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I awoke slowly and carefully. Although, I was accompanied with the realization that fortunately I had not transcended my mortal coils and was under the dominion of some semblance of physics again.

My mind returned to reality, adapting to the sudden pressuring of gravity, the possession of sensations other than sight, the colorless stinging of cold air. I began to feel, trickling slowly back into my cognitive perception. I wasn't among the stars anymore, rather I was laid rigidly on the surface of my bed, eyes screwed shut, my back pressing down against soft fabric. I could feel thin arms and long legs and cloth covering those legs. However I didn't dare move, fearing it was another elaborate stage of the dream. So in silent apprehension I waited. I lay there for thirty minutes, I think. I don't know why I still had those dreams. Don't know what they're supposed to mean, or why I'm seeing them. But they were harmless enough. I liked to think they were reminders of the what-was, then the transition to now, and the uncertainty of the future. But for me, this was an incorrect comparison. For I knew my future. It was concrete and set in stone and nothing I do can alter it.

When I finally did move it wasn't of my own volition. A hand twitched in rare display of independent action, then it began to carefully crawl towards the woven sheets. I pulled them off my body and with crawling reluctant realization, My mind turned from dull post-dream musings to more immediate matters. I opened my eyes and looked around as much as I could without physically moving my body. The room I'm in is still the same boxy little thing, with pale featureless walls cloaked in shadow and sunlight streaming through the shutters of my window. But empty.

Good. Seems like the only thing that's changed is how I sleep at night.

I sat up with a surreal sensation, throwing a leg off my bed and stood up. I felt cold morning air and hard wooden boards beneath my legs, and I inhaled deeply through my nose. The air was clear and fresh today. I moved into my sparse little bathroom. Washed myself, performed the morning routine done millions of times before, and my eyes fixated on the lanky bald figure in the mirror. He was a frail looking man, cheeks permanently sullen deep into flesh, ebony skin stretched thin over his skeletal frame, marred with ancient scars and burns. And the absence of a shirt made his malnourishment more obvious. The outline of his rib cage jutting forward from its cramped prison, making protruding bulges of skin on his chest, while his stomach sank in a deep curving concave. I stared into my reflection, focusing on wide green eyes and I smiled. Solomon smiled back at me. I waved my left arm. Solomon waved his left arm as well. I stuck out my tongue childishly. Solomon copied my gesture but the thing in the corner didn't-

I paused. The playful little expression paused with me, then vanished.

Something had manifested in the far corner of my reflection. Half-oozing out of the dirty wallpaper, forcing its way through through cracks in ancient bricks, it sloughed down the side of the wall and into a large puddle that had the texture of viscous molten wax. I looked behind me and there was nothing there. When I looked ahead, the puddle had already grown. It was bubbling like boiling water, spreading slowly across the ground in the mirror. Suddenly it grew bulging bloodshot eyes, and when it met my gaze it swelled and began to snarl at the sight of me.

That primordial dread and terror deep inside me stirred and watched me in apprehension. I forced it back down with brutal unrelenting discipline, and met that things gaze again. It bubbled, then hissed, then whatever it wanted to do next there was no chance given. I raised my fist and smashed the mirror. I took in a deep breath, and I left the bathroom in silence. It took a while for me to realize I was bleeding until I tried going downstairs, only caring when I felt jagged pain tear through bony fingers. When I looked down, I was met with the sight of countless tiny shards of glass embedded into my crunched up fist, colored a stringy crimson.

I wrenched the reflective shards out one by one, now with a watercolor red to its jagged edges, and I threw the accursed little shards out the window. I'll deal with that thing later.

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Breakfast was flatbread and harvested Berries. Usually enjoyable, but today it was difficult to eat. That waxy puddle of hatred stared at me from my memory, and every bite or reluctant swallow threatened to resurge as vomit. I took in a deep breath, steadying my stomach. It took longer than it should have, but I forced my breakfast down. When it was done, I looked out the window. Dawn was here, but the sun had not fully risen just yet. Instead it crawled slowly over the horizon and with its approach the sky was set alight with bright orange, and the emulsified streaks of sugary white clouds became a gentle red. I bandaged my hand and went out the back door onto my front porch. The flowers of my crudely dug porch were in season today, blooming and reaching with petal hands into the morning sky. They were a new little hobby of mine, taken up a year ago. Maybe if they're lucky, I might water them. But for now, my attention was focused on the peculiar disk sat down on the soft earth. I moved to my little sundial, and sat down on the loamy earth observing it. The time was 6 AM roughly. I felt a sudden flare of pride that my hypothesis, no matter how glaringly obvious, was correct. In mild victory-driven Jubilance I dared to look eastward, making eye contact with the rising red sun. We stared for a few moments, until it pulsated and fractal patterns began to dance before my eyes. I averted them, blinking away the sun blindness.

