Week 1 - “Afterlife”
You are unequivocally dead. And at the end of it all, there is no shining gate nor fiery layered pit awaiting you. You had never quite believed in either, but a part of you expected some sort of consolation prize for the life you lived. A fulfilling void at the least. You receive neither.
Instead, large rock wells swell around you, the cracks in their uneven surfaces filtering in nondescript, gray light. It is unnerving, to say the least, stuck somewhere into the shift of the uncanny valley. The anxiety you carry in your former life blurs into the present and you find yourself trembling.
This place, you realize quickly, is alive, breathing something stifling, lessened only when you press your face to the fractured facades of the walls. Through the fog of sedated silence, you’re certain you can hear the sound of water dripping from the crevices above you or catch the flickering shadow of something resembling animal form; distant nothingness you swear you can make tangible.
You continue forward, backward; the orientation doesn’t matter, as it’s all the same, long and continuous. You cautiously traverse the area around you, discovering pervading weeds and sprinklings of smaller fauna and fungi through patches of eroded ground underneath your feet. The place increasingly seems to toy with you, filling in the gaps, forcing your curiosity.
You pluck a flower from beneath you, thread the stem between your fingers. Your trembling dwindles to a mere sense of wariness, which melts into something vaguely terrifying: content. You are content with this place, if it were to be your ensuing eternity. It was quiet, and you couldn’t ask for nothing more. You have long since rationalized quiet.
You are continuing down an indistinct path when you feel the walls begin to reverberate, a satisfied hum knocking against your bones.
“Welcome.” A voice greets, penetrating and patient.
You twist your head around on instinct to attempt to place it. “Hello? Where are you? Who are you?”
The walls shake once more, accompanied by an amused grunt. Who are you, after all, to make demands?
You think. There are few options. You were dead, clearly, and there might be only one force presiding over this.
“Death?” You manage.
“What did you expect?” comes the acetic answer.
Many thoughts race through your mind - all of them cut off with a gentle lurch from underneath you.
“Ask.” It supplies.
“What is this place?”
Unsurprisingly, you are rewarded with silence. You lower yourself onto the ground, suddenly spent and weary, beside a patch of wildflowers.
“Are you all there is?”
“Something like that.”
You take the flower you picked earlier and set it amongst the patch, inert on top of the flourishing buds. “You convinced a good few that you were escapable.”
“I never did convince you, did I?”
“No.” You admit.
“I suppose then I convinced a greater few there wasn’t an alternative.”
You turn your head upwards as if to address the faceless entity directly. A drop of water lands on the bridge of your nose, careening towards your cheek. “So, is this really..”
The space around you shudders upon the last spoken words of the entity’s:
“What makes you believe this is the ending?”
