It always started underwater, a plummet downwards from the wavering light of being into a blackness of depth. The world became heavier and Alize’s limbs turned to iron, dragging her down, ever faster, to a place where light had never shone, not even before the beginning of the universe. Alize struggled against the forces pulling her down, she beat her hands upwards, she kicked her feet. She would not yield to the Emptiness, not while she had strength in her body.

Still the depth greeted her, surrounded her and already her strength began to wane. Despite her efforts, her determination, the light above her receded while the darkness swarmed her vision. She held her last gasp of breath in her lungs, where it started to burn.

But pain was still life. She was not yet defeated, though each moment imperiled every one of her resistances. Craning her neck, Alize was no longer certain whether light shone above her or if it were only the lingering imprint of brightness in her eyes. Either way, time would soon claim it. Neither could exist at this depth. Faltering, Alize exhaled her spent air, feeling more than seeing the bubbles dance upwards. They would begin their long journey to surface, now nearly as distant from her plight as the sky from the sea.

Alize inhaled again on instinct, always a mistake in the Emptiness. The viscous liquid invaded her mouth, bitter on her tongue, then plunged into her chest to seek a teetering equilibrium. Its tendrils wrapped around her heart to slow her hammering heartbeat. She did not want to capitulate, she did not want it to claim her, but her panic could not fight it, could not rouse the steady, belabored beats of a life trapped in stasis.

From her lungs, the cold began its journey into her own depths, plumbing through her arteries, reaching even the tiniest of veins. A million frigid rivers pulsed under her skin. They would turn her to ice, to stone, to everything hard, cold, and inhuman. This was a condemnation, so similar to the Temple explosion, but at the same time, entirely opposite. This felt meticulous, staid, as if the fates of nature watched with dispassionated resignation while Alize suffered with every part of her body and mind. It felt more pitiless than the frenzy of heat at the Temple. But she could not hold that comparison in her unraveling mind. The memory began to fade. The darkness had no use for memories. She was cut free from the roles she had played in her world. Whoever she had been, whatever she had been part of, she was nothing more than waste, now.

Alize opened her mouth to scream but her voice had disappeared long ago, somewhere towards the light. The darkness crushed her tears from her eyes, replacing the space with its own relentless weight. If she could see the tears, they would tell her which direction was up. Or perhaps the emptiness now transcended something as corporeal as gravity.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

After the span of a thousand years, Alize no longer sank in the darkness. Or perhaps she had fallen so far, she could no longer sense herself sinking. The emptiness suspended her body and thoughts. It coiled outwards from her, its enormity another testament to the magnitude of her isolation. There was no one to witness her pain, to distract her, to give any of it meaning. Her arms became so cold they turned brittle, thin seashells over warm flesh that too would harden soon, the first step to an immortal form.

Occasionally a wave undulation disturbed her, jostled her limbs. It hurt, desperately. Alize dreaded the coming processes. She wished she could shake, could draw her arms around her to protect herself. But it was not the external world that she feared, rather the emptiness breeding inside her.

Her skin began to crumble. Alize could not see it, but could feel the dead filaments peel away from the muscles underneath. Each tiny erosion pricked, but the pain at least meant Alize retained some sensation. As it exposed her flesh to the darkness, the cold pressed against her, numbed her.

And the silence smothered her. In life, Alize could hear only with her ears, but in the emptiness every part of her being encountered the raging silence. She felt it against her unprotected rawness, soft and jagged simultaneously. It muted even the remnants of her panic.

Submit, the silence would speak, but it never needed to. There was no fight, no contest. Alize’s defeat was inevitable. The silence had robbed her of even her will to resist.

It robbed her of the memory of resistance.

The darkness plied deeper into her being, plucking at the web of veins protecting her tendons and loosening them from her bones. It would dismantle her, sinew by sinew to reveal her pale skeleton, slick with blood for the darkness to swallow, before it began scratching at her bones. The darkness would carve them away slowly, into pointed shards so small they could not hold hope, or doubts or bitter regrets.

I always hoped that death was starlight. Alize’s thoughts were unraveling. They were part of the Emptiness too. Everything she had ever been would turn to darkness, to silence.

The Emptiness would claim her, transform her into it, until she stretched across galaxies, imprisoned in endless vacuity. An existence without light, without even herself for company. This insipid eternity spread out before her. She would exist, she would be.

But it would mean nothing.

No. The thought formed in her mind. No!

And somewhere far away, a light blazed. The tenuous connection to her soul hastened into the depths, coming to revive her body. Her soul was safe, somewhere, and Alize still retained enough of a residual connection that it could protect her from this endless fate of darkness.

For now.

The rush began, accelerating Alize’s remains towards the light, until she could gasp, could weep, could shout in relief. Her soul bore her upwards, out of the darkness, back into life.

If she could remember how to live.