Some distant shout stirs you from your slumber. It's too bright again.

Your dreams were filled with images of ages past; when insects were bigger and juicier, and the air weighed less heavily in your lungs. But now you're awake, and your eyes strain in the direction of the sound. Whatever it is, it's approaching. It never used to be like this. Creatures were always happy to exist around you, unaware of your existence. Roots dig into your flesh; a thick forest of moss and reeds grows on the mushy sediment that has covered you.

You carry generations on your back. Every now and then, something forces you awake, and you are treated to a brand new world to explore. The sky changes color. The plants change shape. And the animals, those distant descendents of your brothers and sisters of yore, adopt wild new forms, builds, and behaviors.

It has been a good life.

Lately, however, your slumber gets interrupted more often. Those bipedal, furry beasts that you once observed have returned. Something has driven them mad. They bring tubes that make noise and have enslaved wolves to do their bidding, and they come to harvest the swamp's reeds, even though you have never seen them eat them.

You hear them approach. They will be here soon, and if allowed to remain, you won't get a wink of sleep this eon.

Yawning, you stand up to your full height. Your knees creak, your bones ache. It gets harder every time. Your legs are pillars rising up from the muck, and your body is an island, but your eyes are dots planted on a flat and bulbous head. You have long outgrown the need to see; when something swims by, you snap it up. It doesn't matter what it is. You don't need much. You sleep most of the time, and your sleep is a deathly torpor, where even your heart ceases to beat. The ages pass you by.

You'll never eat bugs that big and juicy again. The air's much too thin for that now.

You were one of the first. You don't feel proud when you think about that fact; you just feel tired. But it's true all the same. The swamp formed around you, and before it did the jungle, and before it a teeming sea. You slept through the advent of the great lizards and the dawn of mammals. You witnessed the emergence of trees. Between winks of sleep, you saw the skies light up with fire and clouds swallow the lands.

But now the apes come to bother you, with their enslaved wolves and their noise-sticks. These days, you wake up almost every week, startled by their ruckus.

You tower before them, stare them down with eyes full of disappointment, and bellow a great roar. 'Go', you tell them. 'Let me sleep. I want to see what comes after.'

They do not listen. Instead they scatter before you, as they always do, and you watch them go. Once it becomes clear they’re really gone, you retreat to where they cannot follow. You know they'll be back, more of them, with bigger sticks and louder wolves. So you settle yourself into the deeper muck, close your eyes, and become just another moss-covered boulder. But you're running out of hiding places, or maybe they're getting better at finding you, and each time they come, they interrupt your sleep once again. Maybe one day, they won't even run.

What will be of you then?

The air keeps getting thinner, and the insects keep getting smaller. You can only dream of home, for you no longer remember it.