It was warm.

Not as warm as the mother-glass, no. It lacked the same warm thickness, that soupy feeling against his skin that made him feel swaddled and comforted. Hugged and beloved.

It was more of a breezy warmth, washing over him gently as it carried him. It carried him, to the place he had to go, to… to…

Rough dirt thumped against his side. He blinked, bubbles blurring his vision. Reaching, he sank his hands into the river-bed. Sand squeezed through his fingers as he closed his fists. Silt muddied the water around him.

There was a place. A place that he had to go.

There was nothing more important. Nothing.

Walking on all four, he pushed himself forward. The going was rough, the decline tough, his hands kept on slipping, the sand flowing through his fingers. But he was determinated. Because there was a place he had to go.

A sudden current buffeted him, almost making him lose his grip. His feet slipped and for a moment his whole body waved into the water, struggling to hold on. It passed a moment later and he kept going.

Having them slipping made him realize that he had feet. Pulling one up, he thrust it into the silt, making a step for himself. He pushed on it, sinking his hand into the sand, before making another rest for his other foot and keeping on ascending. He kept going like that for long minutes, the currents forcing him to hunker down to avoid being swept away.

Eventually, the incline started to straighten up. It turned into a flat expanse a few moments later.

Tired, he stopped to catch his breath. His mouth, his throat, his lungs, they were all full of water. His eyes stung as he looked up. The waterline was just above his head. Beyond, the stars were splotches of light against a wavy backdrop of black.

They reminded him of the place where he was needed, wanted; the place where he was supposed to go. He reached for them.

His hand broke through the surface of the water and he emerged right after. Sounds rushed into his air, splashing and wheezing and the rush of water.

He stood there, breathing water out, his hand reaching toward the sky. The stars blinked mischieviously into the blanket of the night, unreachable, untouchable.

He lowered his hand, looking at it. It was large, the fingers thin and long; a black substance covered them, some up to the knuckle, others reaching as far as the palm. It was hard like the carapace of an insect, glossy and black like spilled ink.

The stars winked.

He turned. A massive installation filled half of the night sky. Concrete towers and walls jutted out from a rocky bedrock, the foreboding black of the rock melding with the grim grey of heavy fortifications. The place’s imperturbability was broken by the red lights flashing through slits and windows. In the distance, he could hear the blaring of sirens.

He didn’t care about it.

He turned to look upward.

The stars beckoned to him coquiteshly, reaching from the black sheet above with fingers of cold light. As he watched, those fingers sank into the burned-out place that was his memory. They searched and dug, until the thing was out and before his eyes, for him to see and marvel and be blinded from. More than an urgency, it was a need, enmeshed with his own being like an ivy wrapped around a ruin. A need to be somewhere, to run… to go… where?

He couldn’t see it. The need was nothing but a twisted tangle, a knot of urgency and want and yearning and confusion.

He focused on it, struggling to untangle the knot. It hurt to touch, but it hurt more not to know.

His fingers burned and scalded as he pulled and ripped, gnawing teeth sinked in his soul as he fought to find a meaning that wasn’t confused feelings. It was like trying to tear down a mountain with a teaspoon, to push back the sea with a broom. Yet, slowly, his efforts produced fruit. The distant need became closer, like a star slowly dancing toward him from the heavens. It clumped together, it took shape, it resolved into a vague silouhette.

It wasn’t a place. It was a person.

It was… a woman.

He held it in his cupped hands, that star, descended from the night sky to nestle into his palm, for him to watch and marvel and be blinded from. He spoke to him of happiness, and love, and all that was good and whole in the world. It was there. It waited for him. As distant as the moon and just as beautiful. Just as ethereal.

His soul yearned for it, that vision of love and beauty. He had to find her. There couldn’t be life without it, no soul, no dream, no meaning.

He lowered his hands. The stars winked, understanding. He watched back.

The last of the water dripping off him drained into the sand. He stood up, his tattered jumpsuit hanging around him.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

He looked forward.

A beach of sand and gravel extended before him, a wasteland of garbage and wrecks and empty desolation. Beyond it, a city glittered, a thousand lights to rival the night sky.

