I had hoped death would be a blissful oblivion, but had all along suspected it to be a nightmare of consciousness presiding impotently over the living world, forever observing its suffering, forever escaping its nothing, a perpetual sleep paralysis that would render me but half awake yet fully down-pressed, submerged, and gasping for a breath, for a life I remain only too willing to relinquish.

Those ideas were so immaterial that they delivered only the barest thread that he could locate anywhere at all. Here, for instance, in this room of the past, in this time of elsewhere. In line with that paradox, he experienced despite his arrest a heightened fluidity of passage through the environment. His riveted body secreted some enzyme of reciprocal control, and Kullak began to know that whoever stilled his motion to rivet him there could not have failed more completely. For he felt a sudden, unexpected advantage.

The energies from that direction perfectly understood his turn of mind. Yes, it murmured, affirming itself among itself. The sound was a superposition of voices, an sibilant passage through his ear canal as it decomposed into its parts. It stirred him. She shadow surfeit, and I shadow grief, it said, stirring his being to attend the source against which his body stood averted.