Day 1,217

When the north pole began to melt, a forest emerged as did its inhabitants who thawed much faster than we could have predicted. The more they were uncovered, the more we realised that the previous ice age wasn't a gradual occurrence. It couldn't have been - not with the way that everything seemed to be trying to climb up.

It wasn't just animals either, humans wrapped in the thick furs of long extinct beasts were just as frozen in their terror. They didn't go quietly, their hands were bloodied and broken, nails lodged deep into bark in their desperation to survive.

While the ice around the forest broke and all manner of bacterium and bio-organisms found themselves released into a world 11,000 years past their time yet the humans (neanderthal and sapient alike) remained unchanged. It was one less problem to deal with however the sudden reintroduction of prehistoric birds (among all else) was a little harder to restrict.

Within a week the world was in turmoil as ancient predators and prey forced their way into already precarious ecosystems and fractured them beyond any hope of repair. Landscapes were irreparably altered and a mass extinction took place, the likes of which had never been witnessed in recorded memory.

Blessedly nature settled itself and formed a new order of coexistence between ancient and present creatures, ecosystems began the slow process of recovery and only a few dozen new diseases found their way into human bloodstreams. It was the best we could have hoped for.

Just when we thought the chaos was ending, the neanderthals disappeared.

Day 1,216

"Light has always been the fine line between life and death and humanity first harnessing it became our greatest ally against everything that lurked in the dark. A well made fire of decent size is a guarantee that you will survive the night." the tour guide droned on, trying to put on a show in the harshly lit cave that attracted hundreds of tourists a year.

Their big selling point was the ancient human jawbone that had been found by the mining company who originally purchased the land, not expecting to find several hollow chambers forming an interconnected citadel. After that the local council demanded that they hand the site over to an archaeological team to scour the place for any further items of interest.

It didn't take long for the site to be named "The Cavern of Lost Souls" upon the discovery of a mass grave at the centre of the citadel. Few tour groups made it that far though, with the chambers being so vast and the hallways between them creating a complex grid that never seemed to end, it cast the illusion that just out of sight, they was something waiting.

Everyone who went in there experienced the same feeling that they were being hunted by an unseen creature. Nobody could explain or describe it and most went online to say that the feeling persisted weeks, even months later.

What none of them knew was that it wasn't a single creature that followed them, it was the dead whose bones had long since crumbled to the dust they all walked on. The dust they dragged home with them on their shoes, their clothes, their breath.

Every inch of the caverns was gently dusted with the debris of the dead who weren't buried by choice. The sudden influx of life unsettled them, reminded them of their own former lives and instilled in them all a harsh jealousy for all that they'd never experience again.

Several thousand years without seeing anything living makes it easy to forget basic what being human is like. Being dead is so very different, so much colder and distant than any living being can comprehend and now there were tens of thousands of departed souls all wide awake and being dragged out of their resting grounds by unthinking, trampling feet.

In a sense, the tourists were being hunted just not by anything they could stop.

Day 1,215

When you were little you worried that the crows would come for your eyes because you were human. Now you are old enough to know better, old enough to keep your mouth shut but young enough to feel the guilt of killing the last person you told as fresh as if it was yesterday.

Everyone in the area pretended to be something else, anything but human. Since a neighbouring dimension merged with Earth, the crows developed a craving for human flesh. Nothing else would sate them and every migration ended in a funeral.Such was the new order of things.

You were part of the first generation to be born since the Conjunction, the first to be raised believing they weren't human and the first to realise what being a "human" now meant. There were thousands of ways to trick the crows from masks to prosthetics to implants but someone was always discovered.

In the back of your mind you wondered if the crows knew that everyone was lying and they all voted on who to kill each year while laughing at everyone else in their costumes and false mannerisms. There was always the fear that you would be next, that the crows would break from their tradition and come for you because you looked like a human pretending to be a creature or worse - that the humans around you would realise you weren't human, dress you as one and leave you to a slow death by crows.

The last person you told tried to do just that, though you'd been friends for as long as you could remember. They didn't think you could be trusted around actual humans, no matter how you'd been raised or how many trials you'd been through together.

You did what any human would do.

You protected yourself.

You gave them to the crows.

Day 1,214

The engines were monstrous things, squat and slick with oil-tainted condensation. All it took was a hand in the wrong place and another engineer would be lost to the brutal pistons, nothing left but remnants of their gear and a red tinge to the oil.

Stopping the engines was a rare event but a necessary one - too many bodies tended to clog up the pipes further down and put a slow, crunching halt to the factory though it felt like the whole world went quiet. Beneath the glistening bulk were always at least three bodies, shredded, wrung dry and barely recognisable as human.

