Nothing. There was nothing. “I can’t see.” Was the first thought that came to his mind. A deep blackness purer than any black that has ever been imagined engulfed everything. There was simply nothing there. He strained his eyes to open realizing they were open and there was simply nothing to see. His heart rate increased as he stared at his outstretched hands yearning desperately to see them. He just wanted to know they were still there. “Am I blind?” The question rang out in his mind but no sound was heard. He tried to speak again and no sound penetrated the nothing that enveloped him. He tried to sit up only to realize there was nothing he was lying on. He wasn’t standing, he wasn’t sitting, he was just existing in this nothing. ‘Floating’ he thought. “Am I floating? What am I floating in?” Desperation and fear grew as his breathing became short and shallow. He couldn’t think; he couldn’t imagine; he couldn’t. He flung his arms around widely reaching out for something, for anything to grasp onto to bring him back into reality. He tried taking long strokes as if in water to reach a surface. His senses indicated no resistance. He felt no water; he felt nothing. His arms dangled out stretched as if treading in an invisible dark void. He couldn’t feel anything. He wasn’t standing on anything. But it felt as if he was floating in the vastness of the dark around him. ‘I can’t feel… anything’ That lone thought crashed in around him as fear replaced the darkness and began to engulf him. His arms snapped back to his body feeling desperately as he rubbed his chest, his hips, his legs, finally rubbing them together as if to produce heat. “Am I dead?” He questioned. He was breathing, he was moving, he was thinking. He just couldn’t hear or see, or feel anything other than his own body. He was confused but he heard each word as he said “I exist.”

His heart finally started slowing. His breath became deeper and more meaningful. “I can hear?” He said aloud. It was muffled and low in volume but he could hear himself. He sighed in relief. He was in a void of nothing but now that nothing was filling him. His breath in and out. His sound as he moved around began filling the nothing with something. That something was him. He started to see shapes. Not of things around him, no. There was still nothing else in this void; he was the only inhabitant as far as he could tell. His arms started to take shape in front of him. His hands and fingers silhouetted against nothing and he could just make them out and they were becoming clear as time moved forward. “Time?” He thought. “Time exists in this void. As do I. I am breathing so there must be some air but…” He trailed off as he thought ‘There was nothing else’. For lack of a better term he floated in this nothing for what felt to him like hours. The fear still existed; it remained with him but it was dulled by the boredom of nothing. His body, before him, shown as muted shapes barely distinguishable from the deep reach black of nothing behind them. He was fascinated by the thought that despite no light he could still make out the shape of his body. Perhaps with the absence of everything his mind would make up things for him to fill in the blanks on what was missing.

Hours passed again as he existed in the void. The fear which once washed over his entire self was but a trickle in the back of his mind as boredom of the nothing set in. He had tried moving himself around, looking in all directions, swimming through whatever it was that surrounded him but despite his best attempts he never had any external stimuli that reflected he was doing anything. He tried doing a flip quite a few times but could only feel himself tuck into a ball. There was no air moving around him so he had no idea if he was successful in his flip attempt. However, he declared himself proficient in the tuck maneuver. After all this apparent time that had passed he realized he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t thirsty. He wasn’t hungry. “Does time even exist here? Or is that simply more… nothing?” His voice had become more noticeable and loud to him the longer he was in this void of nothingness. “There are improvements” as he mixed his internal and external dialogue. “How can I even really know how long I’ve been here, if I have nothing to even gauge the passage of time with?” At that moment he began counting and continued to do so as he existed in the void.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“...One hundred and twenty seve…” he was cut off as he noticed movement in the distance. ‘Distance’ he laughed. “There is no distance, only nothing!” he proclaimed in his best kingly voice. Then, there it was again. The shock of pure fear jolted through his spine. He was not alone. There was something in the nothing. Something that was moving.’How can I see it though?’ he questioned himself. ‘There’s obviously nothing there and no light and nothing for me to see…’ his thought trailed off as he had no answer to the question. But there was something there. It wasn’t moving but he could ‘feel it.’ Those were the words he chose to describe it and it was big. Giant movements he could now see. ‘Yes!’ he thought ‘I can see it! There is something there!’ “Hello!?” he shouted. No echo, no reply, simply nothing. But there it was again. The movement was big, as if a huge thing in front of him was moving as one. It didn’t seem close. He reached out with his hands to be sure. In the back of his mind he yearned for something to touch. He wished it was something, but the fear of there being something being there made him cower his hands back immediately as he had reached out. Again the giant something moved. He was able to make out a lower something and an upper something with protruding somethings out the top. His mind reminisced on the news article he had once read about how the human mind made faces out of things and that is what he saw. A giant face, but it wasn’t a face, at least not a human face. Details emerged, details that he couldn’t describe how he saw, with the lack of anything. The more he stared into the abyss the more he saw. The more focused it became. There it was before him; hundreds of feet tall, a demonic face, with a snout outstretched towards him. Death filled holes where eyes may have once been. Horns outstretched from the back of the skull like protuberance. ‘Not horns’ he thought. No, those were more like antlers you would see on a deer. Teeth as sharp as knives came into view and decorated the upper and lower jaws. If he could see his face I’m sure it would have been as white as snow as the blood leapt to his heart as it began racing again. The fear engrossed him, pure unsaturated fear that he felt like lightning throughout his entire body. The face drew closer and the mouth opened to swallow him whole.

He awoke. Everything hurt, or was that just his mind telling him everything should hurt. Were the two concepts exclusive? Did he hurt? He tried desperately to open his eyes. They worked for a brief moment in time and he drank in the world that once again existed before him. What he saw was a perfectly cut spherical carved out section of the convention hall where he was before all this nothingness happened. He was in a fetal position completely naked as he sat up in wonderment of what he saw around him. Then he was falling, for sure this time. He felt the wind blast against him as he dropped from the carved out dirt pedestal he was on collapsed beneath him. He crumbled against the ground to a deafening thud. All he saw in that moment was sloped dirt walls of the massive crater he now lay in. He could see in the distance along the craters edge people were sliding down slowly toward him. Unable to keep his pained weary eyes open any longer he shut them and fell into a deep sleep.