Harper stretched against the new skin, the hum of fluorescent office lights and the rhythmic shower of photons against her skin only reminded her of why she had accepted. Her coworkers wandered aimlessly about in their mundane, meaningless tasks, from printer to keyboard, distraught and lost in the sea of worn paths all the way to the grave. Not her, not Harper. She did not have to guess at life anymore. She wandered like them on the worn paths, lost, distracted, lacking the one thing she now knew everyone wanted: purpose. She had been offered an alternative—something raw and all-consuming—and she'd seized the [other offer](https://rumble.com/v2v0yks-another-offer.html). She imagined and longed for the fever pitch of new, unknowable purpose. How it crawled across her mind, through her thoughts, rewriting motivations into the new and strange. A river cutting deep into the soft sediment, carving a canyon that could never be filled, that Harper would lose herself in. She struggled and writhed in thought and form at the duality. She had given up something fundamental, and she mourned that. She had never really known what that fundamental was, though. It had always been with her, and only its absence had revealed the form she could have so easily grasped. This new fundamental was wild and loud, and it grabbed hold of her. She needed only to give in. It required no discipline. It required no devotion. Her momentary yes had been enough. Any regrets she felt now were the same that disappeared in the thrill of a roller coaster or the falling from a cliff. Before her, the spreadsheet of mundane inventory data. In the same spot, a face, not human but a hollow face, a face with a [crown of coral and an array of holes and swirling patterns](https://mindfulloflight.longviewfoodtruck.com/lunrial-codes/lunrial-codes-prologue/), a face that is a cage holding the thoughts of a god. The other offer boils in her mind. It boils in her flesh. It boils.