In a deep, dark space between realities, Senadin woke up.
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"Rise"
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It was the beginning of the end; he just didn’t know it yet.
His eyes shot open. He felt cold air brushing against his unclothed body. He was lying on his back against some kind of smooth surface but could see nothing. He blinked, trying to focus his vision.
Darkness loomed over him. It was pure darkness, darker than anything he had seen before, or rather, not seen.
“What…?” Senadin said, though no sound came out.
“Hello?” Again, no sound.
He raised his hand above him but couldn’t see it. He brought his hand to the tip of his nose, and still couldn’t see it.
“What in the world?” He muttered, yet again with no sound.
His head pounded, a headache beginning to form. He put both of his hands up to his eyes to rub them, when he noticed an odd sensation. There was no hair on his eyebrows. His hands moved up to his scalp, where he felt the smooth skin on the top of his head.
Senadin began to panic. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, his hair was gone, and he felt a bitter cold against his naked body. His eyes clamped shut. After a few moments, he reopened his eyes, hoping to be transported back to his room in his home.
His sanctuary did not come.
He pushed himself onto his feet before stumbling back to the floor. Pain shot through his body as he realized his soreness from head to toe. The darkness was disorienting and finding his balance didn’t come easy, while his body and head seemed to have been beaten by baseball bats.
“This is ridiculous.” He exclaimed. “This can’t be real.”
He was able to stand in a low stance, keeping his balance with his feet spread wide apart, his arms at length.
The effort just to stand was enough to sink his resolve. He exhaustedly slumped back to the floor, lying down again on his back.
He stared upward to no effect. There was no difference in opening his eyes and closing them, but he stared all the same.
He felt the discomfort of loneliness, but it was a different feeling than what he knew as his own loneliness. This loneliness seemed collective, as if he was feeling the emptiness of everything around him, which was ironically nothing.
Normally he was comfortable being left alone, but this kind of alone didn’t only feel empty, it felt dangerous. It was cold and sharp, like a knife pressed against his own ego. Oddly, he didn’t reject it, as if deep down there was something that craved the pain in being completely alone. Sen could feel that empty need for loneliness rise from his chest up into the center of his head; eternal emptiness; a craving to be separate from everything. Sen seemed to forget about the pain in his body as he focused on that loneliness and fell into it.
His eyes closed. His breath slipped away from him. He tried to retrieve it but there was no air to breathe.
His eyes opened. He breathed again.
He thought of how he arrived here. He was just about to go to sleep when he suddenly woke up in this emptiness.
He remembered it was a Thursday night, he had eaten dinner and done some laundry before wrapping the night up with a couple games and going to sleep. He lived alone, and he was a plumber by trade. Having spent some time in the armed forces as an engineer, he learned and experienced enough to leave the army and become an apprentice plumber, and he was now a journeyman in the prime of his twenties. His social life was as lackluster as anyone else he knew living in middle America.
He was not special, so while he wondered where he was, he wondered why he was there as well.
It was clear he wasn’t dreaming, and a hallucination would be more than the darkness he saw.
Perhaps he was blind and deaf, laying in the middle of a hangar at an airport. That would explain his lack of senses and the cold ground, but not the chilling air. It was nearly summertime. And it didn’t explain why he had no hair.
Certainly, someone would have found him bumbling about by now. Lying naked in the middle of an airport hangar wouldn’t go unnoticed for too long. Was he chloroformed, kidnapped and shaved?
He felt the areas where he should have hair. They wouldn’t have gone that far to shave him in those spots. His skin was smoother than he was expecting, and his hand recoiled at the odd sensation.
He sat up, the soreness in his body was beginning to subside, but his head still pounded.
Reality weighed down on Senadin’s shoulders like a sandbag covered in molasses. He didn’t know where he was, and from his own apparent reasoning, he couldn’t do anything about it. It was all very sudden, and his situation only started to dawn on him. He was alone, there was nothing and no one around him. Where was he to go? What was he to do? There was simply nothing. There was no plan to make or execute. There was no reason to do anything.
Like a wave, hopelessness devoured him. The emptiness and lightlessness of the void consumed him. Sen’s fist collided with what his mind told him was the ground, but there was nothing. His fist met open air, and when he placed his hand down to feel the empty space, it was solid floor yet again.
“That is not natural. None of this is natural.” He surmised.
His grief and hopelessness turned into a solemn anger, refueling his resolve. He could walk, he could move forward, and so he could surely find a way out. Though the thought had crossed his mind multiple times, he quickly redirected his train of thought to something that wasn’t “an empty alternate universe.”
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"Forward"
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He turned his head, thinking that he heard something. The silence was deafening.
He stood again, taking on his previous low stance to maintain his balance in the darkness. He took a step, and then another, awkwardly moving forward through the void. Every so often he stumbled and fell, catching himself before landing on his face. Each time he would take some time to collect himself before standing up again. His balance soon became accustomed to the darkness, stumbling for what felt like miles before his gait resembled something more natural.
His balance in the darkness improved after he began to rely on the muscles in his legs and his connection with the floor through his feet. He felt stable, both mentally and physically, at least for the moment. It was enough headspace for his fear and confusion to evolve into solemn anger. Who did this to him? Where were they? Where was he?
