Darkness in the World

Darkness fills the air with an ominous tension, black dagger blades poking out to taste a drop of blood from your flesh.

And what is left, what is there in the folds of ebony enveloping your body? Perhaps existence, perhaps the key to eternity, it is impossible to tell with a blind eye or at least one gouged out with the blades of darkness and reality.

The emergence of a light somewhere in the void draws your attention, illuminating the chamber in which you stood for all time. The ceiling still ebbs away into the darkness, too tall to exist. The walls, if they were ever there in the first place, begin to disappear, or they seem to, edging out of conventional sight if sight still exists. The walls are just as eternal as the ceiling. It is only a ninety degree shift that sets one apart from the other.

But they might as well not subsist at all. After all, your attention is on that small pinprick of luminosity that lights the world around you.

It beckons.

“Will you enter my embrace?” It asks.

Dare you answer the seductive voice? What if it is all a ploy, just a plot to torment, destroy, break, or manipulate you? Logic departs.

“Y-yes,” you stammer, beginning to sprint across the world for fear of losing the light.

And then it begins. The one thing that logic could have gained for you the only reason it was ever worth listening to rationale. The dot of light in the distance flickers, like a diaphragm hiccupping. It grows in intensity for an instant, bright white light flooding everywhere, burning your stabbed eyes in some impossible way, then fades away quickly to darkness, then alights again to the same luminosity as before.

“You’re too slow.”

“You’re too slow.”

“You’re too slow.”

It only repeats.

Somewhere deep inside of you, your heart quickens with the pace of your steps. It grows faster and faster until the voice in the distance is drowned out and all that exists is the bass beat of your heart beating in your eardrums.

Then unexpectedly, there is a moment, one singular instant quicker than the beat of a hummingbird’s wings when the light extinguishes. Simultaneously, your heart hiccups in tune with the light. You hope that perhaps it is only flickering again but hope is the beginning of disappointment.

Once the light goes out, you stumble on a few steps quite taken aback with what has happened. Your hope is extinguished and the darkness stabs in again. The walls that, moments before, seemed so eternal are now so close. They collapse in on you, crush you, stab you. Eyes are useless and ears, they are too. There is nothing to see or hear, nothing to taste or smell.

But oh can you feel! It feels like the darkness is jagged, scraping your skin, tearing your flesh apart and feasting on the blood that drips out. All that exists is you and your agony and the dark knives around you.

But for some reason, you don’t feel the agony of your life slipping away. The only thing you can feel is that you are alone.