We fall for what seems like an eternity. We hurtle through this portal, gravity pulling us in a direction I didn’t know existed, through the very surface between worlds. We fall together, hand in hand, as the vortex drags us through nothing.
Finally it stops. The pit in my stomach from falling, from air and matter tearing around me, disappears. The first sensation I have in this world is of blindness. I stretch my left hand, my free hand, out in front of me. The darkness is complete. As dark as it is when the shadows drench my eyes. Next, I realize I feel weightless, somehow. Not suspended, as I did in Silas’ color world. There, I could feel my own weight in the silvery fluid. Here, I feel as though I am made of nothing. That I am nothing. The lack of any sensory input is shocking. My muscles clench involuntarily, and I close my hand more tightly.
Silas squeezes back. I smile. His hand is an anchor. A root. A sense of something in a sea of absence.
I have the sensation that tiny pieces of skin are being pulled, somehow, off my body. Not pulled so much as simply evaporating off of me, dissipating into the black. Sloughing off like dead cells, only here, there is no cycle of life that will turn them into something else. They simply disappear, dissolve, leave my body never to come back. Pieces of myself that I am losing with every passing moment.
Then I feel their voices in my head.
Welcome home.
I want to protest.
This isn’t my home. I don’t belong here.
You do. Everything does.
An unfamiliar voice resounds in my head. Silas.
Why are you using Noomi to come to our world? Why not me? Why not any of the other Pathfinders?
I smile, but even that feels like nothingness. A smile is not an expression here. There is no attached emotion. No motion, no muscles that strain on my face, no upturned lips. Just the wisp of an idea inside a girl from another world.
It carries more energy than the rest. It tries to destroy itself and concentrates its energy in the world we will inhabit. Destroy.
Why?
You come to our world and ask so many questions. You are not entitled to answers.
Soon I’ll be able to fight you. You won’t be able to come through me.
You are so young, so ignorant. We have been in existence since before the universe was created. The worlds were created from nothingness and the laws dictate that they shall return to nothingness. You cannot stop us.
“For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return,” Silas whispers. His voice, aloud, shocks me. A sound! In this world of emptiness, the tiny sound of his voice is like the clear ringing of bells on a sky-blue day. Here I can almost see the sound waves, rippling through the expanse of emptiness, visible for the mere fact that they exist. I want to reach out to touch them, as I did the colors in Aurora. But they dissipate quickly, disappearing into the rift, and when they’re gone, it’s hard to believe they were ever there.
You bring matter and energy into our world, Silas Voladores, the voice in my head says. You bring emotion, light, and sound. You seek to combat emptiness with presence. But emptiness swallows all. You may bring all the matter, energy, and emotion into our world and it will dissolve back into nothingness. The largest number in creation divided by zero is still zero. We will swallow Noomi. She will be our Path. And we will suck your world into ours and return it to oblivion. Where it belongs. Where you belong.
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Porous
Teen Fiction*Trigger Warning* Depression, suicide, and mental illness are subjects dealt with in this story. I have a history with suicide. When I was three, I attempted the first time. A year later, my second, and not five months after that I tried again. Th...
