I didn't perceive the impact. There was no sensation left in my body because my entire being was at that point focused on the things I was seeing, the lives I was experiencing.
This is what I understood in the end.

What that hill did to me and that tiny girl was that it forced us to live through every single human life and the lives of all the creatures that have been intentionally affected by humans.

Hah, Intentionally!!! It makes a huge difference, let me tell you. I'm pretty sure that no one is aware of every single bacteria that infiltrate our bodies and gets killed by our immune system. No person knows how many tiny critters they stepped on or drove over. It would be mind-boggling to even consider but it seems I didn't have to. The number of present lives that humankind throws its will over is demented in itself.

It would maybe be wrong of me to say that it was truly me that was feeling that bombardment. Any sliver of self that withstood the beginning, kept submerging under the waves of input.

I was thrown into the deep right away. Moments of smiling lives and smiling faces followed by endless agony

and torture and hunger, insanity, and pain... People are painful. What I mean by that is that they are filled with pain.
I got glimpses of all the people currently living and it's so hard to remember the ones devoid of any physical or mental malady.

Maybe you've seen montages that aim to shock people with the disturbing footage. All of them seemed to have mushroom clouds and starving African children. Seeing it being so short, so flickering, feathers lightly over a person's mind. You see it, then it's gone. You think about it for a moment, then you go and grab some cheesy fries to make yourself feel better.

What I went through was not short and I didn't see any nuclear explosions but it was relentless. I swept over land and sea like a storm. Everything human-touched was examined and experienced. There might have even been some rhythms to it.

From the wilderness to mines, farms, orchards and so on. Then small settlements and factories, then cities; and then it starts again.

I've lived a hundred deaths and two hundred births. Just the humankind. They were speckled and unexpected each time. They hurt and hurt and I screamed with them but some of them stopped hurting as they faded. Those, I tried to hold on to.

I loved reading books in the life I had before the crash. The adventures of complex, intense, illogical people were wonderous, and this time I got to live through the real eyes of a few of those kinds of people. I would have begged and prayed to stay with them but the waves came crashing in again and again and prayers didn't matter after all.

It comes back to that frame of reference I talked about earlier. I'm human so I could see what I saw and puzzle it together. I was familiar with almost all of their feelings. I could make sense of their actions. Even the crazy or murderous ones.

Pretty much every one imagines what it would be like to give in to such impulses and I saw a few that vividly did.

The waves of the tempest were alien though.