The Unwritten

The Unwritten Part XIV - Darkness

Darkness hovered near the cavern wall, just out of the River of Souls’ most energetic flow. It was overwhelmed in saturated overload. It was all too much! It had fed too much energy. Too much experience had flowed into it. Too much! Too much! It realized it didn't want any more of it, that it needed to hide, tune out, dechannel, to stop the intensity. To somehow make it stop.

But how?

A sweet silvery flavor wafted down to Darkness from above, distracting it. The fissure was glowing again. Opportunity had returned. Maybe it could get out again. Out to see that marvelous place that was not here, that was somewhere out there.

Without thinking it moved closer and as it did, it could feel the vacuum like pull as it closed in toward it.

At first Darkness started to pull back from the enticement, but quickly it found it had crossed the event horizon. It was slammed into the cavern wall, the force pulling it into the elsewhere until suddenly it realized it was no longer where it had been and was once again floating along the top of a small enclosed area. A cool area. An area of softness and stillness and not the usual intensity of its normal existence among the souls who could not scream.

There was another pressure exerting force on it that it could not understand. A familiar force, one that it had felt the last time it had appeared in this place. There was a sharpness to it. It wasn’t uncomfortable but it was odd and had a novelty to it.

Part of one side below began to shrink and a portal to a larger area grew to a shape similar to the size of the entire area it was within. Glowing entities filled the vacant part of the area, growing larger as they grew in proximity. There was a draw among them, a thread, a connection between each of these things and itself that was desire.

Flashes of imagery that Darkness had experienced from the soul it had recently touched, flooded forward, overtaking it, enticing it, offering it an overwhelming set of possibilities. If only Darkness could smile, it would have.

As the beings began to fill the cabin, five of them, then six, then seven, streaming in, Darkness spread itself thin along the entire ceiling, waiting, observing. It was then that it knew it had to share some of what it had learned. It reached out and down to touch each being, touching barely, touching gently, touching each one with a delicate thread of itself.

Then they started killing one another in a bloody melee’ that Darkness could not see but could feel in detail. All it knew were these beings beneath it were spreading energy all about below it, spreading it everywhere. The area was glowing all beneath it. Droplets were glowing, pooling up and then dripping some more.

It was a free for all where souls were escaping their dying bodies, but instead of those who would take a direct trip straight to Hell, they dissipated into the air being fully absorbed into the maw of Darkness.