Cool water flows past your lips: a final wish realized. You open your eyes and tilt the bark as pure rainwater passes down your throat. Life swims into you.
You close your eyes again and when you allow them to take sights once more, your bowl has overflowed and the clear elixir spills over your fingertips. You drink your fill, rest, and drink again. The coolness spreads over your body, returning the spring to your muscles, the spring that flows from your heart. After hours of savoring every drop that nature offers, you glance around, for a faint sizzling swirls the air.
The forest smells of salt, of grease—of cooking. The answer crackles behind you. Sprawled there is a wild boar, skinned and roasted in another animal's fat, flayed atop four enormous fronds. You scan the surroundings. No motion. No sound. And for this reason, only this reason, do you stumble for the slain beast and dig your fingertips into its flesh. Meat pulls from the bone in thick clumps, the thighs soft and the ribs firm. You take the offering without consideration of manners or decency until relief itself—from the famine, from the heat—makes you sink to your knees. Comfort overtakes wariness and you fall to your side, the jungle is warm, and not searing, for the first time. It is only when you wish for something to ease the swelling of your injured hand that you look upward.
There it floats. Black as ink, the void stares at you.
Your heart races. Your tendons coil. And you might scramble from this place like the wild animal you've become but the sound of echoing rainfall stops you. White liquid flows over the edges of the curled bark. The void twists as if gesturing to the offering. Your eyes dart between the swirling fluid and the impossible thing hovering over you. With caution, you edge to the bark and bring it to your lips. It's bitter, gritty, yet reassuring; it tastes of medicine. You glance up at the void.
An abyss, a funnel for light to abandon the world, gazes back at you. Staring into its depths, you understand contentment for the first time since washing on this island's black shores.
This place has everything your body desires. Beauty, nourishment, a sanctuary from the crashes and flashes and pain of the hustling, bustling, hypocritical madness of the world that storm tore you from—that's what this island is. As you stare into the void, and it stares into you, the sunlight refracts through its form and twinkles as stars in the sky. The undulating wisps catch a blue haze from the afternoon sun and churn like the edges of a galaxy. And you realize that this cosmic being is not an empty void.
No, not empty—it is everything.
YOU ARE READING
The Second Stage
HorrorA world unseen dies over and over. It shrieks at a pitch that you cannot hear. It rots with a stench that you will never quite know. It isn't a place meant for you and I, it is merely a bank for the dead and dying; a vault of visceral agony. I...
