The sky and the land were as one: cold, abyssal, and infinite. A solitary figure walked along the nothingness, the footprints it left behind creating the sole division between earth and the ash-filled atmosphere. White puddles of a tar-like fluid tracked the being’s progress; the ground upon which it stepped pulled away and stuck to the pallid flesh. Like the foot, the rest of the body was muted and grey, thin lines of muscle and sinew creating the barest sense of definition along the slim, elongated form. The hands shifted at knee level as it walked, arms connected to hunched shoulders. The head was a featureless canvas, elongated like the other limbs, completely smooth.

The wanderer had no recollection as to how long it had resided in the desolation surrounding it. There was no wind to run across its skin and the climate never changed. The only sensation it experienced was the warmth of the tearing surface upon which it traveled. All it knew to do was move, though even then it had no destination. It only existed. Alone, it believed, forgotten to time and space, remaining to wander without rest, fatigue, or sustenance. To walk proved it existed, provided it with a purpose. Perhaps there was a place to be, something to find. The innate desire for discovery overwhelmed it.

For the first time, the wanderer felt something other than the warmth of touch: a gentle pressure against the front of its body. The skin on its face tore until a mouth of grey teeth appeared, white blood staining them and pattering onto the ground. It noticed no pain.

“Who’s there?” the wanderer asked. It could not hear its own voice, but the words it spoke felt right, accurate.

“Open your eyes,” a voice replied. The voice carried no inflection, yet it was intelligible. It rang inside the wanderer’s mind.

“I have none,” the wanderer said.

“Nor had you a mouth, yet now you speak. You have not ears, though you hear. Open your eyes.”

Once again the flesh parted and two lidless eyes appeared, white and dead, a trail of black tears running from their sides. For the first time, the wanderer saw its surroundings. It took in the flat blackness of the sky and desert before it, turning to see the tracks it had left behind.  They stretched on for an eternity, impure marks on the pristine coal plane. It turned and saw the body of the voice, except there was no body to see. Instead there floated ash and sand, shifting as though flowing through water, turning over and over, yet never coming together.

“Where am I?” the wanderer asked, its eyes following the dancing object before it.

“Dead,” the voice replied. The grains of sand and flakes of ash contracted when it spoke.

“What is this place?”

“There are many names given to this place. It does not matter what you call the place after death, nor what you believe will happen to you. All ends here.”

The wanderer stood silent, the tears running into its mouth, further staining the grey teeth. “So an afterlife was a lie,” it said.

“Not entirely,” said the voice. “You arrived somewhere, did you not? You are reborn in new flesh; come to a place none could comprehend; become eternal.”

“But there are no others. If it wasn’t a lie, how come I am alone?”

The grains continued to slosh around. “You are not alone. There are many others here.”

“I have not seen them.”

“You only began to see moments ago.”

“I have not felt them either, or heard them moving through the sand.” The wanderer looked along the vast horizon. “I see no other footprints.”

“You are but one part in infinity,” the voice said. “You have an eternity to walk and find others, as they have an eternity to find you. All death is here, in every time, from every existence.”

The wanderer looked down at its feet. The sand it stood upon remained black, bulging around the ghostly toes. It tried to think of the past, yet it remembered nothing before now, before it had started walking.

“What happened to the memory of my life? If I’m dead, this can’t be all I’ve ever known; there has to have been something from before.”

A small vortex had taken shape inside the pressure, outlining its boundaries. “Could you remember your life, would you want to?” it asked. There was a pause as it waited for the wanderer to speak. When it said nothing, the voice continued. “Happiness belies the pain found in memory. Time alters it, burdens the reflection. There is little trust to be placed in memory.”

“Then what do I place trust in? There’s nothing here to see, hear, or taste. Can’t I have those, even if they are distorted?”

The floating mass began to tremble, its contents bouncing around the edges of space. “Were you to remember the taste of a thing, anything after it would never taste as sweet. To hear something once would be to forget it every other time. Sight is but a memory should you remove your gaze.” The trembling stopped and the mixture began to flow once more. “Trust in what you will, but material is fallible. Only two objective certainties can be made: There will be life; there will be death. These are the things in which you must trust.”

“If death is the end,” the wanderer began, “then how am I here? How is there a new life? This…eternity?”

“From death comes life. It is the way of nature, of creation. When one thing dies, another feeds from it. Here, where nothing need be fed, nothing need die.”

“What if something were to die here?” the wanderer asked.

“Then here a life would begin,” the voice replied.

The wanderer looked at the thing floating in front of it. It had occurred to the wanderer that it had never looked at its hands and lifted them to its face. The fingers strained outward, each individual knuckle appearing as a slight bump against the otherwise clean skin. It rubbed the hands together and noted the sensation as they slid back and forth, but they created no noise and no actual feeling, just pressure. The wanderer rubbed a hand below its eye and brought back a tear-stained finger, the black dot hanging in perfect stasis against the flesh.

“What was I before I died?” it asked the voice.

“Something living,” the voice replied.

“Who was I?”

“Does it matter?”

“What am I now?”

The amalgam pulsed in a slow rhythm. “Here,” it replied.

“Not where. What.”

“Something of this place. A being; nothing more, nothing less.”

“How long have I been here?”

“You have always been here.”

The wanderer gazed at the footprints which had led it from wherever it started. “How have I always been here if I wasn’t always dead?” it asked.