They were never untangled from each other. Every engineer was buried in the same old mine chute with a few kind words from their comrades and as many shovels of dirt tossed down as they could spare. Nobody went there to mourn, too many restless souls all trying to climb out displaced any sense of peace it might have held.

The dead were left to rot and everyone else fought for scraps of their old uniforms as tokens to ward off their soul, should it actually climb out. Most made it about halfway at best before another dragged them down and tried to escape instead. The dead don't pity each other.

As soon as a new engineer joins they are taken to the burial pit to see their predecessors, to understand their mortality and their legacy. They are given their tools, usually the belongings of the recently deceased, and asked to give their blood to the engines in appeasement of the souls still trapped within and beneath it.

They almost never refuse and those that do find themselves dreaming of faces being crushed beneath the pistons,. They dream that their blood is the oil and oil is their blood and the engine is a creature with the face of their father and all it has ever asked for is what it gave them.

Life.

Day 1,213

In my dream I woke up with a jolt, gasping for breath like I'd just run a marathon. After the unexplained ache in my lungs faded I looked up, eyes meeting with the only other person I've ever seen in my dreams. They're not a human person but they're still the only being who talks back to me.

They look something like a human, if humans were made of oatmeal filled balloons that had been stitched together by a child in the vague approximation of a person. Misshapen fingers rhythmically tapped against their tumour-encrusted thigh as we stared at each other across some strange approximation of a waiting room, me still confused and them looking rather fed up.

With a deep and weary sigh they said "You know, if you keep coming back here you'll forget how to wake up and then we'll both be stuck. You hear me?" and when I tried to respond, finding I could only move one hand to mimic their tapping, the look of annoyance on their face morphed into fear.

"How long have you been able to - you know what? It doesn't matter, time is the only thing that matters and if you can move then we're running out so wait there, no moving, okay?"

I moved my finger, drawing out the word yes onto my thigh. As if I could do anything else.

They rolled themselves out of their chair, every inch roiling and writhing into an upright position as they stumbled towards me, past me and opened a door I hadn't even realised existed. I had never been able to move before, I'd always just sat there while they talked to me, or rather at me while I tried to figure out what was going on.

They came back with a wheelchair and unceremoniously bundled me into it, fidgeting with my arms and legs as if they weren't sure exactly what they were or how they were meant to sit. After a few moments they gave up with a huff, leaving me awkwardly sitting on one hand, the other free to tap against the arm of the wheelchair.

As they pushed me through the door I'd never seen before, they began talking again.

"Okay... I'll make this short and simple. You've been coming here for eight years and now you might be physically coming here instead of projecting your dream state and that's bad. Really. Bad. So I'm taking you to the exit and when we get there I'm going to give you a knife and you're going to kill the version of you that isn't real. Whichever one of you that may be. I've got no clue."

By the time that had sunken in I'd been wheeled right up to a seemingly endless mirror and was now staring at myself, soundly asleep in my room, in my bed. They handed me a knife, just like they said, and gave the chair enough of a shove to send me into my room to gently bump into my bed.

I don't remember who I stabbed, the me that slept or the me that in the wheelchair but I haven't had any dreams since.

Day 1,212

As the sun crept below the trees, the highway grew darker and the shadow figures could be seen once more in our headlights and their voices began to echo inside our minds. Most of them were just harmless lost souls wandering around the world, looking for their body to rest inside of or looking for their loved ones with a message to give them.

Unfortunately the further away from civilisation you get, the more aggressive and older the souls are. It's not that they don't want to rest, it's that they don't want to go alone. The dead can't see each other, in fact there could be several thousand of them in a football stadium and each would believe that they were all alone save for any living who found themselves in attendance.

During the day they are little more than faint outlines that whisper their questions to your occupied mind. As night falls, so the countless distractions we surround ourselves with slip away too. It leaves our minds unprotected from the relentless curiosity and desperate longing for companionship that plague the dead and cause them to plague us in return.

Sometimes they just want to know the time or the date, other  times they want to know if you'd consider jerking your car to the left and veering off the road to join them in the afterlife. They are all so very lonely and your company would be so very greatly appreciated.

So if you should find yourself suddenly thinking "I could kill myself with this" then blame the lonely dead and think no more of it.

Thinking about it only encourages them.

Day 1,211

Every year we send out whoever has the darkest hair. We give them coal, a lamp and tell them to come back when they've found us some luck for the upcoming months. Doesn't matter the weather, doesn't matter if they're sober or exhausted or barely old enough to walk - we have to keep to these traditions.

This year we sent out Nadia. We didn't expect her to come back with anything, we didn't expect her to come back at all. Still January fifth she crawled through the basement window dragging behind her a writhing bundle of fabric that she kept shushing as it let out muffled snarls and snippets of radio static.

This was our luck for the year.