Hellhounds

There is neither sun nor moon in the sky, and the shifting arrangement of the starlike lights above spells something so terrible about their true nature that you prefer to keep your eyes low, to the rotting bodies on the ground begging for a more permanent death. Running across this landscape, through hills of bones and slow-moving rivers of too-transparent water, you evade and pursue things designed as allegories to speed, hunger, and sharp teeth, your own flesh and instincts tuned to the scent of pain and the sounds of silent ambush. This goes on for a second and a hundred years.

And then you wake up, aching and sweaty, and you think yet again about killing yourself. You were told this could happen. The retirement of necronauts is plagued by nightmares, and the suicide rate approaches eighty-five percent.

Nostalgia weights you down as unfamiliar and oppressive as the beating of your heart.

.finis.