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Jane sits upon the splintered floor with her legs still submerging the murky water. She looks around at the same floral flock and roots and monochrome funeral picture. A raven feather lays before her nudity, reaching for nothing. The table and chairs are back in the positions she initially found them when she went walking through the Kafkaesque disappearing door and the two contraptions for sitting are somewhat crooked at Rist and Rhie's simulacra kitchen table. Her wooden chair is as it was, somehow whole again, like she'd never destroyed it. Jane thinks this place has already started over. If the serpent hasn't eaten its own tail for her, it seems to have for this situation.

The stranger sits in his seat and his columbarium eyes are closed and he doesn't seem conscious. Jane thinks maybe he's waiting to come alive when the next "her" arrives in the timing of the eternal recurrence; the next Jane or Terra.

My name is supposed to be Terra. But I'm not her even with her memory. I mean, I am, but I feels like it's too late for me to be her. I'm Jane. I'm the Jane from the mire. I'm Rist's Jane. I feel much closer to this name, this identity. I don't need Terra to complete me anymore. It's too horrible. I know too much about what this place is and what she went through. I want to be Jane.

Jane watches a black ant climb out from under a floor board. It stops to notice her, moving its head around in its "ant" way. She watches while slipping her wet legs out from the hole murk bottom ceiling of the mire, accidentally splashing the tiny curiosity. The ant panics and runs back under the dull chip polyurethane. The mire, without Jane dangling her feet within it, becomes more and more murky until it's no longer water but dirt. The hole becomes like a fresh grave in the middle of the room. The mire girl was much further down that hole than six feet. She was at the top of the tallest building and that was a long way down.

Jane places her wet feet behind her mired butt cheeks and peers down at the earthen floor of the hole that she crawled out from. She feels the ground with her hand, touching its calumny, its silty reality.

Are simulations real? That's what this was. A simulation within a simulation within a simulation. It was an infinity mirror. Maybe none of it was real. Not down there. Maybe not even here. Maybe not even before this place...no. No! That was real! Rist was real! Rist is real! Oh god...maybe that wasn't her body in that cabinet...maybe...

The wheels traveling through Jane's mind rumble into the land of "hope." She decides that this's where she'll set up her life and not in the darkness of the storm in her rearview.

Then Jane feels creepy. Someone's watching her. Someone who's responsible for all the suffering endowed upon her.

"No! How did you...?"

Jane looks up at the table. The stranger is awake and staring at her with long tooth disbelief etched across his putrid face.

Words like slime ooze from his black tooth orifice. "It's too soon! I thought I had more time!"

The stranger stands and comes around the table, never taking an eye off Jane.

"I don't understand. How are you here and not crawling out of the mire for the thousandth time?"

Jane smiles like Terra. "I'm happy about the state of your stupidity, you motherfucker!"

The mire girl startles herself with that word. What compelled her to say it? She can't tell but she notices the effect of that particular single profanity has upon the stranger's countenance and body language and she smiles a nodding crimson lip grin in response to his scale tipping dichotomous shock.

He frantically eyeballs the room, terrified as nystagmus twitch shakes upon him. He jumps backward up onto the table like he's in reverse and crouches, waiting and watching. Eyes twitching in different directions.

"I know who you are now. I have all the memories of Terra. Your name is Michael Leonard. You're the psychopath who invented the dark forest. You're responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, woman and children. My family, included."

Jane kneels and then lifts her leg, pushing her fuming, naked body into an angry standing position. The mire girl clenches both fists tighter than she has ever known to clench them before. Her fingers harden with a hammers destructive potential. The water left from the sloughy mire dries upon her skin through the burning heat of her fury. And yet, Michael has the gaul to crookedly laugh like a vulture flaying skin.

"It's not you I'm afraid of, dear sweet Jane. Oh, no.  You've always been my play thing, Terra. One way or the other. You loved me once, in another reality, in another way station. I put a wonderful mask on and you fell for my charisma and confidence. Oh my Lord, you were so broken and you had no idea who I really was. The city of Veridiction has its modes of truth, and this one made fancy with prophecy. I owned you. And you know, time isn't linear here. What I'm talking about hasn't happened for the Terra, yet. But it has for me. I always had plans for you and I always will. You're my weapon, my greatest creation. A living, breathing reaper. I named you Muerte. Our side already knew you as Death. And so, we made your side know. But it doesn't matter now. How did you escape the eternal recurrence?"

Jane watches him in his curiosity.

"I'm the caesura, not the snake who eats her tail."

"Who told you that? Who....oh....that fuck. That traitorous fuck! I'll kill him! David Leonard! Do you hear me? You put me here for this? To fail? I'll..."

Jane has no idea who Michael is referring to and she doesn't care. But then a blip of Terra's memory hits her. David Leonard was a horrid beast who bested her in a battle at the Leonards weapons facility. After Terra destroyed all of their main artilleries and killed many outnumbering enemies in the corridor leading to the exit, David Leonard came out of nowhere and shoved a sword in her back. Jane remembers Terra's fleeting thoughts that her friends could be on their way to save her. David then took Terra to her torturous fate with Michael. Her friends never arrived to intervene in her demise.

