The first step I took outside the line was like a thunderclap in a world that had forgotten noise.
Around me, the shock was palpable, not in the form of screams, but in a total standstill. Millions of shadows, frozen in their millennial lethargy, seemed to freeze even more. Their heads, heavy with centuries of oblivion, turned slowly toward me like automatons. No one ever stepped out of line. Ever. The line was the only structure, the only certainty. To break the line was to break the very geometry of the afterlife. It was the first sin, an act of free will that had no place in this terminal of existence.
I saw in their washed-out eyes a glimmer of fear, but also a hint of sickly jealousy. I was the anomaly who dared to move when everything else was condemned to stasis.
"Stop," growled Charon's voice, sharper than ever.
But I was no longer listening. The image of the red lycoris in my mind was no longer just a flower; it had become a blaze. I sprang forward.
The race to the river was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The banks of the Styx were not made of sand or earth, but of black, viscous mud, composed of the unspoken regrets and dried tears of those who had failed before me. With every stride, the ground tried to swallow me up. Each step was physical agony, as if thousands of invisible hands were reaching out of the mud to grab my ankles, begging me to stay with them in the safety of nothingness.
The pain was searing. It didn't strike my muscles, but the very fiber of my being. Running here was like tearing off my own skin with every movement. The atmospheric pressure seemed to double, seeking to crush me under the weight of my insolence. But I pushed on. I clawed at the stale air, my imaginary lungs burning with a cold fire, my eyes fixed on the ebony line that marked the end of dry land.
The Ferryman raised his pole. I felt a burst of divine energy whistle past my ears, pulverizing the mist where I had stood a fraction of a second before. The ground exploded into shards of black frost. He was no longer trying to place me in a line; he was trying to annihilate me.
I finally reached the break. The edge of the bank.
Before me, the Styx did not look like water. It was a moving mass of black mercury, a hateful, dense, oily substance that seemed to possess a malevolent consciousness. The river did not flow, it pulsated. You could see whirlpools of screaming faces, currents of broken memories colliding in a crash of broken glass. It was a liquid that did not wet, but devoured.
I paused for a split second at the edge of the precipice. The cold emanating from the abyss was so intense that it seemed to want to freeze the spark of life that remained in me.
"Jump, and you will be torn apart by eternity," Charon shouted behind me.
I took one last look at the gray line, at the dreary safety of oblivion. Then I looked at the black river. Between the dust and the abyss, I had chosen my side.
I didn't jump out of despair. I jumped out of defiance.
The moment my feet left solid ground was the quietest of my life. For a suspended second, I was free. Free from the laws of death, free from Charon's boat, free from the line of shadows. I was a point of pure will floating in the void.
Then the black water rose to meet me.
The impact was cataclysmic. The Styx welcomed me not as a swimmer, but as an intruder to be eliminated. The heavy liquid rushed into my senses, suffocating me with the smell of the end of worlds. I plunged, sucked in by a monstrous gravitational force, leaving the gray light for total darkness, a darkness that had taste and weight.
I didn't know where I was going. I only knew that I would never return.