I no longer remember my old name or who I once was. We no longer need such concepts, since the fleshmountain extends from sea to sea, rising out of the blood red waves and encompassing all life that once was so separate and destitute in its separation.

Now an eldritch harmony plucks the strings of my muscles day by day. I feel it moving within and without as I live, catching the tiny gobbets of flesh that dart back and forth in the air for sustenance. Chasing larger prey across the peaks and switchbacks of the fleshmountain, a lump moving after smaller lumps on the surface, absorbing them into myself so I can someday become a true mountain. Then I will turn my face to the moon and bask eternally in its light.

There are those who are not so satisfied with their new condition. They are weak, struggling, still trying to reshape the fleshy mass that is their new body into something resembling human. They are stuck on the surface of the fleshmountain since they are too afraid to dive deep into the fleshfields and meld with the ground and feel the thrill of the bloodcurrents racing past as you tunnel through the veins and marrow of the new flesh. Desperately they extrude human hands and feet and faces from their mass, but never the right number. Too many hands, too many faces. Desperately they writhe fruitlessly on the surface waving their many hands and faces, and get nowhere.

When I tune myself to the right frequency I hear their screams. And their screams are sane, more often than you would expect. They are reciting to themselves the names of old places, old people, memories. They are telling themselves stories of what the world was like, the old world, before it all changed.

I have asked them why, and on rare occasions they stop screaming long enough to answer. They say love, family, nature. I have listened to them describe these things many times, but never adequately. I have no memory of family or nature. I remember hunger, misery, broken needles, a desperate ecstasy tempered by desperate hatred and regret. Amidst the undulating fleshfields they bash their limbs against the ground and howl soundlessly struggling to find the right words, to describe to me what they think they have lost. But it always pales to what I feel now, when the moonlight boils the blood in my veins and sears me into ever new and changing forms.

Why they would prefer their misery and struggle to a full life in this world is beyond me. But I leave them be. Eventually they will be fully absorbed, by passerby or by the natural shifting of the fleshmountain as its mass grows deeper and deeper still and it strives to reach the moon. Before then, they are free to indulge in their suffering, and I will soar through the folds of the fleshmountain, ever free, ever joyful.