“Recall that you do not remember life,” the voice replied.

“Then how do I know I ever was alive?”

“You are alive now.”

“I thought I was dead.”

“Then how do you speak?”

“Because I have a mouth.”

“The dead are silent.”

“You told me I died.”

“Death begets life.”

The wanderer lowered its head and fixed its gaze upon the sand. Turning to look behind itself, the wanderer gazed at the white substance its feet had uncovered. The white was pure, clean and whiter than the wanderer itself. It thought for a moment, faced the voice again, then asked, “How long have you been here?”

The sand and ash fluttered lazily in the still blackness. “An eternity.”

“Since this place was created?”

“Perhaps,” the voice replied. “And perhaps you have been here longer than I.”

“But that can’t be possible. If it were, I wouldn’t be asking you these questions. I’d have known all this long ago.”

“You know not for how long you have walked, nor for how long you have been blind and deaf. May it not be that you never considered these questions until these moments?”

“I suppose…I guess there will never be any true way of knowing.” The wanderer lapsed into thought once more. Any memories that may have been conjured were those of blind silence and the warmth of the ground against its feet. The only sensations it had known until now.

“Is that why you are the way you are? If you are of this place, as I am, then how is it that you lack a form, a body?” the wanderer inquired.

“Form I have,” the voice said, swirling the sand and ash into a vortex once more. “A body I lack, though I have not struggled without. Not all that lives is the same, is it?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“That I may be as I am means I too live, albeit for a different purpose.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are body-bound, forced to walk and see by the limits of your being. Why this is, who may say?—but there is reason for it, much as there is reason for me being as I am. Our experiences shall be eternally unknown to one another, for I shall not know a body, and you shall never be without; yet we shall always be intertwined by way of our meeting. We will always know another exists, different, but unique.”

The wanderer stood and watched the sand and ash sway around itself, each particle dancing in its own way. Again, it pondered what the voice said. “Each experience is owned by each individual,” the wanderer said, looking down at its hands and feet. It flexed the fingers and formed fists with its hands. “Thank you,” it said to the voice.

“You are the only of your like,” the voice said. “Ours is a place of mystery. Many forms stalk here.”

The sand began to fall back to the ground and the ash retreated to the sky. The wanderer felt the pressure dissipate from its skin. Once the sensation had gone, the wanderer looked around. Nothing had changed; the flat, desolate blackness surrounding everything both above and below remained empty and abandoned. The pale being lowered itself onto its knees and stuck a long hand into the earth. The warmth of the ichor below surrounded its hand as it reached through the top layer. It noted the sensation, watching the fluid run down its fingers and drip white onto the sand, examining as the earth bled down the thin arms. The wanderer opened its mouth and brought its hands to it. It tilted its head and hands back, letting the liquid drip onto the dirty grey teeth and into its throat. The earth-blood clung to the inside of its throat, warming it. Then the wanderer began to chew on the sand, letting the grains pop against its teeth. It reached back down to the ground and scooped another handful of sand, bringing it to its eyes. The blood dropped onto the eyes, blurring the wanderer’s vision, adding a new shade to the inky black sky. It rubbed the sand against the white bulbs.

There was a new feeling now. It did not like this feeling. The wanderer’s eyes began to itch, burning uncomfortably. The warming sensation had become unbearable. It reached its finger to the eyes and began to scratch at them, attempting to pick away the black spots that were burning its vision. Black tears began to appear along the eyes as the wanderer screamed, the tips of its fingers stained in the same white blood they dug from the ground mixed with the white blood of the clawed flesh. Through the pain, the wanderer began to distinguish murky images of somewhere else, somewhere vibrant and colorful. A memory.

Desperate for relief and clarity, the wanderer thrust its discolored head into the white patches of parted sand. The burning stopped, but it was replaced by something new. There was a weightlessness, a feeling of lightness so welcoming that the wanderer momentarily forgot about the image and pushed itself deeper into the fluid. First the head, then the shoulders, finally the rest of the body. It looked around, surrounded by pure white, except for the black hole through which it entered. It began to sink, deeper and deeper into the white plane. As it sank, memories began to flood its mind. It remembered the feeling of wind against its face; the smell of ocean salt; the sound of the waves approaching and retreating from the shore.

 The wanderer looked down and noticed its body had begun to turn black. It was warmer down here, it thought. The wanderer watched as its limbs began to disintegrate. Pieces of its skin split into black flakes and ascended through the white sea, the memories disappearing along with them. It lay, suspended in the light, unable to move or speak, instead relegated only to feeling that warm floating sensation. The wanderer tried to hold onto the images in its head, but empty gaps ripped through these discoveries as its perceptions crumbled. The fingers chipped away from its hands, and the toes rose away. The teeth peeled out of its mouth and cracked, darkening into black silt. Consciousness began to fade as the black hole above sealed itself. The memories disappeared. Eventually, all became white.

____________

A grey, featureless figure walked through an infinite blackness, white marks on the ink-black sand tallying its journey. The wanderer had no recollection for how long it had resided in the desolation surrounding it. The only sensation it experienced was the warmth of the tearing surface upon which it traveled. In its mind’s eye it saw a tree, white with naked branches, a white trail of footprints leading towards it. The wanderer walked onward, obsessed with finding the tree.