Mantel

There is a presence.
Shifting, changing, pulsing - never still, never stagnate.
They say that the body regenerates itself every seven years - becomes something that has never been touched by anyone.

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been.

The presence changes faster.
It is a girl, a laser-beam, a bird on a string - it is a seaslug glowing in a deep pool dream.
It is a lighthouse, a city, a man.

In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth.

Everything and nothing -
It sheds its skin again and again.
Its face is a ruin, a wasteland, an Eden.
Flawless and utterly imperfect - chaos given form and shape.

The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive.

It came on a shock wave, heralded by storm and lighting - heaved itself from the churning seas - the lighthouse never saw it coming.

And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age.

It never came at all - it was always here, always in the edges, the corners of the mind.
It was never here, nonexistent - it has never been and never will be.

That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing.

The Presence lingers, the Presence learns, the Presence knows.

And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.
- Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer

Give Me An Answer