First light outlines the mountain range as you awaken.  Grass tickles your skin as you get up.  Your sense of hearing is quickly overwhelmed by the disruptive rushing water in the nearby river and a choir of chirping mockingbirds.  The land surrounding you would be breathtaking for any other traveler.  Not to say it isn’t for you, but there is simply too much on your plate right now to truly take in the scenery.

22.5° NNE.  The singular instruction dropped upon you: take that secondary intercardinal direction and walk it, you would know when to stop.  

A bizarre task to be given in order to pay off medical debts, but what wouldn’t you do for your family? 

You have only begun wrapping your head around this task with the body in the river, disrupting the flow of the water within it.  You considered removing it and restoring the river’s motion, but you couldn’t bear the idea of recognition.  There were many people in that waiting room, many went before you.  You think it only reasonable to assume they were given the same offer.

Your march begins.  You twist your body to face north-northeast.  Your sense of direction bothers you.  You turned and immediately faced north-northeast, without doubt.  Your sense of direction has always been good, but it has never been that good.  It is something that could bother you, but there is no reason for you to second guess a helpful tool.

By early nightfall you reached the top of the mountain.  Powdered with light snow, the tone of your trek shifts as you bear witness to a mass grave.  Hundreds of bodies lay atop this mountain, more people than what was piled into that hospital.  

You walk forward, no reason not to now.  Unlike the rest of your journey, you watch the bodies.  They sit idle, icy, and lifeless on the rocky floor.  It does not seem like anything killed them at least outright.  You reach the edge of the mountain top and meet a steep cliffside, too foggy to see what would await you if you jumped down.  As you peer off the edge your head bumps something.  An invisible barrier ripples with a pink glow upon contact, it feels like thin rubber. 

The thought that you are done flashes in your mind, but then shadowed by the mass grave you stand in.  You think it over, a barrier like this is unheard of, how it exists is simply incomprehensible.  A new thought flashes:

How can you know when to stop, when you do not know what you see?

You push the barrier, push through it.  The pink glow envelopes you as the barrier stretches to the point that it snaps.  Even with eyelids shut, radiant pink light burns your vision.  You fall, your skin and your blood feel carbonated.  A tingling singe surges through you.  Ecstasy and bliss.  You feel ecstasy and bliss.