The End

A simple fantasy prose storytelling of a lone adventurer's strange dreams, and visions of the void. Also hosted on AO3.

Every night, I die, and between my death and the moment I awake, I see an island.

In a world with no light, suspended in a sea of darkness and distant stars, there is an island. This island floats in the infinite abyss at the end of reality, drifting aimlessly in the void. Its yellow-grey stone forms a flat disk, and rising from it are great black pillars arranged in a ring. At the center is a dry fountain carved out of a dull stone, and a great shadow swoops past it in repetition. The shadow briefly blocks my view of the fountain, or the pillars, as it flies free of gravity in its arc around the island. I have never felt fear like when I look upon the shadow, its full form undiscernible, and watch as it perches on that fountain and rules over the sea of darkness and the island at the end of reality. Occasionally, the shadow seems to see me, and it turns its terrible gaze upon me. I feel my soul leave me, unable to speak, as the shadow stares deeper into me, daring me to challenge its authority over the end of all things. It is the bringing, the keeper, and the ruler of reality, the end of all things, waiting at the abyss where reality crumbles. Caught in its stare, I am unable to awake on my own, only returning to life when the shadow chooses to release me. When I do awake, I jolt upright in my bed, a cold sweat clinging to my body. Every night I die, and I am terrorized by the shadow that waits between the end and the beginning.

That is the world that I see, the world beyond my own, when I look into that crystalline sphere. It unsettled me the first time it happened, and I dropped and broke the first one I found. I never expected to see the island, or that terrible shadow, while still firmly awake. It took many hours to sufficiently convince myself that I was awake and not dead or dreaming. When I found another, I looked to see if the island was still there, and it was. The shadow did not notice me looking this time, and I watched it fly in its pattern for a while before hiding the artefact in my bag. Even from the safety of my own hand, through a window the size of an apple, I felt fear greater than any other I have found in the waking world. Despite my apprehension, I found myself gazing into the crystal often. It had a greenish hue, marbled in texture, and at its core rested a sliver of black, bordered by a yellow substance. From a distance it has the appearance of a great creature’s eye, but up close you can see the yellow is the island at the end, and the black is the shadow and its dark pillars. I kept it on my desk, suspended by a glass stand, where I would often watch the item I had dubbed “The Eye”, and ponder the reality of the island and its tyrant. The shadow never revealed itself, and if I was careful and kept my distance, I could watch it in the Eye without being spotted. I grew accustomed to its aura, swallowing my fear and learning to face those feelings. Many days I would forget about it entirely, preferring to tend my farms or dig out the earth. Other days I would work at my desk, tinkering or writing or whatever I set about to do that day, ignoring the strange presence nearby. Truth be told, it wasn’t the first artefact I found, and it wasn’t the last. Many stranger things would find their way to me in my travels, such that the Eye would become mundane by comparison. My visions, too, became manageable, the shadow losing interest as I learned to turn my eyes to the void and the stars rather than the end of reality.

I never knew why I called it that, “the end of reality”. I believe it to be true, but I don’t know why. From the moment I first died, I saw that place, and I knew that it was the inevitable end. The abyss of stars was the end of our sky, the island the remnant of our earth, and the shadow was the end of all things. I knew it to be true in my heart, though I never knew why or from where these thoughts came. Perhaps they came from the void itself. I have failed to mention until now the horrible cacophony at the end, the screaming silence that rises from the sea of darkness and floods the very mind. It is an inescapable sound, filling every neuron with static, sound without purpose or form, drowning out any thought you may have with a well of unknown voices. There is nothing in the void, not form, nor sound, nor thought. The space between death and waking is nothing, and there is nothing there for you. It is a place meant to be left, to be passed through and never stayed in. And yet, the shadow stays there. It is the exception, the ruler of the end, and the end of all things.

If you find my story strange, then allow me to make it stranger. I say I have never felt fear like seeing the shadow at the end, but I have come close, and I will tell you of that as well.

