Strangest, after some time, you heard a voice - then several voices. The first voice you recognised was your own, complaining in your throat. You croaked and mumbled to yourself. Then, other voices around you. Groaning a low time grinding throb and underpinning the strange, far-off melodies you could hear - faintly.. towards the planet’s centre.

The pain around your eye worsened. Other bodies slipped slowly by while you ground against bone - a boat against a rock in the river. Pain scorched you mute, deaf and blind.

Deeply and hard, you bit into a join of flesh. Blood flushed into your mouth and - intoxicated - you swallowed. Again you tore into the body before you, drinking and drinking and eating flesh.

You drank and ate until there was nothing more to take, and you knew the body before you was at last a corpse. But you, invigorated, moved on. Sliding sanguinely beneath the ruptured body, you slipped between less mobile seething waves of shallow breathers towards the sweeter sounds that sang softly to your ear - further in or further down.. you needed energy to climb with. You bit, you drank, you slid on.