The mighty river flows, and nothing will stop it, ever. No dam can be conceived that will hold this most anomalous of rivers. Sitting on its banks - if you are lucky or unlucky enough to find them - you can see the flotsam and jetsam of mysterious otherworldly places go by. The composition of the river's passengers varies from time to time and from place to place, but there is one constant: corpses.

Over the time I have been following the river, I have seen many terrible things. Some of them were so decomposed as to be unrecognizable, but some of them were merely impossible creatures I cannot describe. None of them prepared me for what I saw that fateful day. The corpse I saw was my own.

I chased it downstream for quite a while, desperately searching for some way to get it to shore, for some way to prove it wasn't my dead face that was staring at me. Even with the eyes gone, even from across the river, even while running and scrambling to catch it, I knew it was mine.

I came very close to snaring it, but I simply didn't have the stamina to keep up the chase. As I gave up, exhausted, a rapture owl settled into the tree beside me. I watched it, and it watched me, and a disturbing feeling came over me as we watched each other. I felt that it knew some terrible secret that I really ought to know, but would not discover until it was far too late. Or perhaps that's just my imagination embellishing the incident. I have nightmares about it every night, now. And here's a curious thing: in the first nightmare, my corpse spoke to me a single word: "Don't."