There's nothing.
Not just distant, or quiet.
There is just nothing there. It is dark, darker than colour. A dark that does not surround you, but it is you.
No.
it is more than you, and you are less than it. The dark is taking you, turning you dark too, but there is not any of you to take. There never was.
And it is cold. So very cold. And silent, to the point where you can almost hear it. Like a ringing in ears that do not exist.
It is confusing, but scary. Really scary. You have never felt anything else before though, so you can not really call it scary. You have never felt comfort. The warm embrace of another, the individuality of a room. The beauty of movement. Life beyond this black has never existed before.
Yet that is scary too. Maybe scarier. The black is horrible, but it is at least black. You know it is black. There is comfort in that.
But what to do when there is more. Colour and movement. Rooms and others to fill them.
Maybe we won't leave the nothing after all.
A desert exists, the only place in reality. It is an endless plane of gold with a white sky which falls to distant dunes and hills of sand, but nothing else. There is no grass or water, no foliage or civilisation. To stand upon a mound and look around is to see only what is out of sight. Walking forever will take you no place new; you will remain in the same desert. Movement is pointless, and yet stillness is aimless. A place of sand which is perpetually still, graced by no winds or cool air and neither by any sun or warmth. No objective exists, and there is no reason to come here, no reason for it to be here. Empty space would have served a greater purpose.
But this is all there is. There is no "empty space", and nothing to contrast the infinite land. No comparison, because nothing here has ever existed aside from sand. You can dig, but your efforts will be in vain. It won't even get cooler the deeper you go.
No, you can dig. In fact, you should. Aside from going down, you can only go around. There is no up save for the dunes, and then you already know what's atop those. Yes. Down is the way to go. There won't be anything there, and you'll be wasting your time, but you have nothing else to do aside from curse your abundance of moments. Eternity exists as the only thing larger than this place, and haunts the creatures which amble over its surface. Like a cloud in the skies above. Although there have never been clouds.
A desert and those who are on it. One and two. Blue and red. A and Z, although there is no language here. No real colours either, and numbers serve no purpose but to count the grains under your feet. And that is even worse than sitting still.
Figures lay tracks through the ground, stalking across the plane. They have been here forever, cannot remember a time in any place except for the sand, and cannot conceive any place aside, for what can they dream of when there is no sleep? Even if they could, what then? Conjure an image from the grain? An infant in a nightmare. They know not but the land within their crib.
They rarely meet, because like everything they have succumbed to the desire for more, even if it doesn't have a word, so they walk without restriction. When they cross paths, it is but the hum of want through which they communicate and stopping could only allow the emphasis on their nothingness to take hold. If one were to slow, it would only be for them to speed back up again. If one of them stopped, they may fall to the ground.
They do not cry. They do not speak. To ease their pain, they have shut off everything but their wish to exist beyond these boundaries, to feel more than this craving, a hurt which they do not understand, for what is there to know aside from what is right before you? Your senses perceive the reality, and if there is but a coarse stream on all sides and woe for air, then that is you. You become your land to survive and cope with the trauma.
Coarse and woeful. Nothing to walk for, and nothing to lose, but no perceivable way of breaking free from the eternal dormancy of their existence. Forever cut by their home, sliced by its cruel nature and their hopeless fate, the scars barley forming in their minds before another wound opens. They do not live; they do not need to. They require no nutrients, and feel no physical harm. Reality beyond the perception of truth. Life without the living. An entity bound not by the laws of existence, but by the very place on which they stand. No different from the pebbles below or the sky above, and yet perceptive of their captivity and the reality they are in. There is nothing but sand. No stars or minerals, and the idea of diversity is as dormant as it is impossible.
And yet at a moment, from the endless place of sand strides one of these creatures in a way which has never existed before. It walks straighter and with purpose, profound and different from the rest, and as it moves through the desert others see it, they spy the individual, that aside from sand, sky and sadness, and they decide to walk with it, because why wouldn't they? It wasn't like they were going anywhere, and even if it was just back the way they came, it'd be no different than the other way.
So, they flocked to this individual, traced its steps and massed, a group forming behind the character until it stopped and turned, looked at its congregation who had trekked from lands distant and yet lands all the same. Never meeting and never not, they all watched the purposeful one, momentarily pushing their woe aside to wonder with empty heads what was different now. Why one of them would walk like this.
How.