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You slowly come to realise you're looking down at your body lying face-down in the snow.
Obviously, you are hallucinating again. How real this out-of-body experience feels is irrelevant: you have ingested something you really shouldn't have and that's that. No matter how many times it seems you have died, no matter how decisively you remember rattling out your final breath, it can never have happened because there is simply nothing after death. There is no such thing as ghosts. There is no such thing as souls. There is—
The next moment, you are lying on the grass surrounded by flowers. There isn't so much as a hint of winter in the air.
You do your best not to look at either the mangled corpse at your feet or the apparition hovering before you as you prepare the emergency cure.
You try not to think about just what that cure entails even as your hands work furiously to twine the grass around the spider gland. It defies all logic and reason, and so if you begin thinking now, you just might stop, and then Willow might...
She is already dead.
You shouldn't have checked for a pulse. Why did you check for a pulse? When will you finally learn to leave well enough alone?
Fuelling the heart feels like being stabbed. That hardly matters, because a few moments later Willow is standing before you alive and well and with a beating heart in her chest. The vision of horror you witnessed has been reduced to nothing but a pile of bones next to her.
"Crap. That hurt." Willow works a crick out of her neck and then nods at you. "Thanks."
You nod back, your relief overshadowed by the terror you feel at the sudden realisation that perhaps for all your conviction that science trumps all, there's a chance everything you know about life and death is wrong.
"What do They want from us?"
It takes you a moment to realise you've spoken out loud. You look away from the tent you're mending — sewing or suturing, your hands know what they are doing without constant supervision — and stare instead at the fire that tonight is merely for warmth rather than light.
Maxwell gives you the same look he always does when you ask questions, a kind of sneer as though he cannot believe he now relies on you for his survival. Finally, he turns his attention towards the full moon which he claims is no moon at all.
"If I knew that, pal, don't you think I would have already given it to Them?"
As soon as you have built a fire and thus shielded yourself from the night, you begin gutting the fish you caught moments earlier with expert efficiency. How many times have you done something like this by now? How old are you now, exactly? What year is it? How much longer will you remain trapped here?
Both your thoughts and hands come to a halt as you peel away the fish's skin and see what's underneath it.
A mass of wriggling white worms writhe where the fish's flesh should be.
You drop the knife in alarm and back away. The exposed worms slowly begin crawling out of the ruined fish, revealing only more of their kind beneath them. It's clear what you anticipated would be your dinner has already been devoured a long time ago.
Despite the wave of nausea which makes it hard for you to pick up your spear and do what you can to ensure the fish and its parasites end up in the flames before the worms can spread further, a part of you coolly wonders how you even managed to hook something so obviously long dead.
You pause in your sewing and raise the needle to better catch the light. It's thick — it has to be to pierce waterproofed fabric — and its tip glints in the false moonlight.
You drive it into your finger without a second thought, then squeeze the flesh even as you're still wincing from the sting of it. You study the single drop of blood which wells up from the wound.
Is it actually still blood, you wonder.
"I think They are fungi."
For once, the look Maxwell gives you is less contemptuous and more bewildered. "What?"
"There's a type of tropical fungus..." You snap your fingers as you do your best to recall the details Wickerbottom shared with you on a long sleepless night you spent watching the fire with her. "Yes, Cordyceps unilateralis. They infect ants and alter their brains so that they leave their nests and attach themselves to leaves until they die. That's how they spread their spores."
The look on Maxwell's face makes it clear he thinks you have lost your mind. As if he's any judge of that.
"Think about it." You realise as you gesticulate that you've lost the needle somehow, but that's not important now. "They've infected us and altered how our bodies and minds function. That's why it seems like we never die! We can withstand what no normal human could! Each of our supposed deaths have been hallucinations caused by brain parasites! They have to keep us, the hosts, alive, so that they can spread themselves to..."
Well. There's the snag in your theory. You assume Them intend to spread themselves to the Old World, but then, they seem perfectly content to keep you trapped in the Constant.
"I will say this," Maxwell begins slowly. "For you, that is an exceptionally imaginative theory."
"They must want something from us."
"Undoubtedly, yes."
"And..." You shudder without meaning to. The prick on your finger begins to throb. "I remember what it felt like sitting on the Throne." You have mercifully forgotten most of it, but the impression of choking on shadows clogging up your veins will never leave you. "If they can use us like that..."
"And that makes them fungi to you?" The look Maxwell gives you is exceptionally cold. "You should keep your asinine notions to yourself."
You fall silent and decide on the spot you'll be deaf to everything Maxwell says to you for at least a week.
Still. Whether he's willing to listen to you or not, you can't help but stare at what you once believed was the moon and wonder. There has to be a purpose to all is. If you keep thinking about it, perhaps you'll eventually find it.
"If the moon here isn't really a moon," you finally say, the words once again slipping out on their own accord, "what's the sun?"
Maxwell says nothing in response. He merely shifts where he sits and frowns at the sky as though hoping to somehow see the sun behind the eerie blue glow of the monster lurking above you.