Consciousness was, to Sagan, bucket in the hands of an indecisive person, reeled up into the light before being plunged back down into the dark well, over and over in a looping sequence. In the fleeting seconds where his consciousness waned in, he caught a shadow passing over whatever light source glared above his sealed eyelids. His forehead twitched, acknowledging.

A person must have been standing over him, his lethargic mind registered. A person neither tall nor broad enough to completely eclipse the light as he or she bent over him. They traded no words, but Sagan could feel the figure's silent examination.

"There is no reason for you to pretend to be asleep, you know," a woman's voice echoed in his head, vaguely familiar. A small groan rumbled in the orkhus's dry throat, limbs beginning to fidget slightly.

"Just a minute, Mom."

"I'm not your mother, you twit."

Something slick and cold suddenly plopped onto his arm, shocking Sagan out of his languor. His eyelids flew open, only to be met with a sight so hideous that the likes of which he had never seen before. It was a grotesque brown face, wrinkled like a nut, with a jagged crack of a grin that ran from one ear to the other... at least, where the ears would be on an orkhus. Its scalp was smooth as the crystal balls back home right down to the sides of its face, but murky as a defective one.

Oh gods, did that thing just touch me?

Sagan jerked his arm away with a yelp, almost falling off the wooden table he was lying on. The monster responded by screaming bloody murder.

Its shriek was accentuated with a high, girlish trill. The abomination leapt backward, before clawing at its visage with its small hands. With a flick of the wrist, it ripped its disproportionately large face straight off — an act that nearly tore Sagan's own heart out in shock.

Just like that, Sagan felt very stupid.

The face that gave him a momentary scare now dangled limply in a little girl's hand, harmless and perfectly, irrefutably, wooden. A petite oblong face replaced the terrible apparition that had frightened Sagan out of his wits, housing round hazel eyes that glared at him with indignation. Crude clothing made out of plant fibers were slung around her lithe body, leaving her navel exposed. She put her hands on her hips, leading Sagan's sight down to it.

In place of where the legs should be on a bipedal creature, she had a long, thick tubular appendage that coiled around her in an almost serpentine manner. Sagan blinked, once, twice, trying to ascertain what he was seeing. Never in his life had he seen a caecilian stygenian in person — not because of his own ignorance, but because of their isolation.

Without any warning, an onslaught of gibberish gushed out of the girl's lips, at a rate too fast for his mind to even process individual words, even if he would have understood none of it. His face turned vacant, like a dolt, unsure how to respond.

Like an ever-helpful genie, 'Mom' translated for him.

"She's saying that you surprised her with your sudden screaming, and asking you if that's really the way you'd treat your savior after she fished you out of that wreck next to the smoking big black rock surrounded by the Primeval Flames when nobody else even noticed you were there, half-alive. In addition, she also almost mistook you for a giant piece of ancient crocodile manure due to your muddy state and your dull natural coloration, but she took it upon herself to take a closer look to make sure because who knows if it was something important that came from the sky along with the smoking big black rock. Oh and also, you scream like a little girl."

"Would it kill you to pause between those words?" Sagan mumbled to the disembodied voice.

"I was just giving you an accurate representation of what the girl was saying. Even for the standards of her kind, she speaks pretty fast," the invisible woman argued. "And it is worth noting that I, apparently, exist only in your head. If you'd like to retain the facade of sanity in front of people, it's best that you keep our conversations confined in your mind."

As the feminine mind parasite said, the little girl was, sure enough, looking at him with the most perplexed look upon her features. She tilted her head slightly to the left, knitting her brows together in a thoughtful expression. Lifting a hand the color of the cloudy swamp waters, she pointed at her chest.

"Sunji. Find. You," she said in broken Orkhese, with an accent so thick and barbarous that Sagan was forced to turn the entirety of his attention span to decipher what she was saying. Her syllables were enunciated slowly — almost painstakingly so — but with such a heavy emphasis on the consonants that it almost sounded as if she was coughing out something in the back of her throat.

The girl named Sunji folded her arms in front of her, jutting her chin upwards with a smug smile on her face. "You. Welcome."

"Ah, um, thank you, I guess," Sagan stammered. "Thank. You," he added, hoping that the slow pronunciation should allow her to understand what he was saying.

Now that most of his senses had been reassembled, he noted the lack of a shirt over his upper body. His waist was wrapped tightly with a dressing of bound leaves that felt cold against his skin. Gingerly, he pressed a finger to it, feeling a dull throb underneath. His finger then ran to his forehead, feeling the same texture wrapped around his skull.

Sunji jabbed her index finger in his general direction. "Who?" she asked. Her little visage was scrunched up — brows, lips, and nose all pressed towards the center of her face — as if the mere effort of talking in Orkhese was a great exertion for her.

"Who?" Sunji repeated once more when it became apparent that it had completely eluded Sagan. She poked her finger into the air with some impatience. "Who? Who? Who?"

"I think the girl wants your name."

