He is the strongest; and his strength lies not in his body—scarred by the violent efforts of so many others—nor in his hunger, which ravages his mind and fills his veins with a restlessness like the frenzy of maddened rats. His strength is his pain, or perhaps it is his pain that is the source of his fire. It burns him, and he moves as if he is trying to flee from it, as if there is some way that he can outrun his own blood.

His jaw, like all the others, is broken, and a constant slavering stream of blood and tears flows off his distorted bones. He gurgles as he runs, a bubbling hiccupping sound that rises—unbidden and unwanted—from his gullet, and he breathes noisily through his nose. Always smelling the air, always seeking that industrial scent of the other side. Always seeking.

He is far off the path. Instinctively, he realizes there is no fortune to be found on the path. Maybe it is a remnant of his life from the other side that guides him so, some tiny fragment of a dream. He runs through the Red Wood, ignoring the subtle pull in his groin for the path, following instead the faint stink of cold metal and charred electrons.

The House, with its steel-tooth door and black windows that swallow the sun, is always behind him. Once, he approached that house as a penitent, swaddled and sealed, but the Keeper cut him instead of inking him and turned him away. The others, the broken-jawed failures who eternally haunt the woods around the House, came out of the trees, eager to strip him of his palimpsest and his mask.

Eager. So eager. So consumed with the hunger that sustains them. So desirous of the piece of meat in his mouth that would give them back their lost language (falling star, o falling star).

But he is strong and, while they shattered his jaw and ripped out most of his teeth, they did not get his tongue.

When he finds a rift in the fabric, he will re-open the gate. He can still speak the words.

The House is sealed.

There is nothing left. Nothing but pain.