Lull

He is often now between places. The gaps wider, the walks longer. Fatigue is absent; blocked out by a shield of muscle, callus, and a terrible impetus. Even grief's leaden weariness is fading, its crust has made him inure. Drained of the fluid of empathy, at first he benefited from an efflorescence of apathy, but it has degenerated into a loathsome grime, a patina of fear.

He often wakes and is still walking. Rest is beyond his volition, automated, overseen by the power impelling him. He does not dream, and his waking memories are garbled by an ubiquity of horror and the confusion of peripheral omniscience. Everything so fragmented that he suspects he is skipping through time, inchoate.

But there are idyllic lulls when he is between places. A high meadow jubilant with so much clean, open air. A nestled hollow in a wooded gulch, evocative of his halcyon cloh. He will stop, void of urge, and breathe, and listen, and feel, for a while. Sensing nothing artificial, the strict conditions of ecology, he speculates that this is the last god's last ambition.

Then a stir of discontent murmurs in his empty stomach. No. The creations of men. All the made things burning, unmade. Destroyed! Murdered! Razed!

And when all the makers are gone?

Silence, a lull. He walks on. The world is vast. There are many empires still.