Unconsciousness is a funny thing. It comes in a lot of flavors. Sleep, Knock-Out, Coma. I’ve been told over the years, by many people, none of whom had anything approximating a degree, that sleep is how our mind organizes information. Like turning your computer off because too many things are running in the background, sometimes you just need to do a soft restart to function properly.

But, getting back to the point.

I am reasonably certain that I was not asleep. Sleep takes two forms for me. The exhausted blink and then five hours have passed kind, easily recognized by anyone with a nine to five trying to hold onto some semblance of a social life. And the deep, soothing embrace of dreams. Dreams, it is to be understood, are easily recognizable for what they are when you start examining them. There is something subtly wrong about them in most cases. A vagueness around the edges, where all the details your mind usually filters out as unnecessary, simply aren’t present, or are filled with cartoonish approximations.

It is noticing these differences, that allows lucid dreaming. It is also, how I usually wake myself up from a bad dream.

I was floating in a vast black void. A soft purple glow illuminated my immediate surroundings, providing just light for me to fear what I couldn’t see, and not enough for me to truly understand the depth of the shadow. This was true darkness, the absolute absence of any celestial body, of any presence in the distance to move towards. There was only me, and the softly glowing, very familiar, purple gem beneath me. Nothing else.

I didn’t think it was a dream, because despite only getting the barest glance at the crystal, the elaborate etchings about the ring in its center stood out in clear detail. In a normal dream, focusing on those strange runes should have snapped me to wakefulness, as my unconscious mind recognized that it had nothing to fill in the blanks available to it. But instead, I could see every detail.

Faced with this alien presence, I was at a loss for what to do. I could move, in a vague sort of way. Drifting back and forth like a kind of disembodied point of view. But try as I might, I couldn’t leave the crystal, only orbit it to a greater or lesser degree.

Giving up on my futile attempts at escape, I settled in to look more closely at the gem. At a glance, it looked rough hewn and imperfect. As though it had been only half heartedly worked on by an experienced jeweler. But the longer I stared, the more intent my focus, the more it felt like there was a subtle pattern to the facets. And as I followed the pattern, I began to feel it. The warm, welcoming feeling of home. The bracing shock of that first dip into a cold pool. The first succulent bite of steak when your starving. It was all that and more, a feeling so indescribable, so impossible to replicate, that for a brief moment in time I entirely gave up on ever escaping from the endless nothing I found myself in.

As though that acceptance was all it was waiting for, the gem began to pulse, slowly at first, but growing in strength and intensity with each passing moment. Every time the gem pulsed, some of its soft purple light would linger in the darkness. Small motes of energy that slowly pushed against the darkness, like pressing a needle through a thick black cloth. Individually they were insignificant in the face of the overwhelming nothingness. But together, they created a tapestry of blinking white stars in the distance. Little holes in the veil of blackness penning me in that began to produce their own light.

Excited, and unable to contain my curiosity my point of view began to drift slowly towards one of the holes, following the flow of the energy now entering into the space I was in, back to the crystal, as it continued to maddly pulse, stronger and stronger until the waves of energy it was giving off began to jar even me in my bodiless state. Finally, with a harsh crack, the gem exploded, dispersing into smaller and smaller flecks of dust until they were all but lost in shadow.

But the inscribed ring remained, rotating gently around a core of the now pure white energy flowing in from behind the veil of emptiness.

And then, I woke up.

***

When I opened my eyes, something was very wrong. More so than the usual wrongness that seems to pervade the entire world I now find myself in. Everything around me seemed just a little bit smaller than it was before. Of course, everything in this shit hole was uncomfortably large in the first place, but even still. The bushes seemed just a bit less safe to hide in, and the ground just slightly too far away.

Grinding my teeth in worry I slowly stood up to look around. The girl - Nadeen - was still unconscious, her burned stump having fallen from my lap as I rose. Only the barest rise and fall of her chest told me she was even still alive. I was still alive, so presumably nothing had come to kill all of us in our sleep. Which was good. I was kind of worried what with all the god awful screaming that we’d attract something, but unlike a real forest ecosystem, the creatures that lived in the murder forest seemed to live fairly far apart. I chittered in annoyance as I realized that if I accepted that as normal, I also had to accept my repeated encounters with danger as a result of terrible, hideously bad luck.

Looking around the clearing, I was shocked to find the corpse of the Gyre Snake completely missing. Even the huge hunks of bone that I found too unpalatable to bother chewing were gone, making me worry that Thing Two must be getting mighty hungry to disappear the whole corpse in a single days sleep.

Reminded of the gluttonous idiot, I whirled around to where I’d last seen him only to see something completely fucking alien looming over the bloodstained bit of cloth that was once Bastok.

It looked like a Thing on steroids. It wasn’t tall, maybe only a foot or so taller than me, but it was thick. It had muscles in places that I was reasonably certain didn’t actually contain muscle groups, and the weird divergence from normal human physiology left me reeling as I examined it, not daring to move an inch more lest I make it mad. Where a normal Thing trudged about happily naked, this thing had bone epaulets on its shoulders, and an intricate lattice of bone and cartilage all the way down its gorilla like arms that ended where its knuckles pressed into the ground to keep its stupidly large upper body upright.

‘Seriously? I can’t get one fucking minute to myself in this fucking place?’ I thought as I slowly stepped back to try and wake up Nadeen.

The movement attracted the creatures attention, and a familiar - if much deeper - trilling noise escaped the things maw. There was a glint of intelligence in its eyes, and it pounded the ground with its fists to sort of half jump, half shuffle towards me at a speed I would have called impossible for something so thick a few moments ago.

