The grey spanned everything, a vast colourless ocean, ready to drown James, and take him to it's grey depths. James saw this, and felt hiss cheek being flooded by his grey, salty tears. Storied hell's igneous, molten, red gates would have been a welcome sight to him, compared to what he saw. He shed tears for what he had done, for his final mistake, and his tears were cold and unforgiving. They streamed down his cheeks, and left his skin mottled grey and filled with goosebumps. As he trudged the vast ocean of nothingness, this colourless, characterless, calamitic, cosmos that decorated his view, the very colour he had valued seeped out of his skin, his material self. Everything was grey, at the end of it all, the man, his clothes, the ground, the sky, all a dim grey. James' tears had stopped emerging, but he was still a sad, pathetic man. the dim non-existent lustre of everything seemed a great disappointment to the hopeful author. Some paradise.
James trudged through the grey, hoping to find something in this sea of nothingness. Nothing was the king of this land, boring it's advisor, bland it's queen, and grey it's soldiers, getting the message of bland, boring nothingness everywhere. Hell was a cold, desolate wasteland, filled with nothing but the breathing of the writer, polar opposite to the hot, bustling hellscape, filled with the screams of the damned, that the humans had preached. At the least, it was this way for James, who had always feared the colourless, bland, unremarkable but necessary aspects of life. Colour was his goal, and he had failed. He had wished to make the world more colourful, and he had failed. He had wished to make those close to him happier, and he had failed. He had wished to make life enjoyable for the next generation, and he had failed. He was THE failure, useless, not worthy of the title of a god, or a giant, or even a human. He was a disappointment, deserving of the world's hate and berating. His rage had grown for so long, but now, facing the endless grey, it sputtered and disappeared, a final reminder of his final mistake.
The tears had stopped, but James wished to drown in them. Maybe their was something after life after death, maybe another grey paradise. He had hoped for paradise, a colourful land, where rainbows decorated the sky, and unicorns roamed the fields. Where dragons littered the fair land, in caves with untold riches, for a hero to kill and claim. Where princesses lived in lonely towers, waiting on a saviour to rescue them. He had peddled that bullsh*t to the kids, hoping that his torch, to surround the world in cheer and hope for a paradise in afterlife, would be passed on to next generation. But that 'bullsh*t' was just that, a lie, a fairy-tale. He had spent his life waiting for his afterlife, where he could roam with beautiful elves, and ride beautiful unicorns. His hopes had been misplaced, and he had lived a uninspiring life for his misplaced hope. He had thought his fire would burn red forever, but it had sputtered and turned grey the moment that his head had kissed the cold, grey earth. His torch was a painting on the wall, non-existent now that his fire had gone out, and the next generation would live in the dark, in fear of the afterlife, as they should, adhering to what James had understood seeing his own fate. The earth IS the heaven, and when a human leaves it, the hell they make is all that awaits them. The grey didn't care what the guy did before his doom ended.
But James couldn't do anything now, he had made his final choice. His head had promised him paradise awaited him, but his heart had always fought against that. His heart belonged to his mom, to Kate, in his pen and paper, in his adulating fans. He felt he had let them down. The countless children, who had grown reading his books, and the next generation wouldn't get that. He had forgotten about that, thinking that only the adults mattered. But his Paladin was the children's hero, not the parents'. His only goal should have been to lead the kids, teach them morals, and to hope that they would grow up to be better than him. He had failed that, like everything else, but this failure stung the most, even if it hadn't drawn first blood. James shed another grey tear, streaming down his grey cheek, falling to the grey ground.
After his greatest mistake, his mother ranked next highest. He had pushed her away, hoping that she would stop caring about him. He wanted nothing more than to be loved, and his mother was the only one who had truly loved him, his entire life. But when his final book failed, he had stopped talking to her, thinking that it would break her heart. The worst thing was, he didn't know if he regretted that or not. His mother didn't deserve him, he was a failure, an idiot, a faulty child, yet the sweet woman had always loved him, pushing through his worst to see the elusive inner good of James. He had never found it, and his final mistake had not changed that, and he was somewhat sure she had been hallucinating when she thought she saw it in him. He didn't have any good left in him, for a far long time. Another grey tear fell, down his grey cheek, down to fall on the grey ground.
His next failure was more of him pushing away, but this time it adhered to love for Kate, and previously, Laura. He still believed Laura had never loved him, but he had once loved her. He had, of course adhering to his very nature, pushed her away, breaking up with her when he saw his fall from the pedestal was inevitable. He was sure that she would have broken up with him, when she understood that he wasn't worth it. But now, when he had no one to embrace, he wished he had not pushed her away, even if that path ended in her leaving him, as long as he could have held for a second longer. Yet he had failed that, and it was another rusted nail on his coffin, filled with his rotten, ravaged, gorged, bloated corpse. A sack of flesh, he was in the end, and the grey didn't even provide that. His mistakes were colourful, he had to agree, but black and red was as painful to witness as grey, he needed greens and golds, blues and browns, yet the grey wouldn't provide that.
His mistakes ate at him, but he had no material body left to feed it. Now, his mistakes bit into his very soul, his head and heart. His failures were as vast as the horizon in the grey, as colourful as the horizon on earth, as wasteful as his paper-ball filled trashcan, and changing that was as futile as changing James. He had pushed everyone away, thinking they couldn't bear the weight of his failures, and now regret joined the burden of his failures. His back was red and purple with the strain, his neck red with his final mistake, his face and legacy dirtied and muddied by his own missteps, and he continued making mistakes, not learning from his negligence, his missteps, his mistakes, his failures. And his face got more dirtied, and his glory got muddled, if you call it 'glory'. His back turned more purple, and his neck became redder.
That's when James opened his eyes, with a red neck, into a brighter world.