Shrike

Grike did not move. He shut down his systems one by one until only his eyes and his mind were awake. He watched the graceful architecture of Tom and Hester's skeletons emerge, their bare skulls leaning together like two eggs in a nest of wet hair. Winter heaped snow over them; the rains of spring washed them clean. Next summer's grass grew thick and green beneath them, and an oak sapling
sprouted in the white basket of Hester's ribs.

	Grike watched it all while the years fell past him, green and white, green and white. The small bones of their hands and feet scattered into the grass like dice; larger ones were tumbled and gnawed by foxes; they turned gray and crumbly, and
it became hard to tell whose had been whose.

	The oak sapling grew into a tree; spread out a canopy that blushed green in  summer and threw dancing shadows over Grike; shed acorns that became new saplings; grew old, trailed beards of lichen; died and fell and rotted, giving up its
goodness to the roots of younger trees that were spreading down the hillside to the
lake.

	Grike sank deeper into his fugue. Stars blurred over him; seasons blinked at him. The trees became a wood. Bare branches breathed in, exhaled green leaves, turned golden, bare, breathed in.

	At last a human figure began to flash in front of him, stooping again and again to place something around his neck. With a deep effort he began to rouse himself; the flicker of day and night becoming less frantic as the whirl of seasons and centuries slowedar

A darkling Plain, 491/492, Chapter 54: Grike in the world to Come