I awoke to concrete, as normal. I don't like concrete. It's rough and doesn't seem like anyone should be walking on it. Most rocks - good, stable, solid rocks - are not rough like this, but get worn smooth over time. Concrete does not know the meaning of smooth, no matter how much you grind it down. It's soft too, by which I mean it's easy to break. You'd think these people would make their buildings out of something durable, like real stone. Not this synthetic crap that gives you blisters if you look at it funny. Even the Fire denizens treated me better than this.

Granted, these people use "shoes." I learned about them recently, they're for people who are incapable of walking around barefoot because they're too dainty and important to behave like normal people. Also because everything is made out of concrete, because this whole place was designed by lunatics.

It's a very big place. A lot bigger than I expected. I thought it was going to be some little pocket tucked away somewhere, but it's far bigger than anything I could conceive of. Me and some of my new friends found an atlas once - what passes for an atlas here - and it showed maps of great big swaths of areas, and then of great big swaths of smaller and smaller areas. Countries with names I couldn't read, a few important cities I also couldn't read. None of them were the city we were in. One of my friends tried teaching me the units of measurement. What a meter was, what a thousand of them meant. A kilometer - that "km" that I thought was one letter because these people's orthography is a joke just like everything else they produce - is the unit of distance the atlas used. From one city to another was tens of kilometers, sometimes hundreds or thousands. From one pole to the other (don't ask me what exactly a pole is but it has something to do with this world being a sphere) was over twenty thousand kilometers. Absolutely insane.

There was a lot of space people didn't use, called the ocean.

There was also a lot of other unused space that you could find just walking around, but this wasn't as mind-numbingly vast. I tried to ask whether people lived in the ocean, and I got mixed answers, but I later found out all those yesses were people misinterpreting my question as being about people living on the shore. I don't care about people living on the shore. There are no major human settlements in the oceans. That is absolutely insane.

I know I shouldn't be judging, but I do a lot of things I shouldn't be doing. I'm enjoying my newfound freedom. One of things I shouldn't be doing is sleeping on concrete. Or so I'm told. No one wants to offer me a bed or even a nice, available patch of dirt, though, so here I am. Me and a horde of other people who are similarly down on their luck, or maybe just disillusioned with the idea of material possessions, wealth, and full stomachs. I prefer to think about them as falling into the latter category; if we have a choice in the matter, then we look silly, but if we were forced into these conditions by extreme circumstances, then we just look sad. While tragedy has its place in the repetoire of every able playwright, I'd rather be whimsical than a sob story.

People often think there is a sob story, on account of my scary appearance. My ears were cut off, so the spaces where they were are just blank, bald spots on the top of my head with a bunch of scars. And my upturned nose is also seen by these people as hideous and weird. As well as the flaps of skin between my fingers and along my arms. They assume I won some terrible genetic lottery of deformation, or maybe I have bizarre form of cancer. When they're coherent enough to get a question through to me, I spell out "Chernobyl" and then they nod sadly, as if that explains everything, or anything at all.

I learned the "Chernobyl" trick from my friend Heather, who says it's a big disaster that happened in Russia when a nuclear powerplant exploded and irradiated everything. I don't really know what radiation is, and she couldn't explain it to me, but it causes genetic deformities apparently, and is also capable of providing electricity to lots and lots of people. Electricity is this place's form of magic. It's not confined to hearts or people, so it seems pretty useful, but no one's ever been able to explain adequately what it is or does. It lives in wires but you're not allowed to touch it, maybe because it's generated by radiation and can give your offspring birth defects. I'm not quite sure, but I do heed the warnings and stay away from live wires.

Anyway, Heather's pretty cool. She looks like she's a million years old, but she's only like forty. I can't tell her my old name, and I don't like the name the Fire Denizens gave me, so she gave me another name sign. It's just a diminuitive version of hers, though. So my name is kind of Also Heather. Or Heather Junior or something. Apparently there's a movie about three girls named Heather who do some cool and wonderful things. I haven't seen the movie, but she says it's good except the Heathers in question aren't deaf, so they use the English (the spoken language of this region) version of the name and not the correct, signed version, and also they're all girls. She says Heather isn't a gendered name though, especially not outside the context of English, so I shouldn't worry about being called Heather Junior. She says also that we need to find a third deaf person to name Heather, to complete our power-troupe. I would love to find a third deaf person and name them Heather Junior Junior.

Most of the people I find, I am told, are down on their luck, inconvenienced by circumstances beyond their control, or sometimes in their control and they're very regretful about it. Most of the people I find are completely incapable of speaking to me, and I have to rely on someone else to translate. I can read lips a little bit - it's a useful skill to pick up - but not when I don't know the language. Sure, I can get a vague idea of what's being said, but it's all a meaningless jumble of lip movements. Sounds like "L" and "O" are easy to identify, but for what? And do they have one L sound, like in my native language, or two, like I'm told the Fire language has? What if they have three or four? How am I supposed to identify whatever the hell a "G" is? It's for this reason I hate spelling things out. The only word I can spell out to any degree of success is "Chernobyl," only because I've done it so many times.

After waking, my usual routine was to wander, with the rest of the throng that lives in the abandoned supermarket (don't ask me what exactly a supermarket is), to the soup kitchen a few blocks down, and loiter in line until a devout Christian tiredly scoops something red and nutritious until a single-use styrofoam bowl for me. I don't know what I'm eating - Heather's explained to me concepts like "tomatoes" and "beef" but it's a little too much for me - but it's filling, and decently tasty, so I don't mind. Sometimes my deafness is a complication, and the people will ask me something to which I'll have to shrug dumbly and gesture to my lack of ears. They like to repeat themselves after this for some reason. When this fails, they gesture, rude imitations of words that sometimes get half their point across. Maybe it has crossed people's minds to hire an interpreter, but these places are charity, and can't afford to waste money on services only a handful of people will use.

