Light glinted off the scythe from some unseen source and streamed into the lake like a tributary. “But I thought you said you were all there is.”
The rocks split from a flash of his scythe, and the ground opened further into a sprawling cavern dominated by a subterranean lake. The sound continued to mount as though the world itself was suffering. We still seemed to be descending into the Earth, and the air was growing warmer and denser now. Troubling thought, but made more so by the growing howl which began reverberating the rocks around me. “What else is here besides you?”Īnd that is why questions are pointless. A vague darkness and a heavy damp smell made me guess that we’d gone underground, but I couldn’t say for sure. It was more like the rest of the world was moving around us while we stood still. I wasn’t running, or flying, or anything of that nature. “How can I try to comprehend something so beyond mortal knowledge?” My voice felt flat and dead compared to his overwhelming substance. I had too many questions, all fighting for attention in the forefront of my brain without any making their way out. If you’re lucky, IT will have gotten bored of waiting for you. Before I knew what was happening, we were outside the hospital, moving at such a frenzied pace that the world around me blurred into a dizzying tunnel of flashing light. I felt myself swept up around him like dirt in a hurricane. My head ached from the strain of this knowledge as my lateness was burned into my awareness, imparted like an inescapable law of physics as unequivocal as gravity. I knew in that moment that nothing could hide me from the specter’s grasp, for he was the only real thing in this world. I clutched at my hospital blanket to cower from the intensity of the Reaper’s presence, but the once soft cotton now flowed like translucent mist through my hands. This is why we were taught without words to fear death. Reality flowed around his scythe like a brush through water colors, and I could see each elementary particle and time itself sunder across its blade. It was as though seeing a tiger after a lifetime of looking at a child’s crude drawing and thinking that’s all a tiger was. The less real my room became, the more real the figure was, until presently it existed in such sharp actuality that nothing beside it seemed real at all. It was transforming into a figure beside me. With each passing moment, the world was becoming less real…īut all that sight and sound – all that being – it wasn’t simply disappearing. It seemed as though every sound was an echo of what it once was every sight a reflection. I was still in the hospital room, but the bustle of nurses and the beeping machines lost their opacity as though I was mired in swiftly descending dusk. What if it isn’t death which is to be feared? What if it is what lies beyond?Īnd so troubled did I slip beyond mortal understanding, stepping into a world as far forsaken by reason as I was now from life.
It wasn’t until I was finally drifting off to sleep that a final intrusive doubt bubbled in my brain: That thought brought me great comfort as I felt the last erratic struggle from my heart against the inevitable conclusion I approached.
When I was dead, I wouldn’t be capable of experiencing anything, so fear still had no cause. While I was alive I wouldn’t experience death, so there was no reason to be afraid now. Even as I lay dying, it seemed silly to me that I should be afraid of the emptiness which reason promised to expect. We have witnessed it, caused it, measured and recorded it to the last dying spasm of neuronal flickering. And so we cling desperately onto even the most dreary and anguished lives, suffering any known evil over our release into the beyond.īut death is not to be feared, because death is very well understood. We think it the final frontier – the greatest imaginable unknown from whose penumbral shores no traveler may return. That is why we humans, in our naive misunderstanding of the universal order, are gripped by the mortal fear of death. No monstrous visage discovered yet has been as terrifying as the infinite potential for horror which exists before the mask is removed. There is no fear as potent as the fear of the unknown.
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