A word you think is English, Nocturnalia, sketches that look like a reverie become dangerous. Creatures losing their minds. Swiggles and arrows like particles carried through the air. Nerve gas? Pollutant? But intentional. Some miasma in the air that makes creatures behave odd. Invisible. Or maybe you’re wrong and it describes something else.

No help at all.

You spend more time in a hidden hollow in the forest. Surrounded by the moss and lichen and pine straw. The soft cool spring of loam beneath your body. The forest mind running through the forest floor. Suppressing your cough. Staring up at the canopy, the woodpeckers and jays and warblers that stitch their way between. Waiting for the sound of the pale men. Waiting for the sound of the dark bird. Death seems like a dream, a puzzle you cannot solve. What will death be like in this maze?

Then the salamander creeps close and looks down into your hollow. Makes a low burbling sound. Turns to look back over its shoulder. Burbles again, facing you.

You don’t understand.

The salamander throws up all over you. Shock. Then, calm.

A light pink liquid, in that light, which seeps everywhere, holds you in place from surprise and some hidden quality you can’t describe. The liquid cools you. Feels like nothing. Feels like air throbbing against you, thickening and thinning to form-fit you. Smooth comfort. Spreading across your arms and your legs, and any reason to move fades from you.

You laugh, delighted. It smells of bubble gum. The smell of watermelon bubble gum! Which you used to buy when you could afford it. Chew it like food for hours. Fool the stomach.

Again, the salamander vomits, this time over itself, and you see the pink surround it, coursing like an organism. Traveling with purpose. Through the glaze across your eyes. The breathing through your skin that is not your skin. The salamander slides in beside you. A solid, a hefty weight. Its belly is distended as if full of young. Tight fit, and you now looking into its eyes as you both wait for the next thing.

Down in the pit of the hollow, so close to something so alien.

A shadow rises across the lip of the hollow. A familiar shape. The dark bird, the reptilian smirk of beak, the bloodshot eye you can imagine despite the dark. But you cannot even tense up against your second skin. Which breathes for you now as if you are covered in lungs or gills, feeding your body through the skin.