Vision slowly faded from his mind, like mud being washed away in trails by a gentle, steady rain. Strange colours and shapes swirled, their mystery not in their form but rather in how they twisted and bent into one another. Their amorphous dance shifting through, between and around his mind as though they were the solid and he, the ephemeral, rather than the other way around.
In a moment of contrasting clarity and confusion, reality sharpened and focused on a shape slowly reaching toward his face. A hand. A claw and a paw, a beak and a tendril and everything all at once and never at all. It lifted and stroked his cheek with the caring touch of a mother and the cruel, grinding grasp of a tyrant.
After an eternal moment, it retreated, and he found himself looking into two black void eyes, all the more present and real in their absence.
A moment of crushing silence, the tension collapsing upon the flesh like a wave. The will giving way like the crippled wheeze of a beggar's breath.
"A deal? You shouldn't have."
The shaking of hands between two business partners. The clutching, desperate hold of two dying lovers. A choking, wretched promise in a quiet field of cold blood and dead bone.
A bargain.
"Yes." It came out as a desperate scream and a forlorn whimper, but the word never changed.
The two void eyes peered out at a point past his flesh but just before his soul.
A sacrifice was required.
"We are bounteous and generous in Truth, but a little more could not hurt."
A name was heard, and the man, the boy, the child took up the chant.
His name flew from the mouth like tongues of flame, burning up upon exit, leaving a sign of their passing but no evidence of their previous existence.
A name was chanted with the fervour of the flock and the promise of the sheepdog. The sound warping under his frail flesh-tongue, the soul trying to grasp it tight, to no avail.
The flesh thing continued to speak the sound, all meaning lost with the sputtering death of the synapses.
…
Silence spread through the void as the chorus came to a close. The deed was done, the act committed. There would be no returning from this. The price had been paid and now the gift had to be accepted.
"An acceptable trade, contractor/child/friend/us, may it be a mutually satisfactory forever."