I. Darkness

Soren last recalled the sheen of a metal blade and its coolness against his neck. He awoke in total darkness atop a bed of grass. Beams of light broke in patches across a black sky, illuminating ruined buildings, and mountains, and plains and rivers and forests, all green with life, yet desolate of humanity. A feeling of dread began constricting his mind, as if the black sky were alive and trying to communicate with him. He scrambled toward a patch of white light and looked upon the darkness with a strange sense of fear. It felt rooted in something closer to his heart than death. Soren wondered what it was as he turned toward a voice.

"Is—is someone there?" A woman crawled out of the darkness. Trembling, she knelt across from Soren at the edge of his sanctuary. Her face was silken, round, with pale skin. Her eyes were bagged from fatigue, and bright red irises shone beneath the light.

She wore a plain dress covering her body, her arms bare; an arrow protruded through her chest, the arrowhead covered in dry blood. She smiled with snow-white teeth.

"I...have finally found someone..." The woman crawled up to Soren and stopped at his feet.

"Please...help me..." Soren felt a profound sense of disgust, yet tinged with a latent warmth that beckoned him, so that he might comfort her. The woman's pleading eyes began to bleed a black, viscous liquid.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"I am nothing, nothing at all. Please..." The woman reached and touched his hand. A torrent of emotions shot through his soul and mind, thrashing around his being with rage, jealousy, sadness, euphoria—ending on a slow, evanescent puff of opium smoke. He felt them begin to supplant his own, gripping him with a sense of fading consciousness as his vision turned hazy—for a moment he saw himself outside his own body. Soren kicked the woman away in a wide-eyed frenzy, his mind seized by instinct; the woman groaned, but did not seem fazed. Blood seeped out of her nose.

"No..."

The woman arched backward, eyes filled dark as bottled ink, mouth hanging, jaw stretching, tearing away from her head in one singular, continuous motion. Her eyes liquefied and ran out of their sockets, dribbling down her face, staining her dress with fathomless splotches of black. It happened suddenly with no gasps for breath, no cries of pain, no tears, wholesome and beautiful as they are, thought Soren. She collapsed onto her back; Soren watched her body slide into the darkness, dragged by a long, pale, wrinkled hand. It was too long to have come from a human. Then all was quiet.

“What in God’s name—”

Soren recalled the metal blade and the imperceptible moment between being and non-being beneath it—groping in the darkness of his mind, he found nothing. Then came fear.

His body sought action to content itself with. Running his hands through his hair revealed it wavy, partially malleable. It covered the entirety of his head, just long enough to pass his ears. His face felt thin, sharp around the jaw, perhaps a little gaunt. His eyes? My eyes…

Beyond the darkness, he sensed a presence listening to his repeated questions; then he started yelling, screaming, crying for his mother, his wife.

“Yes, my wife, my wife!” Soren said aloud. “But who is she? Why is she not here with me? Where am I, where am I...” and so it went.

Light needs sustenance; darkness does not. The starving patch of whiteness flickered more frequently, dimming as if to smother itself. Soren felt his body lock up; he could not move an inch from where he sat. He resigned himself and decided he was dreaming: a vivid, lucid dream warning him to attend the Sacrament on Sunday, or he would awake beneath the taunting glow of a child’s torch in the absolute darkness, teeming with imagination. The child was braver than him, unafraid of whatever awaited. He envied the child.

The light faded totally, without so much as a sigh. Soren closed his eyes, then opened them again; this is what it is like to sleep. His eyes widened. That’s the secret! So simple, as if a child had told him...

He lay against the soft grass and felt a slight breeze tickle his face, and with a wide smile, felt assured; he shut his eyes, and for a moment, truth and falsehood became one.