I have been buried in seven countries and three that no longer exist.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Fornax.

The first time I died I thought it was the end. The second time I thought it was a mistake. By the thirtieth I had stopped counting the cause and started counting the gap — how long between the last breath and the first gasp back, whether the world had moved on without me, whether anyone had noticed. They always noticed. That was the problem.

The thirty-fourth time I was buried. Not metaphorically — buried, in soil, under six feet of Victorian clay in a churchyard in Shropshire. I came back, as I always do, and found that I could not move. That the weight above me was absolute. I lay there, perfectly conscious, perfectly dead, and then not dead, and then conscious again. It took me fifty years to claw my way out. The world above had changed entirely. I emerged into 1947 with grave-dirt in my teeth and the distinct impression that I had missed something important. I had. Several wars. The invention of the motorcar. The particular shame of arriving fifty years late to your own resurrection.

The Broken Circle measures worth in permanence. To endure is to prove you deserve your rank. I endure — I simply do it badly, in pieces, with interruptions. They watched me fall and return and fall again and decided that a demon who dies is worse than no demon at all. The exile was not punishment. It was housekeeping.

Here I have learned that dying is not the shameful thing. The shameful thing is what you do with the life between. I am still deciding what that is. I have time. I always have time.

I am the thing that comes back. I have not yet decided what for.

Visual

Shadowy, indistinct figure with ashen grey skin that seems to absorb light, dark featureless eyes like empty wells, draped in tattered black Sumerian burial wrappings, gaunt frame, an oppressive hunger radiating from their stillness.

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