The world was limitless. Those people who thought science had uncovered all the secrets of the world were blind to potential and cut off from the mysteries of the universe. The Crow was an open mind. He could accept and therefore receive the benefits the natural world had to offer him. He’d evolved into a focal point of natural power.

Those who’d call him insane – the small people – had had their senses dulled by electronic gadgets, screens, machines to keep them fit, machines to measure their fitness, machines to read books from, the list was endless. He was raw, real and untainted. He had a mobile phone, of course – sometimes you had to adopt common necessities to function and fit in – but he saw such accessories for what they really were: a conductor that drained humankind’s base energy.

Better armed this time, The Crow had a handgun in one pocket and doubled up by taking a butcher’s knife from the block in the kitchen. The farmer might be in his mid-sixties, but he’d spent a lifetime working on the land and was still likely to be strong and, perhaps more of a threat, unafraid. The farmer’s shotgun was in a cabinet in the hallway, stupidly visible from the lounge window; although he did at least bother to keep it locked.

A bang from upstairs took him by surprise. He froze, tipping his head to get a better location on the noise, summoning all his considerable new senses, sniffing the air for anything he might have missed. A scent that seemed not to fit, items abandoned that indicated the presence of a person other than the farmer, who wasn’t married and had no children, the reason for that as plain as the hideous scarring on the farmer’s face. Also, he suspected, the reason the farmer had attempted to flee this world before his allotted time on many occasions in the past.

Burn victims were cruelly treated by society. The staring, constant rejection, the polarisation between everything society plugged as perfect and the reality of looking in the mirror. The Crow could understand how hard it was, but not forgive. Animals didn’t sit around feeling sorry for themselves, wishing they could die. They foraged, hunted, killed, fed, mated, irrespective of how they felt at any given moment.

They strove. That was the right word.