Solace
Everything is filled with dust. It hangs in the air like an old friend, dancing in the golden peach-coloured light oozing across the room, flitting into the shadows where it flirts with disappearance. Every tiny speck is so small, easily lost, yet so resolute in the face of life. The air smells of aging books, smiling from the cabinets in their dying days, musty with decline yet nonetheless holding an air of freshness, something of the dreams lining their pages. The old man smiles at me, eyes crinkling as his face lights up. He shines like the moon. Everything aches. I look down and see that I am sat in an opulent green velvet chair, frayed with the tides of time, ornate arms digging into my own in some strange union of bodies.
“You are hurt,” says the man, kindly.
“’m alright,” I mumble.
“In your soul,” he clarifies.
His eyes are like rockpools on a summer’s day, only deep, deep, deeper than anything. They are eyes you could fall into and lose yourself forever in. He blinks, and smiles.
“Have this,” he says, handing me a cup of tea. It is warm, and smells sweet and acrid, like smoke and sugar and spice.
I take a sip, and it runs down into my throat, warming me from the inside out.
“He was a good man, your father,” the man says, wistfully, “Kind, and generous, and always very good with words and such.”
My heart falls like a toddler on a rock.
“No,” I say, shaking my head, “That wasn’t my dad. My dad was fire and ice and the crest of the roaring wave and the cloud over the sun and a whirlwind and a dragon and a gargoyle.”
Tears pool in my eyes as the man stares into my soul. It is quite disconcerting.
“He was both,” he says, simply. His hands dance about piles of books, ancient tomes of forgotten knowledge. They whirl and twirl through the pages, dancing like butterflies until he seems to have the appendages of octopi. They dance and they crawl and they laugh and they swim and they shimmer in the light of creation.
“Go away,” I said quietly, and the tears pushing and groaning at my eyelids seem to pool in my chest, suffocating me until I can scarcely breathe. I force my chest, heaving the tears out of my mouth in a wail. “Go away,” I cry.
“No.” says the man. His arms have become a blur, scarcely touching the pages. I cannot see them all, I cannot hear them all, they are simply whirring and changing, never stopping. They are disappearing and reforming a million times over, over and over they die and are reborn.
“Nooo,” wails the man, eye sockets empty, face aged and haggard, only darkness now fleeting over it instead of light caressing it.
Everything is covered in darkness except me. The man’s hands reach out, ancient, older than time itself, fingernails sharpened and twisted and bent into claws of steel and deformed plastic. They caress my cheeks, ridged, dreadful things.
His eyes. My god, his eyes.
There is nothing there but gaping holes, and darkness and they are staring at me, they are staring into my soul they are staring staring staring into my soul.
The maw of the creature is great and gaping, a chasm of emptiness and dread and despair. Its hands grasp my face, their weathered curvature eating into my cheeks. I can’t even scream.
It is coming for me it is coming for me it is going to eat me it is going to eat me whole I can’t move I can’t think I can’t scream I can’t
Nothing.
There is nothing.
Nothing but me. There is no sound, no colour, no smell, no taste.
Only me, myself, and I.
Emptiness envelops me.
It is not black, it is not white, it is not even some colour beyond the understanding of the human brain, it is just… nothing.
I am alone.
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