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…the ringing in my ears gave way to waves as I opened my eyes, staggering before catching myself. Where - was - this wasn't where I fell asleep, this wasn't... I was forgetting so quickly. What was my - what had been its name?

The name "Rasamama S36" flared for my memory once, and then was gone.

What was it? It didn't matter.

I shook my head as the pain subsided, from sharp to dull, and breathed deeply as my balance settled in this new body. The air was thick with salt and the wind cut against my face was cold, a frigid - my mind supplied the word, somehow - hebridean wind.

"Dear 8ntq8u35e8. The gulls do not land here anymore; I've noticed that this year they seem to have shunned this place. Perhaps it's the depletion of the fishing stock driving them away. Perhaps it's me. When he first landed here, Donnelly wrote that the herds were sickly and their shepherds the lowest of the miserable classes that populate these Hebridean islands. Three hundred years later, even they have departed."

I let the words wash over me like the ocean wind as I stared off along the rocky coast ahead of me where I woke up on this stone inclined pier.

The words in my mind didn't come from me, they are not mine. They arrived the way dreams echo after you wake - distant, but intimate. Not language, but address. It wasn't addressed to me.

There was a beacon pulsing faintly at the summit of the cliffside to the left, red and indifferent. To trails branched off, one along the ricky beach, another up the cliffside.

I turned right, and now in front of me was an old, worn lighthouse. It was dead, clearly abandoned. Like a corpse, watched up on this shore. Like me, I supposed, and the thought gave me an immediate sense of kinship with the rotting building.

This wasn't the Wasteland, and I was starting to suspect that neither was 8tgprv3fenu20cr - but the strangest thing: it didn't feel alien. It felt like I'd been here before. Like I was meant to be here next. Should I be grateful I couldn't remember how I came here? The voice in my head was insistent in reminding me with its plaintive soliloquy.

I don't know if I'm awake yet. I don't know if this is a dream nested in another, or if the waking part was always a lie. But I'm here, and a glance behind me reveals nothing but empty waves and a shattered rotting wooden paddle boat grinding against the waves.

The rotting husk of the ruined lighthouse in front of me gave me a focus, the cold wind behind me pushing me towards it and I had no reason to resist. There were no footsteps in the sand thrown against the building, nor animal prints. All its windows were broken, like the sad teeth I'd seen on a dead - I'd rather not remember that. Even the door hung open, off its hinges *confirm*.

At least it would get me out of this wind. I ducked inside, and as my eyes adjusting everything fell

white

falling

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