I remember it vividly, even so long after. I was out walking one night when a piece of the shadow crossed my path. I am no stranger to hallucinations and phantoms in the night, so I questioned whether it was truly there, but I no longer had any doubts upon seeing the creature in full. It was grotesque, disproportionate in horrific ways. A child-like torso sat atop tall, lanky legs. Arms hung down nearly to the ground, ending in huge hands with crooked, bony fingers. Its shoulders sagged lopsided; the left side slightly higher than the right, and its hips similarly were cocked to the side. Above its bent shoulders was its head, an angular, bony mass of skin stretched across its skull, almond-shaped eyes that glowed in the night, and a massive jaw that almost seemed broken, barely clinging to its skull. The whole thing was pitch black, the color of the night sky, with no stars to illuminate it. The closer my eyes wandered to it, the stronger I felt it, that terrible screaming from the void. When I met its gaze, the purple glow of its eyes pierced me and filled me with an inconsolable dread. Had my legs obeyed me less, I would have run, my knuckles turned white clutching the handle of my tool. As its eyes met mine, the static grew louder, though a sound became clearer as it cut through it: a scream. It was a terrible, guttural scream, carried without breath or pause, silent out loud but screaming through the static of the void. I felt that cold sweat again, my body frozen and unable to move, locked in place as the creature stared into me, my mind empty save that gut-wrenching scream. It stepped closer, one small shuffle at a time, the sound slowly growing as it approached, unable to break eye contact. It stood toe-to-toe with me, towering over me in height. Its slender arms reached out a single, pointing finger, as though it wanted to touch me. I couldn’t move. Its finger approached my face as it slowly opened its mouth, its jaw sagging lower and lower, more than it should have, an impossibly-wide, gaping maw of crooked, broken muscle and abyssal skin. Its jaw unmoving, it produced strange sounds from its throat, somewhere between a gurgle and a chirp. I blinked, and it was gone, a puff of smoke where it once stood, the static scream subsiding in a matter of seconds. It was several moments before I could move again, and upon returning home, it was days before I would leave my house again. I hid the Eye under a cloth; I didn’t want to see it. I wanted nothing to do with this world or the next. Eventually I recovered my senses, though much like discovering the first Eye, I was deeply disturbed at seeing such a thing in the waking world, feeling that dread and hearing that static outside of my nightly passing. I would question my sanity for a few weeks, until one night, from atop a watchtower I spotted another of those creatures of the abyss in the distance, wandering to and fro with no apparent goal. It didn’t seem to see me, but I certain saw it, watching it vanish in its smoke and reappear in another spot, over and over until finally, it vanished, and I was unable to spot it again. I knew then that these things did indeed roam the night, and I never again wandered far from my doorstep after sundown.

Eventually, I returned to shadow-watching through the Eye, disposing of its cloth cover and resuming my prior habits. Nothing new occurred for a long while, months perhaps it was, until one morning I found something on the steps outside my house. It was another Eye, nearly identical to the first, the random marbled patterns being unique, but the vision within, identical. There it was: the island at the end, and the shadow in its orbit. I never knew where it came from, but it was seemingly left for me. Perhaps one of the village cats had wandered a little far from home and left me an offering, though that fails to account for how it got ahold of such a unique item. Seeing as its function was identical, I opted to store it in a chest where I kept other strange relics I found, swaddling it in a bed of cloth and wool. From that point onward, I would add more Eyes to this collection, a little nest of them growing in my chest whenever I found another. They seemed to be all over the place, deep in abandoned places. It seems others long ago were as interested in these strange orbs as I was, and I carried on their tradition by collecting every one I found. 5, 10, 15 Eyes, nested together in the dark of a storage box, rarely seeing the light unless I was looking for another relic. They didn’t seem to harbor any ill side effects like the creatures did, so I saw no harm in collecting them, even if they merely gathered dust.

Once, I awoke from my vision of the void to find it still dark out, and my house misarranged. My shelves had been rifled through, the attic door left ajar, and upstairs my chests were all open, my collection of relics spread across the floor. Mostly they were unharmed, though a few Eyes had shattered in the commotion. The front door was still latched, so I was unsure what had done this, but I cleaned the mess and was finished by the time the sun had risen. This was the first of a series of strange visits, always in the night, and always seemingly related to the Eyes. Later visits would cause far less disorder, but always the chest of relics was open, and always something was done with the Eyes. Sometimes they would simply be out on the floor, other times left on my desk, but the most unnerving was the last night I was plague by a visit. I awoke to the static of the void still in my mind, refusing to fade after leaving that place and awaking in the middle of the night. I clutched my head in my hands, the sound unbearably loud, the scream once again cutting through. I tried to rise from my bed, but found it difficult to move my limbs. I looked at the floor, and arranged in a semicircle around my bed were the Eyes. They had all been placed “upright”, their orientation mimicking an eye, seemingly staring at me as I slept. Eventually I managed my legs off the bed, and as my foot knocked one of the Eyes away, everything faded at once, and it was as if the night had never been disturbed. This was the last time I was visited by whatever meddling stranger was responsible for these disturbances, and the last time I awoke in that bed.

The next night, as I slipped from death to the transient void, I felt an unfamiliar sensation. I felt as though I was falling, tumbling head-over-heels through the sea of darkness, stars swirling around me as the familiar pain of static screams filled my mind. I had never felt a physical sensation there before, normally feeling only the numbness of my soul as it passed through by the end of reality. Now I felt it: the cold grip of the darkness, the disorienting spin slowly stealing consciousness from me. The static cleared more as I fell, the scream being joined by a chorus of voices, unknown speech crying out to be heard, like a crowd shouting in discord. I once again pressed my hands against my head, screaming aloud in pain. The next thing I knew, I was awake, but not in my home. I was lying flat on a dais of black stone, and around me was the sea of darkness. I slowly lifting myself up, stepping off of the black stone and onto the yellow surface of the island. There was no mistaking it; this was surely the island from my visions, the world through the Eye’s gaze. All around me, overhead and to the edge of the horizon, was the great abyssal darkness, full of twinkling stars so far in the distance they were barely discernable. Beneath my feet was the yellow-grey stone of the island, and in the distance rose the black pillars. I could see even from there the tyrant swooping overhead. My fingers tingled with a numb sensation, my legs shaky underneath me. I staggered forward, inching closer to the pillars, the fountain, the great shadow of the end. This was no dream, no vision, no phantom. I was at the end of reality, and the shadow dared me to approach.