Bracing myself to be torn apart like a poacher in the gorilla enclosure, I was surprised when the fast moving mass of meat lurched to a halt in front of me and gave me a hug. Slowly craning my head up (and therefore backwards out of its quite biting range) I looked the Thing in the eye and recognized it for what it was.

Trilling questioningly at it I awkwardly hugged it back. After all, Thing Two was the only family I had left.

Seeing the hesitancy in my gaze Thing Two chuffed in a way very reminiscent of a laugh and then shot a questioning gaze at the still form of Nadeen, its tongue flicking out the drag across its upper set of teeth like a hungry tiger.

‘Did this fucking guy get evolve? And get smarter?!’ I thought incredulously. What bullshit was this? I save his life and he gets to evolve into a… a… whatever the fuck the second form of a Thing was?!

Feeling indignant, I snapped my jaws to indicate a negative to the unspoken question of if we were going to eat Nadeen, then trudged over to the unconscious girl. She was… much smaller than I remembered. Closer to the same size as me actually. Wondering if I just remembered her being larger because I was scared out of my mind when we first met, I glanced down at myself.

I was not child sized anymore.

Where before I could generally be described as a kind of very toothy pygmy, now I was closer in body type to a very emaciated teenager. My arms and legs were stick thing, and my torso was only just large enough to keep me shaped like a normal person is supposed to be. I stared incredulously at myself for a moment, try multiple angles to get a better look in the absence of a mirror.

Someone explain to me how Thing Two gets to evolve into the Thing That Lifts and I’m just a skinny geek! I turned to glare balefully at Thing Two, but was met only with a quizzical look by the musclebound idiot. He may be smarter than he used to be, but deductive reasoning apparently still wasn’t part of skillset.

Annoyed that I couldn’t even vent my considerable rage at him, I turned back to Nadeen, hoisting her good arm over my shoulder and trying to lift her in a fireman's carry. Then I dropped her because holy shit was I weak. Seriously, a human preteen shouldn’t be this hard to life. We were the same god damn size. I briefly considered slapping her awake, but was pulled from my considerations when Thing Two ambled over and easily swung the girl over a single shoulder, turning its gaze on me as though asking if this was really that hard.

I fought the urge to hiss and spit at the oaf. He was helping, and for now at least, seemed full enough that it was safe for him to carry Nadeen, so I turned my thoughts to what my next steps should be. I couldn’t keep living day to day in this god damn forest. I was bigger now, but I was willing to bet based on Bastok’s description of Gremlins that I was still the bottom of the local food chain. Thankfully, I wasn’t an idiot. Bastok and Nadeen had clearly been traveling away from where I had seen smoke during my fall with the Gyre Snake, which meant that there was probably a town in that direction.

All I had to do was get there, keep Nadeen alive, and make sure I wasn’t killed or captured on sight when I ambled into town. Easy right? Right?

I could feel a headache coming on as I started walking in what I thought was the right direction, Thing Two stomping along behind me. I really wished I could talk. This would be alot easier if I could talk.

‘Hey I’m sentient, I saved this girl, please don’t kill me.’ Boom. Single sentence, problem solved. But nope, I had a fucking worm for a tongue, and my body was so optimized for swallowing things whole that nature apparently didn’t see fit to give it a voice box.

Thanks nature. Really. Your the best.

***

It didn’t take long for Nadeen to wake up. She came too screaming in a way that clearly irked Thing Two, its mouth opening and closing in an obligatory Thing warning that she probably only recognized as ‘hungry’.

Huffing like a tired dog I halted our slow march through the woods, then walked behind Thing Two so I could face Nadeen, pale and sickly from blood loss. At first I tried to gesture for her to be quiet by lowering my hands palm down, like a conductor trying to quiet his orchestra. When that didn’t work I tried to physically cover her mouth with my hand. When she inevitably bit me, I slapped the shit out of her.

That seemed to work, and she stared dazed at me as I raised a single finger to my mouth in the universal gesture for shut the fuck up. She seemed to understand that, but stared at me, her lower lip beginning to quiver. Jesus she was going to fucking cry. I mean, granted, I bit her arm off. And killed her protector. And I guess we were basically kidnapping her but…

Shit.

Looking around for a way to communicate, I pulled a branch off a nearby bush and used the pointed bottom to begin drawing in the dirt at our feet. Slow and methodical, I drew an elementary school rendition of a house. Just a square with a triangle on top, and a rectangle on the front to show a door. Nadeen stared confused for a second before recognition seemed to spark in her, and relieved I pointed from her to the picture several times, hoping she’d get the point.

“Y.-you want to take me… home?” she whispered, clearly on the edge of bawling her eyes out.

Finally. Progress. I nodded emphatically, giving her a thumbs up - another gesture I assumed had to be universal.

“...why?” she said, her voice growing slightly stronger as hope filled her that we weren’t just going to drag her into a cave and eat her. I couldn’t really think of a response to that, so I stared blankly at her and shrugged once. I mean, I knew why I was helping her. She was a desperate kid alone in the murder forests of wherever the fuck. But that’s a hard concept to convey using simple shapes in the dirt.

The silence and relative safety seemed to trigger something in her, and like a dam breaking, tears began to flow down her face. She didn’t wail, or scream, or really say anything. She just cried, and hiccuped and moaned. Releasing all her pent up frustrations and despair in the only real way a truly helpless person can.

She didn’t seem keen to stop anytime soon, so I turned away uncomfortably, and moved forward to continue the long trek to anywhere but here.

Man, I really have to find a map or something.