/lit/ - Literature

“Am I dead?”

“Not yet,” the stranger switched back to English and slowly floated down back to the earth. “Not in the way you mean, you gave up long ago. You’ve been dead a long time. Those sad eyes, tearing through all that flesh, scorching the ground you and your men travelled. Why are you afraid now?” The stranger stopped abruptly with his mouth slacked open like a ghoul.

“This place makes me feel everything. The past, the present and the future, the blackness, the void, the eternity of it all and my meager stake in everything. I feel meaningless, frail like a memory fading. I feel it taking me. I don’t want to go.”

“Ah, but you must! Every man before you have gone, every man after you will. All back from where they laid down in the arms of protection, to the final outlines of their curled up corpses. The depravity and endlessness! And to think it all continues after you’re gone and I’m here to keep score. I’m here in the night eternally, the keeper of souls a guide for brittle Knights in armor stolen from the corpses of men from another part of this diseased kingdom. The kingdom is diseased don’t you think?”

“I think you’re diseased, I think this place is evil, I see nothing here but I feel the life being drained from the earth all around me. This isn’t part of the human world, if I could leave I would.”

“You’re sounding weak. I thought a warrior dies honorably, but you sound defeated; I guess you didn’t believe you would have so much time to philosophize.”

The stranger began circling the statue with his hands behind his back; he seemed to be enjoying himself, stuck in some twisted ecstasy watching the Knight’s mind unravel before him.

The Knight heard a faint sound coming from the entrance to the cathedral. He looked back and saw the silhouette of a woman he almost recognized. She didn’t speak or move, just stood there silently. Her face was masked in the darkness and her hands held together gently by her navel. He felt the blood return to his limbs and face, he was able to move again and he began crawling towards the apparition. He looked back and the stranger was gone. He kept moving towards her but she was fading away. Tears were now streaming down his face and he lay down in the empty doorway to the cathedral. He knows he is a resident here forever. He looks above and sees the stars where they are supposed to be, glinting in desolation, never changing, for eternity.