A nosebleed began tapping a drip-drop rhythm on the front of Green’s jacket.
From so nearby, it was too painful to look directly at the creature, so he focused on the blurring treetops at the edge of the clearing.
Holding his breath, he leaned forward and bundled the fawn into his arms. He lifted. The deer’s substance seeped through his clothing. It stuck to his skin like dry ice and the disk in its head picked at his sinews, trying to untie the knot of his body.
“Hold harder.”
Catskill let out a roar and Green felt his body knitting back together.
One of the fawn’s limbs went boneless and wrapped laterally around his forearm like ivy.
He walked to the Hole in Nothing carrying the fawn.
The hole had grown, swallowing the crossed pines. As he watched, the makeshift barrier tilted and vanished into the hungry nothing. A murmuration of dark birds erupted from the far side of the void with a clap of thunder.
It was impossible.
It was simple.
He walked to the edge of the growing emptiness, turning to look back at the chaos of the clearing.
It began to snow in his thoughts and he knew Catskill was losing his fight.
“What a strange, beautiful world,” he said.
Somewhere, an unlikely cricket chirped in defiance of the cold.
Green shut his eyes, set his intention, and stepped through the Hole in Nothing.
The doorstep was not a place.
Green was falling in every direction at once. Expanding. Losing cohesion. He had no recognizable senses because he had no sense organs. The organizing principles that allowed a body to be a body were back on the other side of the door, the door he had just willed shut.
Yet, somehow, he did have awareness.
Brains were not brains in that liminal gap of fractured, kaleidoscopic potentialities, but he still had thought.
There was pain, but the sensation was like an item listed on a written inventory. Impersonal. Important only in that it was still his to claim.
Within the cacophony of his unbound mind, unrestrained by linear time or finite nerve cells, concepts roiling like a spherical sea hovering in deep space, one idea called loudest for Green’s attention.
I am not alone.
The glass fawn was no longer a fawn. No longer squeezed into shape within the narrow, prescriptive confines of reality, it blossomed into a borderless, fecund meadowland of long, finger-rich hands, into the concepts of grasping and beckoning.
Even in that place with no direction, he knew those fleshy thickets were reaching out from something.
He sent his awareness running down those many-jointed fingers, rivulets of his mind tracing the thing to its source, raindrops seeking for groundwater.
What he found was a vast, lightless disk of emptiness that prickedhis understanding by embodying absence while still having teeth to chew.
It hated its own manifested fawn-thing as it hated Green as it hated all diversity of form and perspective. It hated its imprisoning compulsion to exist and to hate.
There was no direction, and still he could feel himself being dragged toward that hungry, grasping thing. He had no body, but it was touching him all the same. Greed and disdain, a galling, violent aversion for all things, bled from the fawn-place like a sustained scream.
Green wanted to resist.
He thought of resistance.
