Nexus day, plus one year: 

     No one went anywhere near what had once been Adam Forwarder's compound for the entire year after "that night"

     The ground had been blasted to glass, for one thing.

​     People assumed the entire compound to be soaked in radiation, (although none could ever be detected.)

     Others assumed the place to be haunted.

     Whatever. The compound gave everybody the creeps.

     But that night...

     Pebbles trembled on the ground's glassy surface...

     and then the surface itself split open.

     Something emerged.

     A finger?

     The "finger" worked all around the hole it'd come up through, picking away at the edges, making the hole bigger, although this took hours and hours to do.

     The finger turned into a hand, a hand with only three fingers.

     The hand picked at the glassy ground for hours, for days, until the hand extended to become an arm. 

     The arm pushed itself against the hard, cold glassy Earth, grew tired, pushed again, tired again, for hours, for days.

     It pushed until a shoulder emerged, a head.

​     Then, after a full month...

     A full figure emerged from the smashed, glass surface of what had once been the Adam Forwarder compound.

     He emerged on a night filled with clouds getting ready to rain, alone in near total darkness.

     This thing was the size and shape of a man, more or less, but this was no man, or, if it was, it was a man made of rocks, of mud, of stone, yet also of something alive, something mammalian. It moved, that something that peered around, yet it had no eyes. It held back its' "head" as if to shriek into the night, yet it had no mouth.

​     And then he created a mouth for himself. He clawed at his own "face" with his own "fingers' until he tore loose an opening.

​     He said his first words in the dead of night.

    His voice came out sounding like exploding rocks.

     "I am Adam Forwarder!" he roared. "I am Adam Forwarder, and I have returned!"

END OF NOVEL

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