Darkness?
No… Not quite.
I drift through an endless expanse, weightless, lost. Stars– or something like that– glimmer faintly in the distance. There's no up, there's no down. Every direction leads to oblivion.
You'd think this would be terrifying, but there's a profound peace that blankets the place. It radiates a strange sense of belonging, turning the alien into something almost nostalgic. I don't remember who I was, I barely remember being.
But here? Here I feel whole.
As if purpose no longer matters. As if all I'm meant to do is exist. The only constant I could grasp is my contentment with staying here forever.
And that's enough.
Time passes– or maybe it doesn't. I can't comprehend anymore, then I feel something stirring through the emptiness of the void.
A hand– or the idea of one– reaches out and envelops me. It moved with a sense of duty. A sense of purpose. I hadn't seen anything as committed in my time here ever. I try to move, to resist, but I am grasped.
Suffocation.
Not of breath, but of self. The boundless peace being violently ripped away, replaced by crushing confinement. Light nor shadow shows itself. The hum of the void is silenced, replaced by an absence of everything familiar. The sense of belonging evaporates.
I am alone.
Truly, utterly alone. I can't feel the presence of other drifting essences– beings I hadn't consciously known were there, sharing the vast quiet– severed, gone. That deep-seated nostalgia of being a part of the void's fabric… is extinguished in an instant.
Why? The thought claws its way through the shock. What transgression is simple existence? Was drifting in peaceful oblivion still too much? Was the agency to even cease – forbidden? This… this force… it couldn't tolerate even the hollow peace I had found. It stripped me of the only concept of home I had.
A measureless span crawled by – millennia compressed into a single beat, or a moment stretched across eternity. I floated in the crushing pressure of isolation, like a raw nerve exposed to the freezing dark. Then… disturbances. Faint, at first. Tremors through the void's fabric. Flutters of raw panic. Pulses of profound confusion. One… then another… and another. Violations mirroring my own. The hand wasn't finished. It was gathering.
They are here. Trapped. Confused. Terrified, just like me. The suffocating emptiness replaced by their shared dread.
Then it returned– the hand. It feels vaster, colder, final. Its reach no longer mine alone, it swept through the void, gathering us with purpose. Not gently, not mercifully.
The hand, it's doing something… It feels like it's trying to– A̸̧̚G̶̹͐Ĥ̴͔!̴̖́!̷̟̊
Ẃ̸̿͜͜H̸͖̉͗A̸̙̝̒T̵̻̓ ̵̧̲̋̌.̵̥̺̍̆ ̷̟͉̅͗I̶͈͜͠S̶̭̽ ̸͚̅H̴̭̒Å̶͉P̶̩̈́ͅP̷͔͓̍̿Ẹ̸̱̒N̴͖͐İ̸̧̟N̴̡̅͊Ņ̸͎̏̈Ṅ̸̪̀Ğ̶̪
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