Between Darkness

Got a special treat for everybody. This is the first chapter of another one of my projects. This one is done(Mostly. Just one more round of edits), and I'm planning on self-publishing it later this year, if everything lines up the way I want it to.

So give it a read and let me know what you think. Questions and comments are always welcome.

Enjoy -

Between Darkness

By James Jakins

The texture is of fresh cut grass. Not at all what he expects.

The whole experience, if eyes are closed, might be confused for rolling down a steep hill.

Beneath him, below this invisible grass, can be seen the countless lights of your universe. The swirling, infinite expanse stands in stark contrast to the rest of his surroundings.

With each rotation in his spinning descent around the perimeter of time and space he is forced to look out into the darkness.

The darkness outside creation. The darkness that creeps into the spaces between things, between worlds. Hiding within that never ending nothing is all that God has rejected.

When He had seen the Light and called it good, He had rejected this space. Or perhaps He has not seen it. It has escaped His notice, and now hides here, at the end of infinity, outside any realms of light.

It is sobering for the traveler to find himself on this precipice between life and the absence of living. 

To have, on one side, the infinite, lonely beauty of stars and suns and life, and on the other to have an absolute nothing.

Darkness that can not even rightly be called darkness. Because to call it darkness, one must first suppose that at some point there was, or will be, light.

He rolls further down the hill that is life, until, after what feels a million lifetimes, and perhaps is, the bottom comes into view.

Beneath the invisible structure that separates everything from nothing is the great plain.

As far as his straining eyes can see is the dull brown-green of rough grass. Here and there small hills break the endless expanse.

He considers that, maybe, this dead or dying world that spreads beneath the infinite and the nonexistent is Hell.

Perhaps when the stories are told of the fallen being cast down, this is where they went. Is it from this plain that war is waged on the righteous?

He does not know. What he does know is that for the briefest of time he was a god.

But now, as he ends his descent around the needlepoint of the universe where it stabs into pale, red dirt, that life is over.

Sound rushes in. The gentle rustle of stale wind through dead grass. After so long in the complete silence of his voyage he is forced to cover his ears.

The countless rotations of his spinning descent make themselves known.

He falls to his knees, bile rising in his throat. He makes mud of the dirt with what little was in his stomach.

With a strength of will that earned him a place among gods, he pushes himself to his feet, ignoring the sudden pain in his empty stomach.

He has been told there is no escape from this place, but he has left loved ones behind. He plans on seeing them again.