Today I did not go to the soup kitchen at all. There had unfortunately been a murder. And, unfortunately, the victim was Heather, lying on the street corner in a pool of blood, with large fragments of her skin flayed.

It's hard to describe. Everything felt empty suddenly, and nothing felt real. I had dealt with tragedy of this scale before, actually of a far grander scale, the immolation of my entire people, but this brought everything back to the forefront in such a way that my consciousness had to sit at the back of my mind as I sat and stared and did nothing. I didn't move. Once or twice someone tried to get my attention, but it was all useless. My mind was numb and blank, save for images of the countless dead, and the dead in front of me. I wondered if anyone would mourn her, or mourn them. My world collapsed briefly.

But only briefly.

Sahhas and Russur found me eventually. Two of the Ancients, blackbloods born long ago due to other prophecies less consequential than the one we grapple with now, staples of time immemorial, with special powers of their own. I've met them a few times. I didn't like them very much, mostly because they didn't have a high opinion of Tsulluts.

"What do you want?" I barked, the tension making my movements choppy and the grief making everything incomprehensibly fluid.

They looked to each other, because they had no idea what I was saying. They spoke the Dark language, and they spoke it. We didn't have any signed language, because there was hardly any light to see signs by. If you were deaf, you might as well go fuck yourself. Maybe there was some system in place to help you. Probably not. I certainly hadn't heard about one. They began talking at me, uselessly, as if they couldn't see that I couldn't hear them, or maybe as if they didn't know anything about me.

I turned around so that I didn't have to see them standing over my friend's dead body, now being visited by swarms of flies. They didn't seem to mind the sight or stench of it, but maybe they're too old to care about death. Death is something entirely different to them, I know. Tsulluts is still alive after being killed, so logically the same should apply to them. Maybe they'd stumbled upon their own decaying corpses enough times that nothing could phase them.

I watched over my shoulder, with morbid curiosity, as Sahhas began to pick at Heather's body, paying special attention to the patches of skin, or rather, to the patches of non-skin, where her weathered exterior has been shorn away with a clean and sharp blade. Remarkable, the efficiency. Even I had to give the killer that.

I turned around to demand "Why are you even here?" A phrase they could not parse the words of and yet probably understood perfectly. Russur chose to respond, but he responded orally, and thus was totally useless. I collected a few scattered syllables from his rapid speech, but it didn't do me any good. Imagine writing a sentence with most of the letters missing. Complete hogwash. Understanding the Fire language was easier, with their wide mouths and hissing consonants, but the Dark language - which I hadn't encountered but once since I lost my hearing - was completely foreign, despite my best efforts.

I felt very far away. This was not my home. My home was gone. My home crumbled around me. What was I doing here?

Hiding.

Obviously.

I was hiding in some far-flung corner of a world completely divorced from my own, from all the others that have ever existed. It wasn't even a fun fantasy land, it was terrible and miserable despite my best attempts at levity, and now my friend was dead. My friend who gave me my name, a name I could actually say rather than that broken "Heddeh" which needed a tongue unless you wanted to say "He-eh," which I didn't, because that was a kind of guano from brown bats that we used to fertilize our mushrooms. A noble material, sure, but not as a name. That was not my name and I was not going to say it anytime I wanted to pronounce my name. I liked my name more in the sign language Heather taught me: two fingers in my right hand pointed left, thumb tucked, swiped over the top of my head and then down to my right shoulder. "Heddeh" is two syllables that I can't say. This is something I can really savor, add a little hair flip in there for dramatic effect. It's a dramatic name, and I can enjoy it. I can take forever saying it if I'm really feeling it. I can put all my weight into it in a way I never could with my voice.

Living here hardly feels like hiding when the alternative is being with those stuffy and insufferable Fire denizens, who would parade me around in the finest silks and act like I was an object. Everything is terrible here, but I'm free, and I have a better name, so who cares?

I care, I suppose.

Sahhas and Russur tell me some more things I fail to here, and I ask them a slew of questions they can't understand, and eventually Russur pulls out his stylus and makes some indentations into the floor. It's not soft or pliable, so it takes the messages poorly, but the concrete is far more giving to the braille-like identations of the Dark language than a normal rock would have been. You win this round, concrete. Useless fucking rock.

I haven't understood the Dark language in so long. Not that I'd completely forgotten, I just didn't have the opportunity. Trying to read it was difficult, like swimming as opposed to walking. The messages were crude anyway, to my benefit:

"Tsulluts is looking for you.

We don't know where she is.

She may be dead.

Zel-whatever is also here.

Looking for you.

He killed Tehhet."

Tehhet, another one of the Ancients, specifically one of the circle that Sahhas and Russur count themselves members of, but he's not nearly as lucid as they are. He's so old he mostly loses himself to his primal impulses. It doesn't help that his domain, the thing which his black blood manifests as, is primal impulses. I didn't realize he could be killed. Or that he was here.

I had a lot of questions then, but Russur didn't pass me the stylus. I gestured at it, made grabs at it, but he looked at me like I'm a toddler after a mug of beer. Did he not realize I'm just as capable of thought as he is? I wanted to strangle him, save for that that would be impossible and counter-productive.

They left quickly enough, and left me to my grief, which consumed me again quickly enough.