His anger wasn’t soon to subside, but it did, and his resolve began to waver with it.
The emptiness of the abyss was daunting. It ate at him, slowly at first, but his psyche soon spiraled downward, his mental fortitude beginning to gather slack. He had walked and walked and still saw nothing. He heard nothing.
His mind began to play tricks on him. There were small hints of something in the corners of his vision. He would quickly turn his head to see nothing. There was no light, no sound, nothing. He would feel a spark of hope for it to be crushed into disappointment and the overbearing realization that he was completely alone, every time. It ate at him. Hopelessness was soon to devour him. When his hope finally broke, he was struck with remorse and sadness. His eyes became wetter until his face curled into sorrow. He fell to his knees, his arms holding up his chest as his head hung low. Until he simply rolled over onto the invisible floor underneath him, becoming a sad, naked, ball of a man in an empty dark void.
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As Senadin’s hysterical fit continued, his mind swayed from hope to dread and back again, over and over. The black, empty space wasn’t doing much for his sanity. He would get up and walk a few steps just to fall sobbing to his knees again. After what seemed like hours of dread and hopelessness, he simply couldn’t cry anymore. He tried his hardest to scream but nothing came out. He couldn’t even tell if he was breathing anymore.
“This must be it then.” He thought. “This is where we go at the end. Exactly what I thought it was: Absolutely nothing.”
His mouth made the action of scoffing, but no sound came out. He feebly stood up. His whole body felt weak, as if his will to live was abandoning his physical faculties. He attempted to take a step before losing his balance and falling on his face. He could see nothing, hear nothing, and there was no real physical space around him for his body to abide. He shakily rose to a kneeling position and closed his eyes again. “But I’m not dead, am I?” He tried to remember what happened before he was placed here but couldn’t remember anything past crawling into bed after playing some video games.
“I don’t think I died… I don’t…” Senadin collapsed mid-thought, falling unconscious from exhaustion.
Some hours later, Senadin woke again to the black dreariness of this empty space. Waking to the bleak emptiness a second time was less jarring, but still uncomfortable. He didn’t feel rested, it seemed being unconscious in this place did nothing to help him recover from stumbling through the blackness while hysterically trying to make sense of it. He closed his eyes, more as a habitual practice of focus rather than blocking his sight. He attempted to calm his mind. After what he had assumed the last day had been, Sen’s mind was exhausted and delirious. If sleep couldn’t help him, he had to figure out if this place was a constant downward spiral or if there were any handholds he could latch onto to pull himself out.
Senadin sat cross-legged in a classic meditative pose. He hadn’t done this in years and felt discomfort in his hips, knees, and lower back, but attempted to block out the discomfort to meditate on his situation.
“Just the basics, I’ve got me, I’ve got my mind…”
His mouth curled upwards as he tried to account for what he did have rather than what he didn’t.
He felt a chilling gust come from nowhere, the battering of the gale resounding in his ears was the first sound he heard in some time, as unwelcome as it was. Sen gritted his teeth against the cold as the gust subsided. “The hell was that?” Sen said aloud, though no sound left his lips.
“Wind? There was something, meaning it’s not all nothing, right?” He thought, as he stood up from his cross-legged position to his feet and started walking.
Days past, Senadin was sure of that. He felt no hunger, save for a few fleeting moments where he felt insatiable, he felt like he needed to eat something, anything. He craved raw meat. He wanted to drink the blood and gnaw at the flesh. He drooled at the thought.
His hunger was quick to subside, but it left him feeling woozy. He was actually going insane. Had he felt the wind before, or was it just a manifestation of his mind? All hope had gone, but maybe it was still there, squirming through his mind, creating hallucinations that pushed him forward.
The cold in this darkness was getting colder, but he seemed to be getting accustomed to it. He would walk, and as the area around him would chill his bones, he would sit to meditate on it. When he meditated, he could feel a warmth course this his body. He didn’t know if there was warmth, or if calming his mind allowed him to endure the cold better. Either way, through boredom or simply routine, he would get up and walk again.
Days more past before Senadin felt another chilling gust of wind. Instead of getting up from his meditative pose, he chose to sit in it, allowing the colds winds to scrape against his bare body. It felt like it cut through him, but he chose to allow it to berate him, nonetheless. That’s when the floor fell from underneath him. He let out a silent gasp as he fell. He couldn’t see anything in the bleak darkness to know where he was falling to, or when he would hit the ground. At first, his muscles were tense as he braced to hit the ground. After a few more seconds, the realization that he was going to die set in. He was falling fast, and now from a great height, there was no chance of surviving the impact. After several more seconds, then minutes of falling, he stopped squirming. Then he hit the invisible floor again. The impact was too quick and surprising for him to even register it.
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“Rise”
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Senadin woke up, taking a huge, silent breath of empty air. What happened? He was just falling, and then he woke up. He felt fine, at least his body was just as sore as it was before, there were no signs pointing to hitting the ground at literal breakneck speeds.
