It's old now, an ancient ruin, a forest of glass and dregs and a fox lost. I was trig enough, true, left the hounds in loam and shadow and sniffing the blue, fleet and flush with tricks.
Yet even after escaping the fate of being torn apart I feel I died anyway.
Survival is a different state. If those I lost along the great and grim road didn't make it, if I become a ghost myself because of that, am I alive or an echo?
What haunts me most after I crossed the last, darkest river is that I'll never know.