Eternity had no smell, but it had a consistency: that of cold ashes settling on everything, muffling cries, whispers, and even heartbeats that no longer existed.
I stood there, one silhouette among millions, lost in a single file line that seemed to have no beginning and no end. We were faded shadows, sketches of men and women lost in a gray limbo where the sky was nothing more than a ceiling of heavy fog. Here, on the banks of the Styx, time was not a river, but a stagnant swamp. Every second weighed like centuries, and every minute stripped us a little more of what we had been.
All around me was the spectacle of dissolution. I saw a woman a few rows ahead whose face was slowly fading, like a drawing exposed to the rain. She had probably forgotten her name a thousand years ago; now she was forgetting the shape of her own smile. It was the law of this realm: silence and oblivion. If you couldn't pay the fare, you became part of the scenery, another speck of dust in this desert of melancholy.
I, however, resisted.
There was an anomaly in my mind. A splash of color screaming out in the middle of this desperate monochrome: a red lycoris. This blood-red flower, with petals curved like claws, burned behind my closed eyelids. It was my anchor, my last link to a reality I couldn't grasp, but refused to give up. Every time the fog tried to creep into my thoughts to steal a memory, the image of the flower would flare up, pushing back oblivion with an almost physical violence.
I could feel the stares of the others—or rather, the emptiness of their stares. They had accepted their fate. They waited for a boat that would never come for them, for they had nothing to offer the Ferryman. Their pockets were empty of coins, and their souls were empty of ambition. They had become docile, spiritual flesh ready to be crushed by the machinery of the gods.
But an instinct older than my own death rumbled in my chest. An instinct that told me that salvation was not to be found in waiting, but in sacrilege.
The ground beneath my feet was strange, composed of black mud and fragments of forgotten things. Each step forward was a struggle against an invisible gravity that wanted to pin me to the ground, to integrate me permanently into the shore. We weren't walking toward the Styx; we were dragging ourselves there, driven by a mechanical necessity whose origin no one understood anymore.
In the distance, the sound of water began to be heard. It wasn't the soothing lapping of a river from my lifetime. It was a heavy rumbling, the sound of millions of regrets colliding in a stream of black mercury. The Styx awaited us, an impassable barrier for the wretched, a liquid border between the end and nothingness.
That's when I saw him. Him.
The massive silhouette of Charon stood out in the fog. He didn't look like a man, but like a fragment of a mountain draped in dark rags. His pole struck the surface of the water with the regularity of a guillotine blade. With each stroke, a shiver of terror ran through the line of shadows.
My turn was approaching. And with it, the moment when I would have to choose between becoming another whisper on the shore or a cry in the abyss.