Well, there wasn't much to gain sitting down. I had much to do today. Already my mind was visualizing it all, drawing up a list of chores. Tend to the monuments, harvest the crops, strengthen the barrier, make dinner, then kill the thing in the mirror. I stood up with a slow deliberate aching of the hip, rubbing my eyes to return my sight to normal. Stupid move. Now there was dirt in my eyes. Sheepishly I cleaned myself up while silently scolding myself for my little act of carelessness. With a grinding sensation I swiveled to behold the destitute little house I called home. In another time and place it was made entirely out of wood. But it was susceptible to the elements and it wasn't the nicest aesthetic choice. So it been rebuilt using Adobe brick instead, with wood only composing the roof. Personally I think it looks better like this. Standing adjacent was my garden. The first seeds were planted centuries prior. Now it had become a vibrant forest, unchecked and wildly growing in all directions, digging its roots into the foundations of the house. The whole thing conflicted; natural thesis and man-made antithesis, crashing together in an insane unplanned synthesis. It shouldn't have worked, and yet it did. If anything it looked idyllic. I felt a calm aesthetic sense of serene peace by living here. But I wasn't here to watch. It was time for chores.

I started with harvesting my crops. I made my way into the garden, weaving between towering trees and grasping hedges of brambles, until I found them. In a wide circular acre was an Artificial clearing, in which lay a field of wheat, ripe and brittle, ready for the harvest. I got to work, harvesting the seeds by hand with a bowl. Only harvested some for now, but by the time I was done, the sky had turned from fiery orange to a pale yellow. I placed the bowl inside my little shack and headed for the monuments. It was a long trek across the width of the valley, tiring and lonesome like it always was. At least it allowed me to wonder at the landscape in its full beauty. On each side I was surrounded by towering hills and mountains, together forming a vast forested canyon with sharp cliff edges and wide grassy plains. An affluent ran across the grassland ahead, dipping into small caverns and branching into child streams at random, meeting together to across the largest stream which formed a great ocean somewhere in the far distance.

And beyond the rolling grassy hill I was on, past streams and dotted blue ponds, chiseled into the sloping faces of the tallest mountains was the monument. Spanning across the width of almost three of the colossal plate protrusions, the monument wasn't dedicated to a single monolithic cause. Rather it was fashioned as an insane conglomerate of ideas and images collectively determined by my subjective judgement as Humanity. Or at least what I could remember of my species. From below I took a few seconds to stare in wonder at the work that took hundreds of years to chisel out, like a child at a funfair. The crude visages of thousands of individual humans stared back, with their eyes the size of heads, lips spanning bodies curled up into frozen smiles. Over the years I've modified the mountains to the point where they more resembled intrusive batholith.

I made my way to the foot of the colossal monolith, where a carved arcade and a featureless stairway lead up higher to the mountain. I cambered up those stairs with expert precision, and got to work. I defined the many human visages etched into the regolith. Perfected the crude imitations of ancient art. Added some extra lines to the reproductions of half-forgotten poetry. Some priceless quotes about Horsemen in a suicidal charge. It was easy at first but soon my joints started to ache under the strenuous labor and as the sky turned wispy yellow to baby blue, the sun began to strike blazing hot fists down on my back. Relentless in its attack, I cringed from the sunlight, suddenly missing the cool loamy ground blanketed in the shadow cast by the monolith.

I did my best to ignore the heat and devoted my undivided attention on the largest and most significant section of the monument. Emblazoned beneath the titanic visages and the words of dead men was a sprawling mural. Already I had worked on it prior, with flowing illustrations already completed. It began with humanity and the little blue planet in third orbit of a medium sized star that was its home. There was the evolution from ape to man, tribal drawings, the discovery of agriculture, the transitioning from tribes to emperors to Kings and Queens and finally to Presidents and Dictators. After the scribbles of Thomas Sankara and Einsteins equations, now only of cultural importance, and then, on the year 2004, the mural was marked with only one word. ANTUMBRICANE. The mural took a turn for the worse. Over the course of the next few years, the human race was consumed. Torn apart by hating storms, or drowned underneath floods of screaming, chittering things from some dark alternate reality, or consumed by the predators and Gods that flooded through the barriers of space.

Wish I could apologize to if any other people, be it human or something else, came across the mural and saw that I had left out some major battle or some dead genius. I don't remember much of that time, and I think out of some sense of horrified trauma I had repressed any clear memories of those formative years. It's been so long and so much had been lost, that for a long while I thought I didn't have to add anything else. Before I didn't know what to add to the mural after that, but now I had a good idea. Figuring I was the one who inscribed this all into the stone, spent hundreds of years etching the visages and the words until the mountain was turned into a monument, it was justified to do what I wanted next.

Today I was going to add myself.

Slowly and with the gentle care of an artist, I etched my face into the stone. It was imperfect, clumsy, but accurate enough. It would look relatively lifelike at a distance. It's not another stick drawing, atleast. The hours crawled by and I finished the giant self-portrait at last, then with haste scrambled down to the bottom of the mural, lungs heaving with strenuous effort, marred skin shining with sweat. Finally. I stared in silence up at the mural, and the mural glared back with faces set in stone. Slowly I sighed, and slumped my aching body against the fertile earth. Surrounded myself with the drudged up remnants of human civilization. I shut my eyes, but I didn't sleep.

No. I only needed to rest for a while. Just a little while.