Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
 With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
 And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane;


Rebirth has messed with his perception of time.
He’d say only days had passed, but in reality it was weeks – months, maybe. He isn’t quite sure. Time is like an image glanced from far away, blurred and indistinct, able to make out the shape of things but not its features. He isn’t sure what’s transpired in those days – he ate and slept and moved, wandered as he is so wont to do. And now he’s back in the meadow and he doesn’t know where she’s gone, if she has left him or perhaps he’s left her.
(No. He would never do such a thing. He is not the one who leaves.)
 
Regardless – he is alone. Such a common state for him – fitting, really – but it gnaws at him like a winter chill, the loneliness. He stares at all the passes faces, hoping for something – someone – familiar, but they are all strangers.
He is older than so many of them, but he doesn’t look it – not in this new body, this reborn thing, black as an oil-slick and in the peak of health. His mind, though – it’s full of holes and wisps of memory, of strange and ugly things that have happened to him and that he’s done to others. None of them are fully formed, they are often as hazy and indistinct as his perception of time, if not more so, but they persist in nightmares and at the corners of his vision. Ghosts and demons.
 
He wonders if his radiates from him, the loneliness. Like a fever. It doesn’t matter, not really – he doesn’t have much in the way of self-preservation. So he moves, careless of how he appears, and he finds himself back in the meadow – his home, as much as anything is his home.
Yet there is nothing for him here.


Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
 I never saw a brute I hated so;
 He must be wicked to deserve such pain.