The fox awoke in a strange land. The twilight light left all of the colors muted, drained, even to the fox's keen eyes. Had the fox been there before, then perhaps it would remember the colors as they were.

The fox loped off, as that is what the fox knew to do. It followed the rolling hills into gentle dips with thick thatches and then around jutting rocks and dim shallow pools. Caverns and holes like rabbit burrows. Shallow pools always in pairs.

It sniffed the air, heavy with salt and damp and musk and piss and shit and sex and rot. The land itself was slick and smooth, like river stones collecting dew in the morning. The fox did not think to taste the moisture saturating the ground; the smell was too repulsive.

It trotted on. This was no place for a fox. Or any other animal as far as the fox could tell. The land in places was spongy, bulbous. Taunt and strident in others. Loose and shriveled and sagging under its weight elsewhere.

The immediate land was bumpy and jagged, but the fox could see an almost flat horizon when cresting hills.

The fox pricked it's ears at the groan. Or grind? Like the weight of a glacier shifting ten miles below your feet.

"Run!" the fox knew.

The fox ran, fleet as it was, still sliding and bumping through the landscape.

The sound was growing. A chorus of creaks and breaks and gravel sliding against gravel. The ground tremored beneath its paws.

The fox bounded from a spongy mound to a jutting protrusion, stepped over a slit of a crack, rounded a stump with twin dark hollows and slinked between a pair of milky pools to reach a crest topped by thin, wavy grass. It paused, panted, terrified. It knew to run, but not which way.

The horizon still seemed flat straight ahead, but tugged down somehow at the corners of its eyes. The twilight had a blood red tinge to it. The fox turned, unsure from which direction it had come. There where no landmark, only grotesque but samely features.

The sound grew. The fox knew the sound of grinding bone against cartilage from eating carrion. It came from all around.

The ground shifted. The horizon seemed no longer like that of land, but of the sea. In motion and swirling and heaving but constant still.

The fox sprawled as the hill heaved upward, stomach turning like it was falling. The fox lost its footing and rolled, falling into a crevice. Both sides where sliding down, together, and the fox fought to stand then run.

And run, even as the land fell away or heaved up suddenly.

The sound was deafening now, with high pitched squeals of trapped air and gas being compressed and then screaming to the surface. The sky was blood red and the air smelled of iron and heat and blood and blood and a fine mist of blood was making the land slick as the fox ran and dodged and scuttled and crawled and fought to keep moving above the land that was all sinking at once and pulling everything down.

The fox's eyes stung with sweat and blood, but it could see the forms now in the shrinking landscape. They had the form of the men and women it had always avoided by slinking back into the shadows of trees and brush. But they where giant and cold, and now they were the very land itself, arms and hands and legs and breasts and noses and hair and milky white pools in pairs.

The fox leapt from the torso and scrambled under a leg falling like a tree. It squeezed through the crook of an elbow as the titan was pulled down, compressing against the slick skin.

A falling hand clipped the fox, and it howled, but could not hear itself above the roar coming from below. The fox scampered on, dodging as a head lolled forward and landed with a wet thwack, sending up a spray of sweat and blood. The smell of heat and sweet and salt and iron and marrow and rotten meat and decay and death and death and run and scamper and crawl and sliding down and pulling down and run and claw and claw and claw.

An eruption of gas and blood spit the fox up. It arched its back and swung its tail to try to bring its feet underneath as it fell. The giants where shrinking, as was the world itself with the horizon arched like a hunter's bow.

The fox regained it's footing and ran. Leaving blood red scratches on pale skin as it leapt and scrambled from rolling back to heaving breast to sinking thigh.

The fox ran as the bodies of all that ever lived sunk down, collapsing on themselves from their own mass like a star forming a black hole. It was the big bang played in reverse, with bodies compressing down into a singular point. Joints popping and bones breaking and blood and bile exploding from compressed abdomens like pimples bursting.

The fox could feel the heat from below, red tinged steam escaping to the surface between gaps in the tangled limbs. But the bodies where shrinking, now small like children. Then smaller, and smaller.

The fox slowed to a trot as flinging arms and legs became like writhing worms under its paws. It did not like the feel the sliming, textured ground rolling beneath it, but the fox no longer feared. It sniffed the air, and over the iron of the blood it smelled ozone, like after a close lightning strike but without the hint of rain.

The fox meander now, stepping slowly on the mound of flesh rippling beneath it. The blood red tinge had left the sky; the fox was surrounded by a twilight of void.

The fox stepped forward but stumbled with its paw swiping emptiness. It stood and turned back. All that was left, all that was anywhere was void.

Except for a deep red pellet, the size of an owl's regurgitated pilus. There was the crushed and digested bones of all humanity.

The fox did not hesitate. It knew. It ate the pellet, teeth crunching and tongue forcing the pellet back and then "gulp."

The fox trotted off into the void.