I awoke within the cool and gloomy comfort of Gor Herself; reborn from hellish nightmares, once again into a hellish reality. 

I did not rise from the ground. Instead, I held it close and crept sleen like, forward on my elbows and knees toward the clutter of jumbled stone encircling the entrance of the cavern. Low and slow, I made my way toward the blessed pale light of dusk. 

Pausing among the jumble of blue and grey stones, I sat back on my feet to listen to and smell the wind. A crawling insect, which I recognized as safe to eat but did not know the name of caught my attention. My stomach growled with insistence. 

I quickly picked the insect up, blew the dirt from it and popped it into my mouth. It wasn't good, but neither was it bad. It was simply food, and I ate it. Whatever you called it, it was green with yellow stripes and nearly translucent wings. It was crunchy at first before slowly becoming chewy, then finally gooey; yet always it remained pungent, salty and bitter.

Next would come the need for fresh water, and that meant going out there. Beyond.

Going Beyond meant being prepared for whatever was next without actually knowing what it might be. There was always, it seemed, more or less equal amounts of both chaos and luck in going Beyond.

That's what life is though; accepting things as they are at the moment, acting accordingly, and surviving if you can, to fight another day if you must. I had come to believe that was best to acknowledge that life is really all up to chance in a way. It was a simple personal philosophy that worked.

Another breathe is always a gamble because it isn't up to us alone to decide if we can have it. While we might want water to drink, that thing in the water might want a meal. I see it as a risk we have no choice but to take; therefore it isn't our decision to make, it is only ours to participate in.

I was thirsty, so the damned thing would just have to eat me if it could, before I drank my fill of the water from where it lived and hunted.

Thirst would surely kill me just as easily as the thing in the river might; only much more slowly, and mercilessly. Things with sharp teeth often killed quickly, but dehydration never did, and that was the only important difference. Death itself, is inevitable, we simply have to survive until it finds us. 

I saw another of those insects, my hand reached for it instinctively as my stomach growled again, but my tongue was dry. This one, I stowed in the food bag I carried because water was what I needed; while food was only something I wanted.

It was like breath and blood, or food and sleep; if one lost enough of any of those things, they died. There was no choice in the reality of those few, simple facts; or, that living meant taking risks to fulfill your needs. Thus it followed logically to me, that the less one confused wanting things with needing things, the simpler, and more satisfying daily living became.

I placed several rolled Kanda leaves in my mouth and began to chew them slowly for their mildly sedative effects. I would often bruise and crush the leaves between my teeth before tucking them away for a time, into my cheek.

Taken internally the Kanda pulp and juice somewhat soothed my mind, allowing it to relax and focus. Used externally as a crucial ingredient in a mud based paste, it served to desensitize the damaged nerves of my permanently scarred flesh.

I gathered several handfuls of the loose red soil from the floor of the cave, added them to my scant collection of foraged medical supplies, then gathered and packed my kit. Shouldering what could hardly be called a burdensome load, I emerged into the fresh air and darkness that lay Beyond.