It's a mountainous place, cresting high along jutting crags, buttressed teeth of boulders, and flat lowland valleys. The miasma in the sky is a rolling bank of soft sanguine clouds. The air is thin; brittle. Tense. The sand and rocky shoals of a long drowned sea reflects the red tempest, but it is equally unlike in its stillness. There is no natural noise. No wind. No rain. It is of a dryness not natural.

I know this place. I wander the overturned rocks, the maze-like caves stretched yards back into thoroughfares of light and rock that meet from floor to ceiling. In the distance, along the flatlands and some surrounding hills, I make out the vessels, the whispers, the anthropophagi that dwell here. I hear the blind rage and angry scrabbling these many miles away. It is rare to encounter them as far up as I normally go. There is a mutual revulsion so palpable as to send off the torsos with teeth and tongue into a panicked jaunt away, only to lured back by the hatred of the outsider.

I am the stranger here.

This place embodies torment. I have never seen another wanderer. I cannot imagine anyone who would want to try, even the more far-gone and destroyed among us, because there are places far more dark and cold and twisted than here. The barrow caverns, the lands of black rivers carved deep into the bowels of netherhells; the places that ancient mystics saw and took back for myth to sow the necessary panic among all humans to never go there. Those lands are foreign and corrupted, and of no practical use except the darkest practitioner, because nothing there knows our ken and the price is insurmountable for failure of any kind.

I choose this place because its pain brings me clarity. I breathe in, and anguish old and new becomes like a thread that I can follow.

My eyes are closed but open, and I am not yet here or there. I am up high as a thicker cloud bank billows down and along, orange-red cracks seizing and melding. I am feeling through a few prized patterns, of circles I stepped along again and again, ruefully smiling to myself as the texture of the thread here is a step I should have taken, or there a mistake of the foot I never corrected. These are woven failures. These are the loom threads worn through my tapestry that stand out, that remind me how despite having (probably) foolishly decided to remain on or come back to incarnate here, the wisdom of many lifetimes only slightly impacts the current manifestation.

And then I remember the trigger. I tap into my self, and spin around the thread still hot to the touch. I see it and wonder. It is too new to classify as a critical life event of good or ill, of something learned or a golden loop of regret where the feet did not turn properly.

I focus on it. And words come out. Attempts to explain and understand, of realizing that they will do no good, that the die is cast. Silence heals. I am so connected to this person that it delights and terrifies me. I knew things could go wrong, would go wrong, that at some point it would require a stop and a change, but there was an absolute certainty, a purity to the connection that transcends myself and that person as we exist. I had thought I had found a good balance, something to quench the human manifestation of feelings and inclinations, to achieve some creation and emotional-spiritual bond that was unique and spellbinding and fundamentally a force for selfless good.

I was wrong. It is a pleasant fantasy, but it will not work; not as things are. It was worth trying. I will repeat that many, many times.

The way things will go is healthy and sane, and ultimately beneficial. My ego-self needs time to heal, because I hadn't expected this change so soon. Every message and intimation was truth to me and in some cases very difficult to convey. It was the way that felt natural.

It will be okay. I just need time here, in this place, to reflect before I come back.

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