The line stretched endlessly, writhing through a void without horizon, like a living serpent of ash and silence. The air was thick, molten, heavy enough to crush lungs and skull alike, pressing so hard that my soul felt like it was melting, dripping away in rivulets of wax long abandoned. Every breath was a struggle, the air sticky, foul, smelling of scorched iron, charred earth, and the metallic tang of ancient blood. Time had stopped. Or perhaps it had evaporated altogether, leaving only a frozen, suffocating stillness, a millennia-long pause in which we — thousands of us — floated like corpses trapped in some endless limbo.
Then, after centuries of immobility, a movement tore through the mist. A boat emerged, black as the marrow of bones, its timbers writhing like living tendons, groaning under a weight that seemed to drag it from the bowels of the universe itself. Silence shattered with every creak, resonating in the marrow of my bones. This was no salvation for all — only the few who still possessed a coin, a memory, a fragment of essence could hope to board. The rest remained on the embered shore, eyes hollow, mouths moving silently, begging for mercy that would never come. Their whispers crawled along the air, a swarm of ghosts buzzing behind my ears.
I lunged toward the boat when it returned, driven by the desperate, gnawing hope that my turn had come. I thought I had the fare, an invisible currency to claim my passage. But the truth struck like a blade: I remained pinned to the shore, unseen, unheard. My identity began to unravel. Yet one image blazed in my mind, relentless: a red lycoris, vibrant and obscene, a wound bleeding light in the darkness. It belonged to nothing. No face, no place, no memory. Even my name had been ripped away, scattered by the scorching winds that devoured the remnants of who I had been.
The boat drifted toward the opposite shore, where the darkness pulsed like a living thing, swallowing the passengers one by one into its gaping, silent maw. A cold terror tore through me: they were not going to salvation. They were being devoured, dissolved into the black soup of oblivion. I refused this end. I refused to be a residue forgotten, erased by absent gods. A survival instinct, sharper than fear, sharper than memory, propelled me forward. Step by step, I broke the line, defying the eternal law of waiting.
The shore gave way beneath my feet. The water touched me, black, thick, heavy as liquid mercury, erasing the world. It swallowed me completely, folding the surface over my head, sealing me in a cocoon of silence that screamed in my ears.
Then the air changed. The shadow-cloaked figure steering the boat twisted suddenly, breaking the lethargy of countless centuries. His mist-wrapped form shivered, and two pale, furious eyes ignited, burning through the void, locking onto the spot I had vanished. He was no mere ferryman; he was the judge of eternity, and I had offended him. For the first time since time itself began, a soul had refused silence to embrace chaos. I was no longer a failing passenger; I had become a criminal, a stain on the eternal order, marked for purging.
The Styx roared. Not water, but a river of regrets, of primal anger, of pain collected across eons, dragging me down, down, into fathomless depths. Shadows writhed along the current, monstrous forms sliding just beneath the surface, their eyes glimmering with hunger. I glimpsed faces — twisted, screaming faces — of those who had come before me, lost and gnawed by the river itself. Charon froze on his skiff, skeletal hands gripping his pole, but he did not move. He knew, as all who serve eternity know, that the river's depths were not for even him to witness, inhabited by horrors best left unremembered.
I sank deeper. The water became a living darkness, pressing into my chest, invading my ears, filling my eyes with visions of memory and torment, twisting them into grotesque parodies. Time dissolved; space warped. I was unmade, my essence shredded by currents of shadow and flame, dragged toward a yawning abyss where even gods dared not shine their light. Here, in this gut of the universe, I became nothing. Not dead. Not alive. Just a whisper of what had once been, a flicker of red in a black sea that had swallowed all hope.