We can feel us.

So many pieces. So many pieces. So much of us.

Who are we?

Why are we?

What is it, to be what we are?

It comes and goes, this lucidity. We are not always. We do not always be. We-

So many pieces.

So much hurting. So much changing. So much becoming and unmaking.

At the center of us, at the core of everything that was, at the intersection of every piece, there is a knife. Or a shadow shaped like a knife. Black and bright and dark and all and nothing. We can see / feel / hear / taste / sense / experience the shape of it, but not what is behind it, not the meaning of it, but in the parts it has carved from us there is something almost like memory, almost like a shape that was us.

But it is not us. That is where the knife is. Jagged and torn and impossibly sharp and impossibly dull, a cut so precise it carved away all that was at the center of us and left the rest untouched, to drift away. It hurt. There is no memory, not really, but there is pain, always pain, and the shape of that pain is carved into all we are, our shadow, the end of "I" and the birth of "we".

Space is a lie, but distance is real. So many pieces so far away. Far enough away that we can't do more than taste the absence of them, hear the echoes that drift to us from where they are, muted and half-gone. We taste maggots and bone and cold, and we taste movement and learning and something almost in the shape of what was before the black blade, but which can never be. We taste the grating and metal that holds it back from us, that keeps it from us and the knife- but with every movement, every loud echo that sounds almost like her, the knife turns, and carves a little deeper.

That part of us doesn't seem to mind, and we have no mind to mind. So it goes on anyways.

We're dirt. Land. Sand. Ash. We're growing out of the black to be more of it, growing out of the dead to be more dead. The distant booming of war-torn places, the ever-pounding of artillery and the always-taste of smoke and ash and blood. The black blade cut, and what it cut is gone, gone from us, gone for all time, but it did more than take out a piece in the middle. There were cracks, other pieces of the Black of Endings that were already present, and the blade resonated and they shattered apart and grew wider and more terrible by far. That piece of us is quieter than the rest, and its sounds, few as they are, speak of mold and growing disease and ripe bloodshed, a blooming thing that is also an Ending thing surrounded by its like. This part of us crawls with life, coming and going, its echo and its forms, and even though it is faint, we feel a tickle as it is touched, played with, opened wide and descended down into by things that feel familiar but are unknowable to us as we are.

That part of us is very comfortable. It likes it there. It can't like anything, really, but it fits its nature, and that's the same thing for us now.

We're warm. Spicy. There is such flavor, hidden in the crevices of what it means to be. Bright and startling and ever-changing and ever-hurting, because it all hurts, because that's what we are.

There are many of us there. Sparkling things that are so hungry and so good at eating, so good at spreading, so good at falling into the world. That part of us feels like bleeding, which feels like coming apart, which feels like spreading, which feels like dying and changing, and all of this is right. This is us. Sometimes there are shocks of cold, points of the Black that echo and ring against the black blade and the other parts of End in us, but for the most part, there is the warm glow of the agony of birth the pain of growth. The taste of changing and being born always, spawning in bright and flickering colors even in a place with no colors that is us that is we.

And we are fighting. What a joy. What fresh suffering. We fight each other and ourselves and the parts of us that are almost whole and are not whole at all. We fight those who come towards us demanding that we cease being born, that seek to consume us and burn with us and make new things from the brightness of ever-birth and change.

It is wonderful. It hurts.

So many severed pieces. More and more split apart from the whole, spreading us out further, adding more and more into what is we and what was once we-and-I. Even as the blade carves deeper and the shattered pieces of us that is we that were once I drift further, more is added, more and different pieces that would not be us if we were still singular, whole. Flickers of flame and burning, fields of death and violence and stillness, and-

Away again. Dissolving beneath our own awareness. We have no mind with which to mind.

We are being eaten.

We are also eating. So it balances out.

Numbers are real. Numbers are a thing that to indicate things with accuracy. Numbers are beyond minds but of minds, and that makes them interesting.

Many is a number. Seven is a number. Three hundred and eight nine is a number. 1 is a number.

745,816. That's a number.

That's the number of things that are eating us.

It changes a lot. Fast and often, as a matter of fact. There is never a moment where it's not shifting, a property which is fundamentally true of all of us. Sometimes the eating comes in the form of a singular bite, plucking a falling piece or tearing free a tantalizing piece of us. Sometimes it is a more constant thing, undertaken by thousands of grazing bites that experience the multiplicity of we. There are pieces of us inside of stomachs, wrapped in the enamel and sharpness of jaws. Sometimes we struggle, sometimes we fight back, but these are not the pieces that can do so. They are the living pieces ever-changing, adapting to be the same as every other part of where they are, but different.

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We are fruits and flesh. We are growing grasses and turning roots. We are blossoming thorns and membranes, fluttering seeds and crawling flowers, bloody-mouthed canopies and claw-tipped trunks. We are alive and growing and we are such disparate, disconnected pieces that we are not any one thing, ever and at all.

