Time finally came to a complete standstill when I reached the fault line between dry land and the liquid abyss. There, the fog parted to reveal the monumental horror of the crossing. It was not a simple boat that awaited us, but a blackened wooden structure, saturated with centuries of moisture, every joint groaning. The sound was not that of wood working; it was a chorus of muffled groans, as if each plank of the boat had been carved from the frozen cry of a damned soul.
At the center of this spectral vessel stood Rigidity made flesh—or rather, made of absence.
Charon.
He looked nothing like the engravings in history books. He was an entity of pure function, a bureaucratic extension of death itself. His silhouette towered over two meters, draped in a robe of indefinable texture, somewhere between rotten linen and solidified smoke. His hands, huge and gnarled, clutched a polished iron pole whose contact with the shore produced a metallic echo that resonated to the marrow of my nonexistent bones.
The Ferryman did not breathe. He did not blink. He was nothing but icy anticipation.
When my turn came, the silence grew thicker, so thick that it seemed to want to seal my lips forever. I looked up. Under his hood, there was no face, only two jet-black wells, empty eye sockets swirling with fragments of dead stars. His gaze did not rest on me, but through me, assessing the residual value of my soul as one might inspect an account ledger.
"The offering," he said curtly.
His voice was not human. It was the rumbling of a landslide, the crash of an immutable law descending upon a tiny life.
I stood still. My hands were empty. My past was ashes I could no longer collect. I had no gold, no honor, no prayer to offer him.
"I have nothing," I said.
My voice sounded foreign to me, a discordant note in this symphony of gray. Charon tilted his head very slightly. The movement was mechanical, devoid of emotion. To him, I was not a suffering being; I was a miscalculation, a piece of debris in the perfect machinery of the afterlife.
"Nothingness is the lot of those who arrive empty-handed," he replied with brutal indifference. "Step back, shadow. Your destiny is not the other shore. Your destiny is to feed the mist. Wait here until your essence dissolves. Wait until the Styx drinks your last reflections until you are nothing more than a breath of dust beneath my feet.
His words were chains. I felt the will of the shore take hold of me, urging me to take that step back, to join the mass of anonymous souls who faded away in resignation. The "divine bureaucracy" made no exceptions. You had to pay to exist, even in death.
But then, deep within my failing structure, something rebelled.
It wasn't fear. It was anger of the purest kind, a spark of red fire bursting from the Lycoris that haunted my vision. Why should I fade away? Why should the end of my journey be dictated by a debt collector draped in black?
The Anomaly awoke. It was not a cry, but a straightening. My fingers clenched. The resignation that flowed through my veins like a slow poison was instantly burned away by an iron will. If death demanded a price, I would pay with the only thing I had left: my refusal to obey.
I did not back down. I took a step forward, breaking the sacred distance between the dead and the Ferryman. The creaking of the boat stopped abruptly. For the first time in eternity, Charon seemed surprised. The order had just been broken.
"I will not be your dust," I gritted through my teeth.