The beads are a familiar heavy weight on my arm. He questions why I don’t have them tucked in a pocket this time. “Touch is the first sense I was able to recover when I arrived in the Abyss. When we… I… was in floating parts of flesh and thought, those things that were physically touching me were closer than other things. I want to be able to recover myself at once.”

“Still terrified?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely.”

3,656 words.