Something changed. What first was there, suddenly wasn't anymore. Or had it never existed in the first place?

Now there is nothing, only the feeling that something's missing. Like it's too cold, too silent, and that the walls around him are too hard, too solid. It is supposed to be soft and bendable, warm and comforting, he knows it was before. But before what? He feels out of place, like he doesn't belong here. He misses what there was before, but he can't remember what it is that he misses. There isn't enough. There's nothing but him, he's alone.

Suddenly, something happens, something exists, besides the nothing. It moves beside him, in the endless darkness, and causes the sloshing, stirring and forming of currents.

It's where he is but at the same time it isn't. It replaced him. It replaced the nothing but at the same time it didn't. What is it? Who had begun existing beside him? But is it a someone? Or is it just a phantom, a figment of his imagination, or delusions caused by a centuries long solidarity? Maybe it isn't a someone but a something?

Suddenly, a dark surrounding wetness enters his being, causing his core to retract. And making a weird throbbing sensation erupt in his being. He feels a foreign opening, high on his body, open and close rapidly. He needs something but what is it?

The wetness -that he can somehow identify as tasting bitter- enters the weird opening he can now recognize as his mouth. It streams down his unwilling throat and pluggs his ears. Pain erupts in his chest and itches on the inside of his ribs.

The need for something that could take it all away and give him back the black nothingness -without any pain or discomfort to be had- made him move the weird appendages he could now recognize as limbs.

He squirms and kicks, only for the pain to worsen. He tries to find a grip on the hard walls around him but it's as if there is a veil keeping him separated from the outside, as his hands keep slipping away in slime and gunk.

He lifts his hands in a weak attempt to stretch the tight cocoon around him, but nothing happens. He tries to pierce the wall by pressing his fingers forward in a gathered rough point. He presses his fingers into the wall as hard as he can but it doesn't work. He's trapped.

Mind blank and with nothing else left to try and do to escape, his uncouncious provides sounds that leave his throat on instinct, in sharp chirps and gluttoral screaches, but they're heavily muffled by the goop surrounding him and still filling the inside of his mouth and throat.

Slowly his thoughts start to slow down and he's dimly aware of his hands and feet having stopped moving as have his legs and arms. His chest no longer hurts as the goop seems to have succesfully infiltrated every crook and crevice of his body, filling him with a weird numbness. And everything has becomes quiet.

Silence and nothingness encompass him all over again.

Just as he feels the soft throb of his heart stuttering in his chest, sharp spikes pierce his skin and he's roughly pulled upwards through a hole in the cocoon that hadn't been there before.

His body is still unresponsive but, as the crown of his head meets an icecold emptiness in the alien empty space above, his heart starts and it makes yerking movements in his chest. Still, as the rest of him breaches the surface he doesn't move -can't move- and he only hangs limply from the tight grip on his arms as he's dropped to the ground and roughly rolled over to his back.

He's still can't move, and also remains otherwise unresponsive, as a shadow of what he thinks is a face hovers above his own. The shadow is gone as soon as it came and he's left with a feeling of imense cold as it dissapears.

Quickly though, the shadow returns but this time, instead of above his head, it appears above his chest. He doesn't get the time needed to enjoy the warmth of the shadow, he can feel spreading along the lenght of his left side, as a heavy weight is suddenly pushing down onto his frail ribs. It feels as if his lungs are being flattened by the pressure and, as the same pain he felt when he was still burried in the goop starts to burn and scratch at the inside of his ribs, he's turned over to his side, away from the warmth.

As if the wall that was holding it back got broken down, bitter fluid starts gushing out of his mouth and throat and he shudders as the foreign feeling of needing to breath is finally met with air.

When the gushing of fluid slows down to a dribble and then finally stops completely, he is lifted up from the ground by the same hands that turned him over to his side. How he knows? He isn't sure, since wherever he looks things are blurred and hazy.

He's stopped from thinking further on it, however, as the air entering his lungs seems to cool considerably and the hands holding him suddenly let go.