“Whispers. Not words — something older than words. Images. Feelings. The last moments of living things, preserved in the space he occupied. A fish's final view of the surface — light through water, the shadow of a net. A bird's last heartbeat — the sky, the wind, the sudden stop. A human — a Rakshasa, actually, long dead — the smell of salt and the sound of children laughing and the feel of sand between toes and then nothing, the great nothing, the silence that was not empty but full of everything that had ever been.”