#c: void

But there are stories, too. Stories of heroes and villains and right and wrong, of damsels in distress that hide a knife in their boot and gut the snake that tries to tempt them. We all like to think we´re different, that we will not fall for the blueprint that those stories have laid out for us over millennia; surely history serves to teach us a lesson so that we can learn from it? But it’s never as easy as that, never as simple as tracing the lines on the maps of time and deciding, yes, I will be different.

In the end, he was no different either.

He knelt on the blood-stained floor like a man about to be knighted, head bent almost respectfully if it wasn’t for the way he gritted his teeth and the way he leaned so heavily on a sword that shook with the force of his denial. And he was almost alone, but even if there had been more people around to see him broken they would not have been able to hear the second figure speak. 

All there was, was the absence of sound; only when the sword finally slid from his white-knuckled grip did the silence waver, metal clattering to the floor and echoing for mere seconds before silence engulfed the two figures.

But there was oh, so much to be said. The man’s expression shifted, eyes glued to the floor but widening in fear in response to something he heard. There was a shake of his head, the undeniable refusal that even now he could not let go of. In his head he screamed, because his throat was too raw to make a sound and he didn’t need to anyway. 

The figure heard all of his arguments and the anger that he lashed out with minute after minute until even as his thoughts settled down like the dust around them. His hunched shoulders told whoever could have been watching that defeat, as much as it pained him, came like the end of the world they’d avoided so many times; slowly and then all at once, a freefall sealed with a single nod. But it was enough.

We all knew it would come to this and oh, how wonderful it is to see that you are finally seeing what we have known all along. You won every battle before this one with a sword in your hand and your friends at your side, but they are not here now. And they will perish unless you do it for them. Do them that courtesy and everyone will be better off.

We all knew it would come to this.

In most stories, there is always a goal. That one thing to be found, the one goal to be accomplished, the one enemy that stands between the hero and the certainty of a happily ever after. Sometimes it’s a dragon, fierce and proud and its breath setting the world alight with golden flames until the hero undoubtedly strikes and slays the monster that we are not afraid to acknowledge. 

Sometimes it’s smaller than that, the road to true love that can be sealed with a kiss and tears down all threats in its wake. Sometimes, it’s even smaller still. Sometimes, it’s merely stubbornness that stands between before and happily ever after. But though the world is a web of stories, it would be silly to think that all of them end happily. No matter how stubborn the hero is.

The man finally looked up; his gaze dragging upwards from the hooded figure’s feet and up up up until their eyes met. When he staggered to his feet almost abruptly, pushing himself up and out of his tight crouch to stand on equal grounds for the moment he had left, something close to laughter rippled through the air and the man knew that he had lost – but if he was going to be damned, then he refused to accept it on his knees. 

He had knelt enough for a lifetime and then some, and he would have to give them everything – but they would not have this.

He stood proud, tall, with a rod for a spine and his hands at his side twitching for a sword that had been engraved with legends – but in the end, it had not been enough. A hand, pale and bony and not at all kind, patted his cheek almost like an elder would do with a child that had been chastised, and then there was nothing for a very long time.

The void, they said, was a horrible place. But even the memories of the man and everyone else combined had not quite prepared him for what was waiting for him on the other side of the veil that they so carelessly threw him at. He’d never known how painful nothing could be; it tore at this shadow of himself, relentlessly chewing away at his flesh and wrapping itself around his bones until there was nothing left of him. 

And he fought; of course he did. As a reluctant hero should. Digging his heels into ground that wasn’t there, nails and teeth out and screaming into the abyss that curled around him like a mother’s embrace until the end of time and then some.

T i m e l i n e s a r e s t r a n g e –

He watched everything disappear slowly and was not able to stop it. The names went first, one by one by o n e until all he knew was that there was something he was forgetting. There had been something important about those faces, those smiles, but it escaped him now; and somewhere in a distance shadows cackled and chewed on the memories as if they were a feast, leaving him with the insanity that something much older than him had promised him.

Everything.

Was.

Lost.

If there was something like dismay left, he probably would have felt it somewhere down the line; they’d promised him nothing, surely that would have meant that pain would be gone too. But it burned away at him until he clawed at his own not-eyes in an attempt to spark some kind of light in the darkness, scream after scream tearing from him and answered not even by an echo of the sound. He saw nothing, and remembered nothing, and prayed for the first time in forever until he’d forgotten what a prayer was, too.

Even this eternity ended, at some point.

Eventually even the shadows got bored with what he had once been and spat him out into a corner of the void, leaving him there shaking and gone. There was no body left to curl up but he tried to anyway, scared and broken and even the idea of having forgotten something gone. And maybe it was better, that way. The once-man hid in the shadows that he had accepted by now, letting them sink down until he was as much a part of them as they were of him. And just one word, one fleck of (ironically) light remaining;

V o i d.

He’d known s o m e o n e like that.

It made sense, that the word would resonate; it was his home now, after all. But there was a sense of something more than just the darkness that stirred and the man latched onto it with everything he had, hiding it deep down as the last vestige of the sanity he had once had, and waited an eternity more in the hope that it would stop hurting.

“I t  c o u l d h a v e b e e n w o r s e –“

It was nothing. It meant nothing. But even if the man did not remember why, remember anything at all, he knew that it was a name for something more than the darkness he’d stopped fighting. If he remembered it, he would have recognized the smell of cookies, the small grin that had not been enough–

But he didn’t.

Instead, he took it as a name and wrestled his way out of the cell they had thrown him in and finally played the part they had spun out for him. The memory would not know him, either; no one would.