He looked toward the sky, where the stars were still winking. Allusive, cajoling, beckoning him forward like a pale finger curling from beneath a door.

He started walking.

--------------------

The gravel crunched beneath his feet, sharp little rocks jabbing in his soles. It didn’t hurt. Despite him not wearing shoes, the same black substance on his hands covered his feet. It enclosed them in an inky, metallic sheen, blocking any pain from the contact.

He was alone. The sounds of his steps barely rang out before being swallowed by the salt-heavy air.

He didn’t mind it. He liked the silence.

Metallic wrecks, like skeleton remains of beached whales, littered the sand. They loomed over him as he passed, old and foreboding, creaking despite being no breeze there. He could feel their hatred, radiating from their mouldering forms like heat from an open forge. They hated him because he lived and could walk and see, while they were condemned to flake with rust and crust with salt, always able to see the sea but never to touch it, ever again.

Garbage, beach implements and toys and masses of rust that could have been anything emerged from the sand like so many tombstones. They hated him too, but their hatred had a pitiful quality to it, a self-pity that made it weak.

He was walking when he felt the sand go down beneath his foot. He jumped back, just in time to avoid falling in the sinkhole that opened where he had been standing a moment earlier. He frowned at it, at the churning depths of jagged rocks and sand. He followed the sinkhole with his eyes. It ended to a jagged limb of rusted metal thrust into the ground.

From then, he made sure where he put his feet, and kept his distance from the larger wrecks.

Eventually, the graveyard of rust gave way and he stepped into an open space that wasn’t just sand and gravel.

The road was dusty and lonely, not a breeze to stir the air. Old vehicles, now little more than metal skeletons, littered the roadside, abandoned where they stood when whoever lived there once had left. They led the way to a jumbled mess of a junkyard, crowding around the rundown entrance like beggars asking to be let inside.

Across the junkyard, alone in the desolate emptiness, stood an old diner, the kind belonging to post-apocalyptic movies. Broken steps led to a door leaning ajar on its hinges. A neon signboard above it once named the place as “The Ol’ Pittance” in bold, glowing letters. Time and neglect had taken its toil over it, turning the letters off until another name glowed into the wastes.

“The Pit” was open for business.

The door screeched against the floor as he pushed it open. The local beyond was smoky, the touch of salt covering every surface. Tendrils of fog sneaking around a grimy floor. They slithered beneath crooked tables and chairs, and the legs of those they sat at them. People leaned over salt-encrusted glasses and didn’t speak. He felt their eyes follow him as he made his way toward the bar.

An old man stood behind the counter, wiping a dirty glass with a soiled rag. He did so with a strange mix of contempt, sadness and solemnity, like it was both an important duty and the most pointless chore of the world. He looked like the salt had got to him the same it had done to his bar, his skin looking like a weather-beaten root and with the color to boot.

As he reached the counter, the barman turned to him. The heavy slump of his eyebrows and the haughty look in his eyes as he scanned him made for an uncanny contrast. Uncanny almost as much as the eyes themselves. They were the same color of the fog sneaking on the floor and bulged out too much.

For a long moment, the barman said nothing. He just watched him with those foggy eyes, that seemed to bulge out more, the more he looked.

He said nothing, looking back.

The barman snorted, an unpleasant, wet sound, and returned to his wiping.

“We don’t get newcomers here.” Even his voice had the wet in it. It reminded him of the sound of the sea while underwater. “Drinks?”

He watched him. Buying and selling. The concept of money. It was all trickling back in, drop by drop.

“I don’t have any money…”

The barman’s laughter was a hacking cough. “Good. Because we don’t have any drinks.”

He watched him. Then, he turned to glance at the room behind. Only a handful of tables had people at it.

“Where is everybody?” He asked.

The barman made an unpleasant sound as he gathered something in his mouth. He spat. “They left,” he grunted. “Too close to the Sea, they said. To the Big Nasty.” His lips curled back and he showed him a row of crooked, yellowish teeth.

He watched him, not understanding. The sea was warm.

