Old Man, New World

[Amos]

The older man did not realize immediately that he was back in the physical plane. No, that awareness came much later. He wandered through the streets of the city he didn’t know, waiting for the massive buildings to fade into nothingness as they normally did. Eyes accustomed to not truly seeing didn’t grasp the clarity of reality nor did ears that had been deafened by static for what had to have been centuries. No, it was the scent that made him realize it.

The rot and decay of the shadows was not the same rot that was had here. It was the idea of brokenness and ruin, not the actual process. There was not the stench of old food and waste in the other place.

When the smell first hit his nostrils, it made the old man wretch and heave. And then the laughter started which made the retching even worse. He knew he must have been a sight of madness, naked and heaving and laughing uncontrollably, but the image just made his reactions even worse. Finally he managed to settle himself and he took a moment to gather his wits.

The world around him was real. He was real. Somehow, he was back in the world. He knew time had passed but there was no real way to account for how much. There would be answers to that soon enough though. For right now, the hunger that he had been able to ignore for what felt like millennia because there was no way to sate it demanded to be dealt with. He would do it gracefully though. No reason to be a monster.