I never much minded the view, endless as it might have been, nor did I mind the loneliness that came with it. A lack of colors and sights to be seen, other than the slightly blacker road ahead, with no textures to keep me centered except for the tightness of my chest, and nothing to smell but gray, all might have made a less stubborn man mad.

The silence assured me I was.

No matter how hard I tried to breathe, there was nothing. My hardest of stomps and screams held no substance in a world that didn’t care. Memory was fleeting. When thoughts began to creep back into my mind, the lack of sound shredded them to the barest of whisps. Even still, with enough time to do nothing but try, some semblance of intelligence seeped through into my consciousness.

I don’t know how or when I did, but at some point, I understood I was dead. I had to be. Nothing could be more monotonous and meaningless than, well, nothing.  But if I was dead, how could I be nothing? I was something. Death was something, and so for the first time in what was either moments or eternity, I took a step off that black road.

 Crunch

Suddenly I was running. Every step made a noise, randomly assorted between clanging metal and crunched up gravel, as if this place was unaccustomed to facilitating such a process. These noises became a cacophony. It hurt to hear. It hurt to be.

I ran harder. Now the noise was becoming thick, almost solid, a vibration meant to do something other than be nothing, and so it was. Cracks of color spanned out of my floating steps. Where there was once a passage of pure void, there was now something else. Something with meaning. And with that something came someone.

A perfect mixture of that void and chroma, that absence and substance, that nothing and everything, stood before me. A constantly swirling miasma of the two opposites danced across the surface of a roughly humanoid shape, with no distinguishing features beyond ebony and bismuth. It stepped towards me.

Suddenly I wasn’t moving. I was instead frozen in place as all the noise around me ceased within a fraction of a moment. The silence was once again returning, and with it, the madness. I felt fear. But damn, feeling something felt good. At least, it did. Then the figure spoke. Then feeling things fucking hurt.

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I instinctually knew that I no longer was a part of that unmoving, silent status quo. As the figure spoke, I listened as a babe in the face of infinity might: without caution or understanding. In other words, I was pulverized.

____________________________

The wanderer had diverted off a path that none ever had. So, when confronted with a new experience, the creature felt what could be loosely translated to a sense of curiosity. Nothing new ever happened here. Such was entropy, the nebulous moments between an ending and a beginning. There was an infinite number of souls trapped here, as whether by divine choice or cosmic irony, some were doomed to never experience reincarnation or rebirth.

Instead, it was their fate to be broken down to match the nothingness that surrounded them. Not that the creature knew much about the reassimilation process, as those that took part were just beyond its gaze. Instead, its function was solely to watch the souls that traversed the path towards the metaphorical meat grinder that it couldn’t observe. Occasionally, a soul would stop moving upon the road. While not explicitly the creature’s directive, it took it upon themselves to gently spur the wanderers back into movement. Some souls started that way though, immobile in the face of supposed infinity. Those were much harder to move.

This particular one had refused to move as some others had, fresh into their journey. This soul was not new. No, it was old. Older than any the creature had ever inspected. This was hard to tell, but the trick was not in the size nor shape, as those were amorphous qualities. The measure was in depth, and looking at this wanderer was akin to looking at the horizon: immeasurable. This quality had held the creature’s gaze for moments longer than it normally would have inspected a soul before pushing it along, and in those precious few moments, the wanderer moved.

Off the road.

A step off the road was something new. Nothing new ever happened here. These two basic facts battled it out as the creature was faced with indecision for the first time. Stop it? Or let it continue?

And then, a symphony of what could only be described as chaos ensued. Noises. Noises and substance, concepts of which the creature had only been faintly aware of before but now had to confront directly as everything the soul walked upon existed. Before a choice could be made, however, it all stopped. That kaleidoscopic taint still stained the surroundings, but it no longer spread. It was silent. The wanderer had stopped still, its perception now understanding the creature.

The creature had never had cause to speak before, and there was a lot of before to cover in its existence. While that existence may have been one of ceaseless monitoring, watching never lent itself to communication. So, when it spoke for the first time, it was as one just born might: without caution or understanding. In other words, it screamed.

____________________________

The boy opened his eyes swaddled in her warm arms, feeling so… safe. She opened her mouth to tell him something. Not with urgency but with a desperate love that matched her hold on him. He strained his senses to listen for the comfort found in this feeling, as a primal creature left now curious might: without caution or understanding.

In other words, he heard nothing but silence.