The barman frowned. He drew back on his glass, looking annoyed. “All the people packed up and went to the city. Place gone to hell ever since.” He shrugged toward the desolate room. “That’s the dregs at the bottom of the glass.” He must have been pleased from the image, because he coughed another laugh.

“And you? What are you doing here?”

He thought about it for a moment. The distant silouhette hung in his mind, even more sparkling now that he was sorrounded by grime and salt-encrusted glass.

“I am searching for someone.”

The barman pulled up with his nose, sounding like phlegm bubbled in his throat. “Started recently?”

He blinked at the strange question. “Yes…”

“Won’t find it here then.” The barman turned back to his glass. He nursed it like it was a babyborn. “This is a place for endings, not beginnings.” He hacked again, fond of the image.

“Where then?” He asked, clenching a hand on the counter.

The barman shrugged. “To the City, maybe,” he said. “All the world is there. That thing you looking for might as well be there too”. He scanned him with an ironic look. “Won’t find much dressed like that though.”

He looked at himself. Apart from being barefooted, his orange jumpsuit was in tatters; it fell around him, little more than burned out scraps. Memories trickled in, drop by drop. You didn’t go around dressed like that.

He watched the barman. The man shrugged.

“Can’t help you there,” he said, but then reached behind the counter. “Apart from that.”

He threw something in his hand. He watched it. A hat. It was a blackened tophat, woven out of flimsy cloth that felt both rough and flimsy under his fingers. The top sluped slightly to the side and a patch of different color had been used to sew shut a hole on the side. Salt crusted all over it in grimy spot.

He watched the barman. The man had already returned to wipe his glass.

“Have a name?” He asked.

He clutched the hat to his chest. “No.”

The barman gave him an unimpressed look. “You look dark enough,” he said, his bulging eyes pausing over his hands, making him feel the need to hide them. “And you’re young. How about Dark Kid?” He grinned.

He frowned. “I am not a kid.”

The barman hacked. “That’s what a kid’d say alright.” He shrugged. “Whatever. Your name your choice. How about just Dark then?”

He watched the tophat. The tophat watched him curiously. It… it wasn’t so bad. The star was bright, but he? He was dark.

“I am Dark,” he murmured.

The barman’s wet laughter echoed through the bar.

“Got any money?” He asked, bulging eyes twinkling.

He shook his head. Buying and selling. The concept of money. He understood it. But it didn’t make much sense to him.

“I’ll just take it.”

“Hey now”. The barman denuded his teeth. “That’s Villain talk, you know?”

He blinked at the man.

“Villain?”

“That’s the bad guys. Or at least that’s what people in the City say.” He shrugged.

Bad guys… he revolved those words in his mind for a bit. Was he a bad guy? He wasn’t sure. He only wanted to find the star. Did that make him a bad guy?

The tophat had no answers.

“Don’t think too much about it,” the barman grunted, breaking his reverie. “You got an objective, don’t you?”

He stood taller. “Yes.”

“That’s much more than most of us can say.” The barman’s arm whipped toward him, the rag almost striking his nose. “What are you waiting for then? Villain or not, you got something to do, don’t you? So go! Beat it! Start running and answer question later!”

The man returned to wipe the glass, like he had disappeared from his counter.

Dark understood that he had overstayed his welcome. In that place of endings, there was no space for such as him.

Without a word, he turned his back to the barman and his dirt glass and walked out of the bar.

Outside, the sky was starting to lighten up, danw approaching. The stars winked out one after the other, blowing him a kiss before returning to the dark place where they spawned from. But he knew that they watched. They always did.

He looked at the tophat in his hands. It was a patchy, pitiful thing, but there was still life and curiosity and purpose in it. Just like him.

Lifting up, he settled it on his head. The hat tilted a little sideways, before finding its place, a little passenger on the life of the one called Dark.

He smiled. The tophat waved at him from his perch. He had made his first friend.

Dark turned toward the city in the distance. With dawn approaching, the glittering lights were slowly dimming down. What it didn’t ever dim was the star that Dark saw in front of him, that sihoulette he would chase to the end of the earth.

He wouln’t ever stop following it, never stop walking toward it. To reach, to understand, to remember.

He started walking.