You didn’t die. Nothing ever does. Fixed in the rigid fibres of time and space, everything that was and will be remains constant, given life and magic by the fleeting traces of consciousness - the ineffectual impulses of matter that wants to somewhere else, something else. In the vast body of the universe you are not even a cell, not even mitochondria. You are not even a by-product, a waste, a deposit. You, your mind, is a tension, a waveform; a possibility measured against what is and what cannot be, that in the vast inflexible fabric of the world cannot collapse into anything or nothing. Held fast in the taut fabric of potential, you cannot die.

Others around you find a kind of death, a peaceful disintegration, torn to shreds and consumed. But their fragments remain. You feel them in the soft mush of the medium you travel through, the piecemeal bones and flesh of ruptured bodies, the decomposing corpses that have given up, shut down, fallen into unsleep, dreamlessness. But you are an engine. You power through this liquid graveyard, disinterring these sacks of dead meat, to consume as your fuel, your food. And in consuming you give the dead new life, their proteins and carbohydrates jangling in your gut, their fluids dissolving into yours. As their old blood reaches your brain you taste their needy deaths, the hopeless craving of their bodies, exhausted and hungry in this dead world where they refused the new life, of motility at the price of feeding, feasting on the weak, the tired, the old. But their cells sing inside their new host, delight in motion. You feel them in the surge of your limbs, the strength of your body, the relentless grinding and sucking of your jaw and mouth. They tingle on your tongue, waking your taste buds with novel flavours, the sweetness of the meat on the underside of arms, the sour gaminess of livers, the tough meatiness of hearts. The dead cannot die, only their forms modify in your digestive tract.

And what drives you, what separates you from the mass of the defeated. It is you, your knowledge, that somewhere deeper down - at the heart of the world - is a mystery to be discovered. Somewhere, where the great drumbeat of the world pounds its unending rhythm. You will take them with you, down into the yawing darkness, to reveal what they cannot reach. They gasp in relief in their final consumption and what little guilt you have evaporates with the reward you offer. They pay the price of blood and flesh to live forever in your power, to share your knowledge. They cannot die.