Intermission of Despair

A void of nothingness encapsulates the world. Light and darkness bear no meaning in the abyss, with the only certainty being frighteningly absent. He had seen this before.

Seen? Was he really seeing anything? The same pain as before pierced his eyes, flooding them with a foreign sight. Did he have eyes? He could certainly feel the pain of where they should be.

“This is nothing.”

Nothing? He had heard that before. What did that voice mean by nothing? If he looked down where his body should be and only saw the void, does that mean he was nothing as well?

“Boundaries exist here only if the viewer is willing.”

He wanted to see his hands. Was that willing enough?

As if on command, lines emerged and formed the shape of hands. The space enclosed by those lines bore a distinct difference to the void they formed from, but he couldn’t tell what. It didn’t hurt to look at them, however, so he focused his gaze on them.

His right hand wasn’t only a hand. There was a disc in it, an attached chain undulated in the space around it. Where did this come from? Was it a… pocket watch? Jiron’s watch? Why did he have Jiron’s watch?

The moments preceding flooded back to him. Much higher in clarity than when he initially observed in numbness, the scene of Jiron and the soldiers fading into the dissolution repeated over his vision. He saw his hands write out that accursed word, expanding out to dissolve the world around it.

These hands in front of him were responsible. All he had left was that watch. Is that what he wanted to show her? Was that whole journey over something so frivolous? Did Jiron die over something so frivolous?

The lines of his hands returned into the void. They were too painful to look at. He felt like crying, but he would need definite eyes to do that. He couldn’t manage that either. He wanted to curl up and cower, but he didn’t have legs or arms to tuck in.

This was really his fault. Whatever Jiron’s reason was, Erebos was the one who pushed them along. For what reason? Because he wanted to see Jiron happy? Because he didn’t want to see him unhappy? Was there a difference?

Why did it have to turn out this way? If he killed Jiron, why didn’t he die along with him?

Maybe he did die. There wasn’t any way to know for sure, but maybe this abyss was the only thing awaiting him after death.

“Return to me once you find your resolve.”

His resolve? What did that voice want from him? He would rather never return to this place of nothingness and painful memories. He wanted to escape.

And that void parted, yielding a world of edges underneath.