You wake up, sprawled upon wet stone. Utter silence blankets everything around you, and your memory of yesterday comes up blank. What was yesterday? Faint lights on the horizon, in all directions. You can see shapes around where the light illuminates. Your footsteps echo, and, suddenly aware of the vastness of this space, your breathing shortens. What are those low chords humming in the air? After even just a few minutes of total silence, the mind begins to make up sounds to hallucinate. You investigate one of the light sources, and find it describing a small tower, with an entryway and a few stories of single rooms. The interior of the tower glows a creamy yellow, which reflects the damp, stony material of its exterior. In all the towers near this one, you see the same configuration of window-holes and door-holes, all empty and bearing the exact same bumps and imperfections. How much time has passed? Is this one of those dilated fever states in between waking and sleeping? Where's the way out? You notice it first by the shadow it casts behind one of the endlessly repeating towers: A thin figure hovers wraithlike, its face (a purple wiry color) angled towards you. You greet it tentatively. You're close enough; might not want to get any closer. The wraith responds, exhuming stories of faceless names clairvoyantly. Excited, you listen to its incomprehensible counsel. Are these answers? We are all larvae, says the wraith. We are the progenitors of the larvae. We are not the larvae. Larvae never existed, says the wraith, looping around and cancelling its narrative yet again. The story forms into a horse shape, each thread of contradiction a highly elliptical hair, or sometimes even a retelling of its oblong face. The horse had no nostrils. But your mind is water, and the wraith's tale dissolves into it like sugar. Your sweetened eyes contract in their focus on the figure, now unable to discern anything on the periphery. You ask the wraith how this situation has happened. And then it disappears, wailing upwards towards some heaven and returning to hover closer to you than it was before. An amorphous object covered in waving opaque white antennae squirms in the wraith's grasp. The wraith asks you to listen closely, so you bend your ear towards the white creature and hear its message: A long strand of of permutations, boiling the water in your mind and swaying you back and forth. Your muscles ache of fatigue, bent into this strange listening posture. You flinch, almost falling down. The antennae sting your cheek like nettles during their swift return to the heavens, carried angellicaly by the wraith. Why are you here? The darkness persists, and you need to get out. There was something before all this, and then you grab onto the wraith when it descends from heaven. Take me, you know the way out of here. The wraith refuses to float, and its horsetail purple wires dig into your skin, birthing blisters onto you. A quick blink of your pupils distorts your vision as you suddenly snap into rage. The wraith does not fly you to heaven, so you beat it with your fists. Pain flares across your knee when your knuckles make contact, cutting through the air where the wraith once was. Opening your pain-grimaced eyes, you see the inside of a tower, and instinctively look around. On the periphery of your vision, the windows and doors all melt away, leaving no exit and sealing up space.