The rain continued.

  I walked with brown behind me and green ahead — legs, joints, the repetition of forward movement that occurred because the body defaulted to forward when standing still was too close to the other kind of still.

  Trees, large ones, their canopies absorbing the rain and releasing it in filtered portions, their trunks solid and barked, standing because standing was their method.

  I walked past them. The weakening was temporary. Behind me, past the brown-grass trail, the trees would recover. The leaves would straighten. The bark would rehydrate. Old growth was resilient enough. They would survive me.

  He didn't.

  The thought sat there. Not new. Not arriving. Just there. The way a stone was there in a field — present, obvious, requiring no delivery because it had always been in that position. Permanent.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  He didn't survive me.

  Not my qi. Not my emission. Not the withering-radius that killed grass and dropped insects. He didn't survive my pattern. The pattern of attachment and loss.

  But non-attachment was the lie.

  The rain lessened to a drizzle. The kind that hung in the air rather than fell — suspension rather than precipitation, too fine to be rain and too wet to be mist.

  I walked through the drizzle, through the forest, brown underfoot.

  No destination, no plan, no thought that constituted planning or destination — just movement. The body moving because the body could not stand still.

  Hours? Days? A period of time that had the characteristics of changing light, changing temperature and changing atmospheric conditions suggesting the planet continued its operations regardless.

  The planet did continue. That was the thing about planets. They continued. The rain fell, the trees stood, the grass grew where I was not. The fundamental indifference of a world that was not indifferent but was also not interested in the grief of a woman walking a trail of dead vegetation through a forest on a grey day.

  The world held. The world continued. The world did not care.

  And the not-caring was where I not lived.