Ah, Sagan answered in his mind. It was the only one he could provide, pathetically minimal as it was. His head was a ravaged mess, a state of tangled chaos, where information overlapped with imagination, facts cartwheeled, and the nonsensical did pirouettes. The events transpiring from the moment light flooded his sight had been so absurd, so whimsical, that Sagan would not be surprised if he were to find himself awake from a bizarre dream within the next few seconds.

The question then became: where would he awaken? Onboard the airship, where everything was still well, and the world still made sense? Was reality where Kevin, Marie, Captain Nathaniel, and all the others still drew breath to laugh and converse with him another day?

And suddenly, Sagan recalled. The lifeless eyes, the broken bodies, and blood upon the marshes. Too real to have been a fleeting episode of fantasy. The recollection hit him like a punch to his injured gut, bringing about nausea and tears to his eyes. He clenched his eyes shut, hoping he could lie back down upon the table and let the darkness transport him back to a sensible reality. But the darkness only served to cause the pain-riddled memory of pushing debris to resurface, the memory of a friend's last, frightened plea of help — one that he'd failed to fulfill.

His eyes flew open, and Sunji's impatient face came into focus.

"Sunji," the little girl spoke, slapping herself in the chest with her palm. She marched straight towards Sagan, fearless, and jabbed her little index finger into his broad chest. It felt cold, wet, and slimy against his bare skin. "You. Who? Who?"

"Nicolaus Sagan," Sagan finally answered, with resignation. This was his reality, no matter how absurd it seemed. It was reality, and thinking otherwise was only wishful thinking. Hope had a bitter taste when unfulfilled.

"Ni... ni..." Sunji mouthed, her gaze darting upwards towards the ceiling. Her tongue slid in and out of her lips, moved in circles, reared up and down, in an effort to grasp how his name was supposed to be pronounced. Sagan watched with some fascination.

"Sa... gan... Sagan!" she cried, triumphantly.

Sagan nodded, a slight smile beginning to form on his face. This bald tribal girl was starting to be endearing, and quite adorable. Sunji laughed and clapped her hands together.

"Sagan! Sagan! Sagan!" she chanted, pleased to have gotten his name. Suddenly, her face broke out in a wide grin — that borderline terrifying grin that stretched from one side of the head to the other. A glint of mischief had ignited within her round eyes, one that sent chills down Sagan's spine like a bad premonition. Sunji leaned towards Sagan, forcing him to lean backward, uncomfortable with the sudden invasion of his personal space.

"Eo-kwe! Sunji find Sagan. Sunji keep Sagan!" she announced, ecstatic. "Finders keepers!"

"What?"

"Sunji say. Sagan do. Sunji find Sagan. Keep Sagan. Finders keepers," the girl explained in her terrible Orkhese, oblivious to Sagan's confusion. A terrible feeling began to seep into the orkhus, though he dared not begin to imagine what she might mean.

An exasperated groan suddenly echoed through his head, one of a woman's. "I think you have just entered a slavery contract with a stygenian child."

A- what? Sagan asked in silent surprise.

"A slavery contract."

Sagan paused to let that sink in. A smile began to stretch his lips. He shook his head slowly, marveling silently at the sheer ludicrousness of his situation. The smile did not reach his eyes, wide with a far-off look. Then, came a laugh. It started with a small chuckle, but gradually rose closer to hysteria.

It wasn't even funny. Nothing about this was funny. Yet Sagan laughed as if it was the funniest joke he'd ever heard in his life.

To him, anyways, the gods were making some mad joke out of the strings of fate.

"So," he said, more to himself than to Sunji or the invisible woman in his head. "My comrades are dead, I'm stranded in the marshlands, and now I have a mind parasite inhabiting my head. To top it off, I'm bound to slavery by a child who saved my life — not that I wanted to be saved in the first place, if I knew how things were going to turn out."

His laughter stopped, and he looked up into the dark, earth-colored ceiling, leaning back upon his hands.

Gods above, what sort of frivolous game are you all playing with my life?

"That's a tough question to answer," the feminine mind parasite replied. "It's more of a gambit on my part."

I was asking the gods, not you.

"Mortals! How easily you forget," the woman scoffed, in a tone that almost showed hurt. "I, too, was once included in your grand 'pantheon' of gods. Patron of your very race, no less! What is it you go by now? 'Orkhus' — 'to forget'. Apt name, I should say!"

Sagan sat upright hearing that. What?

Before the woman could answer, the wooden cottage door suddenly swung open.

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Chapter Writer: VeryBigMess

AN: That ending is just... ugh. Blegh.

So, I've got a question for all of you readers who have gotten this far, and are reading this at this very moment (yes, I'm looking at you). Who is your favorite character so far? And whose chapters do you enjoy the most (by this, I mean taking into account the voice, writing style, and whatever plot is generally going on in their chapters)? You do not have to answer this if you do not want to, it's just for... uhh, research purposes XD

Anyways, thank you so much for having gotten this far into the story! It means so much to us to know that you've been invested in this story right from the very beginning up to this point. I sincerely hope we won't disappoint you all!