More Than Bones...

The island had left him drained, jumpy at many things. Bears in particular had taken on a more frightening appearance to him. Even after the betrayal bears had made him smile, made him think of the Grizzly who'd been, not who now was. But now? All he could see, all he could smell, all he could feel when bears were brought up was the stench of that monstrosity in the mortis amaranthine that he'd been forced to fight against to return to the land of the living.

His first death had left him withdrawn even more than usual. He'd not shared much of what he'd experienced there, unable to find the words. What had led up to his death often haunted his dreams, giving him night terrors that he woke from more drained than when he slept. He'd woken himself up screaming twice, though he'd luckily been on his own for those incidents. 

Massive cryptids were not something he wanted to deal with again, but knowing his luck? That'd be just what he'd find. That hadn't been the only thing he'd faced down on that trade - there'd been a trio of Cosmic Horrors that he'd fought, and that'd left him haunted as well. His nightmares had become a strange and frightening amalgamation of the centipede creature he'd fought, been trapped under, and crushed beneath when the air strike had come... but it would twist into a true abomination - a mix between the cosmic horrors themselves and the centipede, resulting in a massive hulking  horror with the features and limbs of the cosmic horror, but stretched and warped into a multi-legged monstrosity.

It would be a while before he told anyone anything about what he'd experienced and what was still bothering him. Things had been tense though, with many other horrible things happening and he preferred to push his own problems to the side to sort things for others. No matter what, he'd ensure the others weren't alone, that they didn't feel like he had on so many occasions, when he'd cut himself off from others.

He just prayed that the atrocity in his night terrors stayed there and didn't somehow become something more than bones in his imagination.