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Your New Hell

Summary:

Thinking about five minutes longer than the Narrator did about the implications of a world without death.

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The first iteration of the world without death makes any torture you endured in the Cabin look miniscule in comparison. And none of it enacted upon you or the now-gone Echo, who might deserve it as this new horror's architects—enacted instead on the people the Echo had kept ignorant while he twisted their fate in your shadow.

As the Den warned you, it was only death that brought surcease from certain types of suffering. Some, you could rescue the mortals from—if a voice or two cried out in prayer from the depths of a tunnel collapse, it was an easy thing to free them. For others, though, you could picture no route to freedom.

Nearly all food was made of living things, which now could no longer die. Many creatures, uncaring or unable to adapt, simply put others to torment, to be eaten alive and digested and scattered cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, harrowed consciousness still clinging to what remained.

Cells could not die, instead building and building within a body, the line between cancer and organ cell blurred. Nothing newly born now developed the way it had before—the webbing between fingers could not die off, neurons could not prune, and some mortals gave birth to wads of flesh and hair and fingernails, incapable of living a life but riddled with it all the same.

Infections reigned. There was no killing them now, and they had no way to kill their hosts. So now people lived even if their feathers had fallen out, their flesh formed into fistulas, their lungs too full to draw breath.

When you figured out how to give your false death to the mortals, to let them "die" and be reborn healthy in some other place, that aided them some. Finally, creatures could eat dead flesh and plant matter that was left behind, could purge infections and send the germs and fungi off to colonize some place outside them. Could renew themselves after deathlessness had taken its toll.

But the Echo had torn you and the Princess apart too roughly. For all he'd put amnesia into his plan for the new world, it was she who'd had the ability to induce it, not you.

How much could they forget?

Nothing.