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 As the Sluagh opened his eyes slowly, his entire universe was different. The colours of his life, the eternity of blues and greens, were gone. Instead, he could see as his eyes focussed a glorious cavalcade of colour. Beautiful! So beautiful! He was laying face-down on the banks of the great Sarafan Lake. The texture of the sand, the heat of the sun, the noise of plants and animals and life was paradise, it was the height of pleasure hearing and feeling and smelling and tasting. He was alive! The world was alive! Memories floated in his psyche, a life of eternal scavenging and fighting, of monotony and soft dull sensation. The world had changed, everything had changed. He could think, feel, understand, perceive. And he could perceive so much! The world had become so much more, and he was a part of it! Alive, he was. Truly, gloriously, alive. His intelligence was still growing, his simple existence before started to make sense, everything was starting to fit. I was a scavenger, I understand the Ancient murals now that I ignored for so many millennia. They described a place called the… Spirit Realm… A place of death… A place where I lived… And in that realm was the… Spirit Shrine… where I too lived… And that strange creature activated the shrine… The revelations came thick and fast, the jigsaw was making sense. His home had been the Spirit Shrine, a place designed for, according to the murals, a holy saviour to return to the… land of Nosgoth. This was Nosgoth then, this beautiful alive place. What a holy name, Nosgoth! The creature, the holy saviour, activated the shrine and the explosion sent him back to Nosgoth. And…it accidentally brought me along with him. Still lying there in the sand, he put the final piece in the jigsaw. The murals labelled us Sluagh. Scavengers of the underworld. I am the first material realm Sluagh, and…my name is… Frank. Frank pushed himself up with his arms, and stood up straight. The hunger was gone, the soul hunger! Instead he… felt… something else… Cautiously, he walked over to a nearby tree, and without thinking reached for one of the apples on its branches. He bit it. Wonderful! Divine! Frank bit more, and more, and took in the sights around him. A beautiful world of sensation and life. A new plane of existence.
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