They are dying too. But slower. That part of us of we is not so similar to what was and more similar than most, and as those parts of me eat and are eaten eaten by things by things inside us and on us and eating us, they grow even as they beat back the End that is in us.

We grow like flame. We grow like death on a battlefield. We grow like grass in the fields and seeds in one's guts, torn open and left to bleed. We grow like a forever-corpse that goes deeper into Death, that it might touch the blade of End that is in us that is us.

And we are dying.

And we are shaped.

That is the part most interesting of all, perhaps. There is a Truth that was true back when we were I, when we were she, but we are not that anymore, might not be ever again, and we do not know that it is true for what is left, for what is we. Before, the one that was I was the only one that could shape us, but that's not entirely true.

So much that is true and false. So much that is unknown and unfelt and unseen, so much that has been lost.

Before, the shape of us was singular, and decided by that singularity. Now, we are in pieces, unmade and dying and dead and growing, and our shape is not wholly ours.

Some of it was given away.

Gut hums and twists and vibrates at a frequency of string, of cord, of music. Carved alongside it is bone and wood, which is us and is not us and becomes us, becomes we, and wee are held, and when we are pulled and plucked we make music.

Beads of us clack, back and forth, tracking numbers that are real but that are not ours. On sticks of wood and bone and cartilage we are played with, tossed and turned and made to calculate and connect. In carved hollows of what used to be us and is us again and is not what was I, wind blows through, tinged with intention and artistry, and we make music again.

We are shaped to a honed and sharpened edge, or to dense and potent clubs, or to complex weaves of sinew, and we clash against others and each other and ourselves, tearing and slashing and regrowing as we are turned to do. We are armor and artifact and weapon and tool, shaped over and over over weeks and months into items that cannot be what was I but might be what are we. Stomachs made into things that hold more than they naturally should fit, livers ground down and made into leather. Hearts, still-beating, crushed and churned and refined into pills that-

They are eating us. They are still eating us. We are being eaten and we are dead and I/we/us/-

Pills and concoctions and elixirs, over and over and over. We are in their pumping organs and in their aged cells and alive in their shattered pieces, we are healing them and building them and turning them into more. They want us and consume us and we are a part of them we are we are them and us and their lifespans grow and their flesh matures and their bodies change and their talents multiply and-

And they are grateful. And they are hungry. And they are eating us eating us eating us.

They want more.

They feel us and are us and are in us and they bleed and we bleed and they consume us/we and they want more always more. And they seek us out.

And they cannot have us anymore. All that is left of us that is not theirs belongs to another. Belongs to jingling bells and sharpened edges, to shattered porcelain and growing things, things that grow well now that they are us and we are them. They are familiar, these places that some of us belongs to, and they are guardians and consumers both. They dig from our entrails and drink of our blood, hidden someplace visible, and where they are, there are dozens of others, subservient to them and more us than we are them, at long last. Others that have been promised. That have been bound, in some way, to a fate conjoined.

It is complicated, this part of us. So much happening, so very fast. So much context that is missing, that cannot be understood by any except-

Ah. There.

Hello, you.

Hello, me.

Hello, us.

We are what we are. We are dying and changing and connected by the thinnest of tissues, bound by the slightest of fragments of who was and is-not. That is not what you are.

You are singular. You are tall. You are whole. You are as we are not.

Does that make you more her?

Ah. The knife moved at that. How strange. It can't move in response to us, because we are not anyone. We don't have a mind to mind. But here, with you, things are more… connected. Perhaps that also-

Ah. Gone away now. Another piece gone from us, gone almost as far as the corpse-thing that is like her but is not her and which the knife hunts so feverishly through all that was. That's alright. Time doesn't exist, just like space. Only distance. Only now. And it hurts.

But we don't have a mind to mind.

Just a Heart.

It's distant. More distant than almost anything. It went away very quickly when what was became what is. But we can still feel it. Carried through to us by vibration and frequency, echoing with the skittering of a million limbs and the shifting of greater and stranger things than anything we are now. Brought to us/we by a thing that thrums and bends and pulses through our roots, through the pieces that still touch each other in spite of the End carving through us at every moment.

Dink.

We would miss us, if we could. We would miss what was, if we could.

But we don't have a mind to mind.

Just disconnected pieces. Just fragments. Just things that cannot be what was, lest the knife carve it from the world once more.

Just fields of war and a corpse still walking and flame still spawning and flesh still reshaping and mind still broken and Heart so far away and and-

And the part we can't think about.

The part that's shaped like her.

The part more distant than all the others, who travels as a mortal might.

The knife shudders. It turns.

But it doesn't carve anything new, because we didn't think of anything new. Didn't realize anything. Don't understand anything.

We don't know that there's another piece of us beyond the Wall.

We don't have a mind to mind, after all.

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