"I know who you're referring to. Yes, please. Do something good for once. Kill him."

Michel looks like he's about to respond with a witty retort when someone outside the house mumbles the word, "motherfucker." The accent catches Jane in the belly and the heart, like the mire girl is familiar with this particular voice. Somewhere, somehow, she remembers that lovely tune singing a shadowless profanity.

"Oh my god! No! The Judith is here! I don't believe it. It's too soon. My plans will be destroyed, we aren't ready. We aren't ready for you to wake up in our world. The memories in your head are Terra's recollections from the first reality. No. How did you come through the bottom? What was different in the eternal recurrence? It can't simply be your meagre understanding of a caesura! How did this happen?"

Jane's filling her head with questions but they're encapsulated within a burning fog of rage. She wants to beat the living shit out of this man, this monster. The feeling's not like when she had her own monster. She doesn't want to bathe in his blood or drink his blood or make art of his body, she merely wants him to die. But she knows that if she does attack, his crackling shadow voice revenant abomination will surface and more than likely kill her and place her back into the empty city simulation of where she just was. Or he'll just kill her. No, Jane's going to wait for the Judith to enter. And she no longer wishes to die, she wants to know if Rist is still somewhere. And she wouldn't mind watching some vengeance if she has time. And so, if she can't kick his ass, she can torture him in other ways.

"Motherfucker!"

The stranger squirms back across the table and into the shadows. He places his thin, gloved hands over his ears and scowls at Jane.

The mire girl hops over the little funeral hole and tiptoes closer to the terrified psychopath. "It's amazing what one word can accomplish, motherfucker."

Moans of Michael's pain fill Jane's ears. Terrified pain. Anxious pain. Michael suffers at the whim of the word.

There is a loud knock upon the wall where the door should be and a muffling voice makes it's presence known.

"I'm gonna tear off your hide you wretched, goddamned fucking prattling miscreant! You motherfucker!"

The door sharply appears and is instantly ripped off its brass hinges and thrown in the direction of Michael, with the screws flying behind it. And his eyes are wide as he backs further into the corner of the house, climbing off the table and slithering underneath its rectangular water stain bottom ceiling.

Judith enters the house. She wears a green, empire waist dress with coppery accents at the short sleeves and along the waist. The dress brings out the coppery tinge in her hair, which is also verdant green and gray. Her stockings are copper and she wears green high tops with black laces on one shoe and gray on the other. The smile on Judith's beautiful freckled face is directed at Jane like an old friend who's finally come home.

"My girl! Look at me! I got all dolled up for you. My sweet, Jane! And just look at you, all fixed up for a ruckus fight with a lowly life form like Michael over there. I won't have this beast ruin my girl anymore. You leave this motherfucker to me. I know how to kill him. I've killed a few of these things already. Oh, and thankfully, I never had the misfortune of meeting your monster. But it was the strongest because of who you were and who you are. I'm so very glad that it tucked tail and ran. But you be careful it doesn't wake up again. You need sunshine, my girl!"

Judith walks further into the room and hugs Jane.

"My girl, you have a choice. You can continue this way and wake up in the world your memory is situated in and be Terra. Or, you can..."

Jane looks into Judith's eyes with longing and butterflies. Judith witnesses what's written all over Jane's face.

"Oh my girl. I see it in your beautiful green looking glass orbits. Ok. Imma take care of this cowering abomination and help the next mire girl find her way home. You've found your home, girl. Now wake up Jane."

The mire girl leans her cheek on Judith's shoulder as they continue to embrace. Jane hugs Judith tighter. She closes her eyes and a tear trickles down her pale cheek. The tiny, salty drop lands on Judith's weather worn shoulder.

"Thank you, Judith."

"Oh my sweet Jane, wake up. Wake up Jane. Wake up and be free. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up...."

The circle shifts like the inner house is caught in a tornado spiraling its verticality through its horizontal gravity like passages in and out of passages and like a top at the never-ending of its endless spinning. Judith and Michael and the little house and the giant roots fade into the molecules behind her eyes. Stars form from such molecules like a mist of glitter and such stars under her eyelids twirl and shift with a thousand green eyes watching behind and back in satisfaction. She finds the moving forest creep upon her vision in her mind as it waves its branchy fingers in her direction and the wind picks her up like a dream of falling and speaks to her in whispers, "wake up."

Jane tries to blink a few times as her eyes roll around to the front from the back of her head. The mire girl opens her lids and she feels the bright black drain through an aperture emerald pigment swirling the overcast from her eyes like a sink. The vignette fades into a streaming blur and the blur blearily focuses upon the star spun sky under the four trees in the clearing. Her vision glows and glimmers and fades and glares like the reflections of distant suns in interrupted midnight water until finally, she feels her heart give a thump.