Eternity had no smell. It was nothing but a texture.
It pressed against the senses like an invisible weight, a burden one could never grow accustomed to.
It was the feel of cold ashes settling over everything every object, every thought, every remnant of the self.
This gray dust seeped everywhere, sliding beneath a skin that possessed neither warmth nor true existence anymore.
Silence was not the absence of sound, but an active force.
It smothered screams before they could even take shape in parched throats.
It strangled whispers. It extinguished the last echoes of hearts that had already forgotten their own rhythm.
It was not emptiness. It was a saturation of nothing.
An excess of nothingness so dense it became physically oppressive.
I stood there, motionless, a mere silhouette among millions of others just like it.
I was absorbed into a single-file line stretching far beyond the limits of perception.
This line had no visible beginning, no discernible end. It simply was.
It formed a rigid spine, an unmoving scar cutting through an expanse of absolute gray.
We were washed-out shadows, sketches of men and women with uncertain outlines.
Unfinished shapes, slowly eroding, trapped in a limbo where individuality was considered a manufacturing defect.
Here, time worked patiently to correct that error of being oneself.
Above our heads, the sky was not a sky at all.
It was a low ceiling of compact fog, a mass of mist frozen and heavy as lead.
A lid pressed down upon the world to ensure that nothing ever could escape.
Here, on the banks of the Styx, time was no longer a river. It flowed toward no ocean.
It stagnated. It pooled around us like the foul waters of a thick, viscous swamp.
Seconds no longer passed; they piled atop one another.
Each instant weighed like centuries upon the soul, crushing the last impulses of resistance.
Each passing minute peeled away a little more of the substance of what we once had been.
It was a slow, methodical, irreversible erosion.
Memories frayed first at the edges, fading like ink forgotten beneath relentless rain.
Beloved faces became nameless masks; cherished voices dissolved into indistinct buzzing.
Then emotions dulled in turn, losing their sharpness, their color, their necessity.
Joy became a distant legend, and pain itself eventually turned into an abstract concept.
At last, identity collapsed.
It was the most complex structure of all and also the most fragile.
We waited, but we no longer knew for what, nor why.
We were nothing more than empty vessels, ready to be filled by the eternal gray.
All around me unfolded the silent spectacle of dissolution.
A few rows ahead, my gaze fixed upon a woman—or the remnant of what she had once been.
Her face was erasing itself before my eyes, her features fading like a drawing beneath an invisible eraser.
The curve of her nose melted into the flatness of gray; her eyes were nothing more than washed-out stains.
Her mouth had become an uncertain scar, a line that no longer remembered how to open.
She stared ahead with the terrible patience of those who have nothing left to await.
She had probably forgotten her own name more than a thousand years ago.
Now she was losing the shape of her smile, the sensation of warmth that had once accompanied it.
Soon, she would forget that she had ever possessed the capacity to be happy.
This was the immutable law of this realm: the absolute reign of silence and oblivion.
It was not a punishment imposed by anger, but by a glacial indifference.
If you had nothing with which to pay the passage, you did not cross.
And if you did not cross, you waited until you were nothing at all.
Eventually, you became a fragment of the landscape, a grain of dust embedded in the mud of the shore.
An anonymous particle of melancholy contributing to the immensity of this nothingness.
Yet I resisted.
There was an anomaly in the workings of my mind, a flaw in the erasure machine.
A blot of color screamed within me, obscene with vitality in this monochrome world.
A red lycoris.
Blood-red—vivid, impossible.
Its petals curved like sharpened claws, elegant and brutal at once.
It was as if the flower itself had been sculpted from a substance made of pure defiance.
It burned behind my eyes, a persistent image that refused to be diluted by the fog.
I did not know why this vision endured when everything else was being torn from me.
I did not know on which grave it had grown, nor which hand had picked it.
Perhaps it marked the boundary of a farewell I had sworn to make eternal.
The context, the story, the name of the one who had given it to me—all of that was gone.
Only the flower's shape and its blood-soaked color survived.
But that was enough to hold the structure of my soul together.
It was my anchor, my last link to a reality I refused to abandon.
Each time the fog crept closer to steal another fragment of me, the lycoris ignited.
It brought me no comfort. It wounded me.
It drove back oblivion with a physical savagery, like a blade of iron heated white-hot.
In the distance, a vibration began to creep beneath the surface of the fog.
At first it was only a shiver, a dull tremor rising through the soles of my feet.
Then the sound asserted itself, tearing through the padding of eternal silence.
It was the noise of a colossal mass cleaving a liquid too heavy to be water.
A roar of millions of regrets colliding in an endless night.
The Styx did not announce itself as a river, but as an open wound in reality.
That was when I saw him, emerging from the mist like a cliff coming to life.
Charon.
His silhouette rose like a geological formation—immense, black, and unyielding.
He bore no resemblance to the tales of the living; he was a fragment of mountain forced into motion.
Rags of shadow hung from his form like scraps of petrified storms.
His face was nothing but an abyss hidden beneath layers of ancient darkness.
An overwhelming authority emanated from him, a force that demanded the submission of every atom.
The pole in his hands struck the Styx with the regularity of a guillotine blade.
With each impact, a collective shudder ran through the line of shadows.
It was not fear—fear still required hope. It was the recognition of an absolute.
Soon I stood before him, at the very edge of that black mercury which reflected no stars.
The Ferryman did not breathe. He did not blink. He was a pure function.
"The offering," growled a voice like ice cracking beneath a glacier.
My hands were empty. My pockets held only tatters of faded memories.
I had no coin to pay the passage, no tribute with which to buy my rest.
"Nothing," I answered, and my voice rang like blasphemy in this church of gray.
The entity inclined its head, a mechanical motion devoid of any trace of curiosity.
"Nothingness is the fate of those who arrive empty-handed," the specter decreed.
"Step back, shadow. Your destiny is to feed the fog until your essence dissolves."
The words fell like iron chains, commanding me to rejoin the herd of the nameless.
I felt the ground tug at my feet, urging me to retreat, to fade, to accept defeat.
It would have been so easy. All it took was letting go becoming dust beneath his feet.
But the lycoris in my mind exploded into an inferno of pure rage.
Its blood-red petals shredded the veils of obedience being forced upon me.
I would not be a grain of sand. I would not be a statistic of oblivion.
If salvation demanded a price I did not possess, I would pay it through transgression.
I did not step back. I stepped forward, breaking the sacred distance.
For the first time in eons, the perfection of the divine machine stuttered.
I looked at the black river, that abyss which promised pain rather than emptiness.
Between dust and the abyss, my choice was made.
I smiled at the Ferryman and I jumped.