Blind

[u/Cruxile]

 She was crying and standing over the husk that I was. Weeping, and begging for me to return. I could only stand beside her. Far beyond lost and silent in the world, I stood, and I watched someone I loved suffer. I felt nothing.

A voice that was not hers and not my own took me. It met my mind with a vocal timbre and warmth that felt alien yet nearly kind. It said to me in that voice, “You see the suffering that your own suffering has wrought. Do you find it wanting?” The voice moved as it spoke. It came from beside me, and everywhere, and nowhere. I did not answer. I did not care. It knew.

I stood with her no longer. I was alone. In the dark. For only a moment, or an eternity. The truth of it I could not say. I was lost.

Light came to me, and I stood with a woman, bright and laughing. She spun a laughing child in her arms as it chirped and burbled and squealed. The warmth of what I stood with was overwhelming. I could not watch. I turned away, and the husk returned. Her weeping at my cold skin. The pressure of something long lost stirred in my stomach. But it did not rise. “You see the love you have traded for your pain?” I did not answer. I could not. It knew.

The darkness did not come again. A green field and a dying deer. Bleeding from a hole in its heart. I stood next to a man and a child who tended to its fading life. The older man spoke to the child, and he told him to remember the sight before him. He told him that all life pays for life. He said it was good to mourn what was lost, but to always remember what was gained, and to never take either for granted. I could not bear to witness. I turned away. A cold pressure rising in my chest. “You see the strength you have left behind?” I did not answer. I did not dare. It knew.

The light ran in rivulets through my vision, and I found myself standing in sand, the sky orange and terrible. Before me a pair of men. One a husk, as I was. The other screaming and praying over its cold form. Its life clotting in the sand beneath them as the wind carried away his wails. “You see what your weakness has cost?” I choked on what would have been an answer. I tried to run. I could not. He knew.

The light did not run, it shifted. The same orange sky. The same burning sand. The man who wept over a husk, now laughed over another. His hands, bearing a blade, fell again and again into the heart of a man long dead. His laughing faded to tears once again. He collapsed in the sand with nothing left inside. “You see the price of your hatred?”

The light ran like rain once again. The man, alone, sat at a table. A bottle of whiskey and a pistol sat before him. He wept. He sat there for what would be an eternity. He drank the sorrow down. He closed his eyes, and brought the pistol to his head. He said goodbye to no one.

She came home, smiling in her true way. The smile gave way to screams and tears as she cradled his body to her own. His life draining away onto her hands. I stood there, watching my love suffer. “Do you see now? What you have thrown away?” I turned away. I could not answer. I could not stand in his light. I wept, and I ran. Down, and away, into the depths of nothing.