complicated script, it was simple. That's why he'd said nothing, done nothing, when Cenpre had taken something away from him. What had it mattered? He wasn't real, he had known he wasn't real. He was a puppet of meat controlled by the script. It was correct and well that other people wouldn't take his wishes into account, his job was to do what the script said, and his script had said lust. He'd done his job adequately, hadn't he?

He walked, awareness slowly growing that the goats spoke in human voices. Thomas smiled at the goats as he walked by them, and they chattered at him; they were nice. They told him what he needed to hear, he just couldn't understand the words; he needed to listen more carefully. Thomas approached one of the goats, which stared at him with glowing, horizontally-slitted red eyes. Its mouth moved, and speech came out, but it was not words. It didn't need to be words, the truth transcended words.

It was starting to get to be hard to walk closer to the goat; the ground kept wobbling uncontrollably underneath him. No, his fake body was just dying now, he was just one of those bandits. Hadn't he chosen bandit party as his origin? He hadn't chosen that, it was all fake, and he was dying now, he'd always been dead and just not known it. The ground came up to meet him, as was entirely appropriate; from the earth, to the earth. He was earth. His script was empty, he had reached the last words, and there wasn't anything left for him to do. He didn't need to die, he had already died and not even realized it, the moment he had become this script, which after all only had so many words written in it. Now he was the earth. He was of the twisted trees, he was a root system that would reach down, down, into the darkness. The darkness embraced him, for there was nothing left.

Light. Darkness. Confusion. Blurry images; it took a long moment to recognize color, and as if the recognition were the thing, the blurry image was suddenly vibrant with colors. Green, and blue, and brown. Mostly green. Pointy green, not flat green, and close.

Sound came on then, sudden – not an awareness growing, but instantly, from one moment to the next, there was not sound, and then there was. It was a rolling, gentle, sloshing sort of noise. Random and chaotic and yet gentle.

A jolt of lightning flashed through awareness, and Thomas sat up sharply, and then fell back over to start dry-heaving. The pain. Oh fuck the pain. Everything hurt, and he started taking stock of his injuries again, surprised to see that they were already tied with torn shreds of oiled brown cloth, his undergarments having been turned into makeshift bandages. He could remember deciding to bandage his wounds, but the memory of actually doing so was oddly missing. Along with a number of others.

He glanced at his health, in the status screen; twenty six. He could distinctly remember that it had been forty one before, so he was still bleeding, but maybe not too badly, depending on how long he had been out.

Thomas pulled himself to his feet, stifling a cry of pain when weight settled on one of his legs. He could remember walking, in a daze of confusion and despair, but his memories beyond that were fragmented; he must have been in shock. Certainly the glowing-eyed goats that had spoken in tongues weren't in evidence in reality.

Step. Pain. Step. Pain. He grit his teeth and kept walking. He needed to get back to town, get to a healer, get his wounds treated so they wouldn't get infected. Step. Pain. Step. Pain.

The world slowly passed by, the colors bleaching out into nothing as he moved.

Thomas found somebody; one of those fishing with nets. It had been the woman who had greeted him on the way out. She made a noise, and other people came over. Thomas let himself slide off his aching legs. He looked at his health. Nineteen. He'd made it, and he was still bleeding.

The next hour was a blur; he had gotten through the walk back to town, and now he just let the pain fuzz away everything else. He was aware of bandages being changed, of somebody talking to him – he was aware of saying something back, but not what he had actually said. Whatever it was had caused something of a stir. People left, more people came. Somebody gave him food, but it was water that he found an unquenchable need for – he'd been walking dehydrated for more than an hour just a few paces away from the river, unaware in his pain and misery how much he needed a drink.

The evening … passed. Like an eternity, like a heartbeat; somewhere in between, each moment of agony dragging on for perpetuity, and hours disappearing into nothing. The sun set; the sun rose. He hadn't slept, but neither was he awake, drifting in and out of greater and reduced degrees of self-awareness. Mostly his attention was consumed by an all-engulfing agony, his mind confused, and in his less lucid moments, he thought himself a block of ice, or a spreading flame.

Awareness gradually became less sporadic; the people filtering in and out of his room became people again, rather than angry spirits come to demand something he couldn't quite understand. Ice and flame gave way to more mundane pains. A drumbeat that had become the music of his existence resolved into his pulse, felt a dozen times over across his many wounds.

Slowly awareness shifted into something more coherent; he alternated between fitful sleep and blubbering self-pity through the first night he remembered that he more than a ball of pain and misery. But the pain and misery only subsided further, until he could think again.

Thomas forced himself to sit up, after a half hour of slowly realizing that movement was an option, and look around. The cot on the ground was all too familiar; the scent of herbs, and other smells – sweat, rot, blood – just as much so. He was in a healing house again. Flashes of the fight went through his mind, and the room spun; he shook his head against the thought of one of those weapons being -embedded- in him, of the bites that had been taken out of him, and focused on the here and now. He needed … food. And water.