There’s only the light now.
The snow stopped, even melted, but I don’t know when.
Green fuzz and pockmarks of color spoke of new growth, another random spring.
It was all there in the light.
I could feel my physical form moving when I willed it, but I could no longer see it.
It felt like pushing water; red ripples would move away from my limbs, and whatever I desired to see, it would show me. I did not ask to see her, though. Not yet, being unsure of what that vision might hold.
Human cravings of hunger and thirst were a thing of the past; human desires for companionship and sated lust were amusing memories. But there were days when the ongoing, perpetual silence of my new existence became crushing, and those memories provided some relief.
There was in me, if possible, a sense of relieved horror: I would not die, but what had I become?
The gem itself had dissolved from the inside, but never abated in power and brightness. Its new light provided a bright window in the mountainside, and curious birds and the animals that could reach these heights often came by to investigate.
I could entice none of them to enter, though with a tilting of their heads I knew they heard me.
Was I a watchman, a portal, a lock, or a key? What, or who, was I waiting here for? What was I supposed to do, or be?
If I was part of the light, why did I still have these thoughts? Light wasn’t sentient.
If the light was part of me, why couldn’t I subdue it, and leave this place? Light had no power.
A profound, lonely sadness gripped me, and ripples went out from where my mouth would be, but there was no sound.
Whether I wept or screamed, I couldn’t know.
Perhaps I’d gone insane, and was cackling maniacally.
Maybe I spoke my name, or hers.
Whatever the silent sound, I kept the ripples going just to see them, to know that some part of me was yet living.
But there was only more time.
Only more ‘why.’
In time, the ripples stopped, and there was only basking in the red glow that
slowly turned me on eternity’s spit.
When and if I returned to the world, for whatever reason, the meat of who I was would be rotten. The core of me was becoming a patient, powerful poison. If that core was placed inside the waiting world, there’d be no coming back.
There’d be no coming back.
Nightshade Stories 