All I could hear was the sound of my own bartered breathing as the Darkness encased me. It was calm at first, the sensation of my brain going into overdrive while my body refused to follow the instructions it dished out. The humid air surrounding me, and the bitter taste in my mouth, other than these sensations I couldn’t feel anything else on my body— though at this point it no longer feels like my body. My hands and legs are stiff as blocks, but I somehow manage to move them, though that doesn’t make them weigh any less than a million pounds. Even now, the ghost of sensation lingers in my cold heart. Desperation, fear, sadness… I claw desperately at the walls of my confine when I can manage. Even though I know its pointless… I still keep doing it, it’s the only way I can manage to fight back the constant fear that I am drowning in. 

I feel like I am clawing away at infinity. The darkness will not yield to me, there is no hope, yet I still fight. I want to scream, I try to scream… but I had lost my voice along with my tongue hours ago. Despite knowing fully well that it will be better for me to conserve my air, desperation has long since replaced my sanity. Any ember of humanity I still cling too will be lost in time— that is, if I have not lost it already.

When I wasn’t struggling a futile struggle, I was trying to catch my breath. A horrible stench filled the air driving away the almost non-existent oxygen I had left. I found myself gasping for air like fish out of water when there was none to breath nor enough to fill my rotting lungs to the point where I would feel more distraught as the grim reality set in. The stench of decomposing flesh fills my small coffin and chokes me. The stench of my own flesh appals me. 

At a certain point in a man’s life, at the end to be precise, where he is dying of oxygen deprivation and heaving to the smell of his own flesh, he starts to think; do I truly deserve this? Given I am not exactly a nice person, some would even consider me a villain. I am no saint, but such torment- NO! I do not deserve this, no one could ever deserve the horror I am forced to endure. To be lost to time. I refuse to succumb to despair, but deep down I know there is no hope for me where I lay. Where ever it is I lay.

Eventually, I will have barely the strength left in me to struggle. Time seems to have lost all meaning, whether it was night or day I would never be able to tell. Darkness. All that is left is darkness. It’s too dark for me to see my hands, even when I struggle to hold out my hands in front of me. But I can feel my fingers, barely, what is left of them at least. 

The nails on these fingers had fallen off ages ago, along with the skin around it. The cancer had taken most of my flesh, and I had scratched what was left of them down to the bones of my fingertips. I finally laid silent in the dark, devoid of all hope, helpless. This is how I will remain for a hundred days and nights, crying when I feel hungry and dry, but never dying. 

Hunger and thirst had become a norm, but the release I seek will never come. Death would not visit me; I am a damned man. No matter how much I yearn for it, I will not die. I think back at the life I had lived, as shambled and petty as it was- I would trade this hell for it any day. For at this moment, time and death were no longer enemies.

It would always be better than this living hell I now endure. Looking back to my life before this; I had a job, a home, a family… it wasn’t much, but it was enough. I see that now. I was never a good man, there’s no point lying to myself. I did things that even I found appalling. I neglected my family… ‘Oh! Helen’ 

Her name came to mind, it had been so long, it now sounded so foreign to my mind, and even more so to my barely functioning lips and vocal cords. I can no longer put a face to the name in my head, it’s all a blur now. She used to be my wife. I used to be her world, at some point, but I neglected that love she had for me until there was nothing left. Now she is somewhere better I hope, ‘All I ever did was take…take! Take!! I want another wish!’ I could barely even speak but I managed to force a semblance of the words out of my mouth. “You can hear me… I know you can. Give me another wish!”

I know he can hear me. I know because I can hear him laughing in the void.

Prologue : End