His legs crossed again, and he closed his eyes. The warmth inside him seemed like a flickering candleflame, fighting against the breeze of an open window. He focused on it, imagining the candle standing stalwartly upright. It comforted him. It gave him the boost he needed.
The winds berated him once more. Was this going to be his new routine? Walk, sit, meditate, embrace the cold wind, and then walk again? What else was he to do?
Senadin abided, getting up to walk in the direction the winds were bellowing. Beckoning.
He adopted a routine of walking, meditating, and sleeping, or at least attempting to. He would endure the bleak conditions of the void to switch to meditating in a cross-legged position, attempting to control his mind.
“No spoon.”
After days of the routine, his moments of insanity seemed to dissipate. Despite his intention, even the attempt to think of nothing proved to be an action, and the void let him know. Whenever it seemed like he was trying too hard, the icy breeze would kick up and Senadin would start walking again.
It seemed to him that when he tried to think positive thoughts, the darkness would strike him, either with extremely cold gusts of wind, or by dropping the floor from beneath him, letting him fall for a ridiculous amount of time before catching him again in its cold embrace. When he tried to do the opposite and deprecate himself, the darkness would do the same. After several rounds of stubbornly fighting the obvious, Senadin resorted to simply clearing his mind, attempting to recreate the void that was around him inside his mind. He realized it was finally time to embrace it.
The idea of how much time he had spent in pure nothingness was now a mystery to him. He could have been there for a couple weeks, maybe a month at most, but after a few attempts to sleep and not being able to, he gave up and everything started to blend together. Several times now he had tried to scratch tallies into his arms or the back of his hand or the top of his thighs to have a reminder of the times he meditated, but no matter how hard he pressed into his skin, it wouldn’t break. After the pressure subsided from his fingernails against his own flesh, he could feel nothing but cold air around him.
Senadin’s mind had evolved since his abrupt transportation into the void. After hours, days of mulling over things in his head, he had nothing left but to accept where he was and the fact that he might be stuck there for a long time, if not forever. The fleeting questions of why he was there and how to get back were barely even memories now. He no longer tired or felt the sting of the cold. His walks became shorter and shorter, until the winds no longer buffeted his back and all that was left to do was meditate. He now sat cross-legged with his eyes wide open, no longer needing the habit of closing his eyes to descend into his trance-like state that became his meditation.
He realized while being mindful in his meditations that his mind had to go somewhere, not just cease to operate. It had to be given a task that was invisible. The idea wasn’t a trick of the mind, it felt more like a secret pathway around his thoughts that was hiding in plain sight all along. Eventually, he was able to envision the simplest of objects while maintaining his embrace of the void: A solid black orb, slightly lighter than its background of complete darkness. This revelation, that it was possible to create concepts even when there was no generative thought or causal reason for them to happen, was the turning point that sent Senadin’s morale boosting upward. It was only a thought, but he was able to create something out of nothing. He felt a wave of tempered glee rush over him, warming his bones. He expected there to be a rush of icy wind berating him from feeling such positive thoughts, but as he waited, he realized he couldn’t feel any wind because he was surrounded by water.
He felt like he had been sitting there meditating for hours, possibly close to a day, but as his mind came out of his void trance, he could feel the icy sting of water flowing around him. He wasn’t breathing and he didn’t feel as if he needed too, but dread quickly overcame him as he realized the water wasn’t flowing around him, he was diving through it, and he was going straight down.
The idea of going deeper into the water, deeper into the abyss, meant that it would become increasingly more difficult, if not impossible to get back out. Senadin realized this and a stricken panic enveloped him when he suddenly felt the need for air. He tried to swim upward but the pressure of the deep water kept pulling him down. He couldn’t even see where he should swim to and stopped fighting it when hopelessness hit him once more. This new hopelessness was much different from what he felt when he first fell into the darkness. He felt no agony or remorse. He simply understood there was no hope, and he promptly accepted it. He didn’t need hope anyway. After existing in this place, unable to sleep for what seemed like more than a month, hope was no longer something that he wanted or considered an option. He finally accepted it, that hope can kill, but it wasn’t the only thing that could. He accepted that this place was obviously alive, and it wanted something from him. He could feel it. It not only wanted something, but it also wanted everything, it had a hunger; a hunger that was much like what he felt when he experienced his short bouts of insanity.
His mind felt fuzzy. He hadn’t needed to breathe at all in this place until now, where water surrounded him, and it gave him no option to do so.
“Of course it’s ironic. With nothing to lose, all I am is everything I have.”
He sniffed in some of the water through his nostrils to test it, wondering if it was a test to see if he would try to breathe the water. Whatever the test was, he failed; the water was not breathable. He coughed out his remaining air as the water went into his sinuses and down the back of his throat. He could feel his mind shutting down. He lost the feeling in his hands and feet. He could feel it now, his mind drifting into an eternal rest.
“Alright, then. I’m all yours.”
Senadin’s last thoughts trailed to the candle in the window. He could feel its warmth like an inferno against his own life force, paling in comparison. He felt the breeze come through the window, it was comforting, and he smirked.
The candleflame flickered against the wind, and then died.