The Unwritten

The Unwritten Part II - The Darkness

Darkness was feeling the power. It was absorbing tiny Hell bits of matter that fed it giving it a great delight that it hadn't felt in… ages. Or ever, actually.

Suddenly then it was it was expending those energies. Why? What was happening? It started to feel slightly drained. Matter shot out away from it, impaling inorganic beings passing there beneath it. Matter drawn from this world was being absorbed into it and then expelled from it. But it wasn't doing it. This was being done, to it. What was this? What was happening?

It was then that something started pulling it back. Back outward to… There.

No, something was pushing it. Pushing it back to that place where it had finally escaped from. Finally and for the first time in millennia, since it had originally evolved into existence, it felt…freedom. But that wasn't quite right either. It was more like there was a pressure differential. It was naturally being pushed and drawn back into where it had been. Where it had always been. But then, where had it been? If only for the briefest of moments?

Then, it was all gone.

More precisely, the world was gone. What was that world?

The dark flames of Hell were back, crackling once again beneath it from where it hovered above the never ending stream of souls as they rushed by in their personal, multilayered torments. Still, there was a bit of a crack left there above it, exactly where it had been before when first it had noticed it and found that it could slip in between and… out.

A crack that had opened in the wall of a place some called Hades, some called Hell, and others called Sheol. This was all of those things and more.

Hell isn't big, just the anguish.

Darkness had heard so many names screamed within the minds of the multitudes that passed beneath it. This place that no one wanted to think about through all the uncountable years. Names from those innumerable ones who had entered there, never to escape. Those who had entered… from up there, out there, out...somewhere.

That wasn’t really "up" by any sense of the word, but that was the feeling one got in this place. That this was down somewhere and not up... there.

This was a feeling it had acquired over time in its eating of those who had newly arrived. Until they learned. Not eating their blood, or their flesh, but their Beingness. Their spiritualness. Their energies or whatever you might want to call them.

The new ones bled the most. But they were all food.

The more long term residents bled still, though far less than the fresher souls. Until they found ways to better maintain their energies, their life forces, their fears, it was a feeding frenzy for Hell’s denizens. Though it too had to avoid the others like it in order to enjoy the gluttony.

It could be hit or miss. Not because of a lack of souls, but due to an overabundance of creatures not unlike itself. Creatures created as if from the dust along a baseboard, fluff and lint accumulated in cracks and crevices of a place too long lived in and too far beyond repair.

All had one thing in common. It is well known how religions differ far and wide. One thing they all have in common was that all got it mostly wrong. They truly and really did. Most of it, anyway. The parts they did get right? No one paid that any attention whatsoever. Or if they did, they paid attention in absolutely the wrong ways. Such was the way of the world. The world that Darkness now knew was… “up there”.

“Hell” was a word derived from the Saxon as in, “helan”, to cover, and referred to a hidden place. “Sheol” was another word similar and from scripture derived from a root-word "to ask", or to more correctly to "demand"; referring therefore to insatiableness. The Greek word “Hades” had become somehow hybridized to the Christian words, but it all was referring to the same exact place. Here.

This, same dreadful place. This place of misery, this place of despair. This place of apathy and regret.

These and other words like them, Hell, Hades, Sheol, they all refer to a place low, that is barricaded from access in leaving or entering; that contained those now dead. Various religions from the Middle East and Mediterranean areas blended together in an attempt to try to indicate something that only few have ever somehow gotten ever the remotest, merest glimpse of.

Yet other religions had their own Hells. Many of those existed, but not in this place. For them, theirs were somewhere else. The Chinese have a great number of Hells and some non-Chinese believed it is even proof of their non-existence.

Rather it is true proof of their being known, in point of fact. It was knowledge of, something. Something, rather frightful. Something Western religions and Middle Eastern desert religions alike all feared even to contemplate. That was, that not only does Hell truly exist, but there are many different Hells available for one to descend into upon death.

So live your life well. For there is no turning back. Once you've arrived, you’re there. There where those who committed lawlessness would be thrown into THE Furnace of Fires in that place where there is a great weeping and gnashing of teeth. From then on it is the land only of great regrets and immense agonies.

What the living were always trying to describe through all their varieties of words and metaphors was exactly where Darkness was born. But it wasn’t any kind of a place any of the living really understood. It's hard enough to understand, if you're actually here. Or worse, if you were born there.

In Hell you see, souls bleed. They bleed life force. A force that never runs out once one dies.

All that eternally lost power tends to accumulate in the nooks and crannies of eternal despondency and there it allows creatures like Darkness to spawn, to exist, to continue, if for no other reason than to torment yet another eternal souls awash in their own private Hells.

No two are alike. Darkness knew this. It knew its purpose, it knew its abilities: to exist and to feed. It also knew what had just happened, "up there" and that it was quite beyond its capacity to understand.

What not in Hell then, was it that had just happened to it..."up there"?