There was no time to react. One moment I was scrambling to hide beneath an illuminated umbrella of greenery, the next I was swept off my feet and into the air, a viselike grip squeezing my rib cage into my lungs, the assault as sudden as it was terrifying. Helpless and frightened, I bellowed a bloodcurdling scream yet uttered no sound, my mouth filled with goo …

No, not goo, it was a tentacle!

Oscar?

SILENCE.

The searchlight followed us as we moved through the trees, two of the cephaloped’s tentacles wrapped snugly around my waist and legs, the others grappling for vines and branches. Crashing through curtains of leaves, Oscar dropped in a dizzying, stomach-churning free fall into darkness—and then we stopped.

Oscar released me just long enough to pin my back against the trunk of a tree. Splaying its head and tentacles, it blanketed my body, its flesh changing colors, camouflaging us with a cluster of thick surface roots amassed around the moss-covered base of a two-hundred-foot sequoia.

I could feel my guardian struggling to control its gasps. My own breaths were somewhat stifled, my face covered by a semiporous sheath of stretched tentacle skin.

Breathing, escaping, awakening … none of it was important. Wrapped head to toe in the cephaloped’s embrace, my only priority was to manage the building waves of euphoria that were causing my body to shake uncontrollably as every square inch of my being was submerged in what felt like a pool of pure energy. My cells cavitated, the neurotransmitters in my brain rapid firing as if touched by the hand of God.

Thankfully, ABE stepped in. Channeling the onslaught of echolocation, my bio-chip recalculated my brain waves on the fly even as it escorted my mind’s eye on a journey through another sea of consciousness that melded the cephaloped’s consciousness with mine.

Oh … my.

Through an emotion-laced prism I stole a glimpse inside my host and discovered my soul … and Oscar’s soul … and the redwood’s soul—each a spark of purity that bound every life-form that existed, had existed, and will ever exist not only to a higher power but also to one another. Call it the soul, call it energy … what I saw, what I experienced was the essence of creation—love without pretense, giving without receiving—a marrow of caring so honest and perfect it defined selflessness.

It no longer mattered whether I was asleep or awake, dead or alive. In this one brief moment of clarity I had resolved the meaning of life, the very reason for us being—and this simple simplistic understanding stripped evil of its purpose and boiled hatred and greed and corruption down to its naked truth. I saw the Creator’s essence in its design and I wept, my newfound wisdom setting me free, robbing death of its impact; revealing the soul’s immortality.