Nihil

Hel is a place where an ocean has no waves, where a desert has no dunes, where light is mere darkness in the black. There, is neither searing heat nor blistering chill, only a stale wind of muted whispers. It is a hard place, an empty place, devoid of all but slated stone shattered by the hammer of time unto coarse gray sands upon the salted shore of a great, endless, deafening, nothing.

There are no demons, no grotesques, no delightful torments, for there are no demons more grotesquely delightful than those which we carry within our selves to torture our own understanding of forgiveness.

There is hunger yes, but no starvation, for the fruit that grow do so slowly... and rot quickly. There too is thirst, but nought to quench it, for the rains that fall never water the ground. There is pain in this place, as in all places, yet no agony, nor any relief, and where there are wounds they are washed clean until golden, though never shall they heal.

Where there is strength, it is worn down by the gravity of burdens fixated upon with near zealous and hostile reverence, burdens that remain inconsequential and forgotten, so as to make inconsequence and forgetting the greatest of weights to bear, grinding down and down upon even the strongest that their flesh will wear thin as tattered garments and their bones will grind into the dust upon which they tread. Dust… a desert of dust, a desert of unnumbered souls that have withered in this silent grave.

In this place, consciousness is confusion, thoughts are ever inescapably consumed with seeking some quiet corner in which to curl up and languish into decay, to hollow into atrophy, to be buried, face drawn over by a veil of unshed tears, and succumb... but these thoughts survive still, and surviving is harder to face, for any hope which endures is neither blessing nor curse, for what little blessing that warmth gives feeds the burnt out flame of the self, while its curse means to continue, unending the path for which there is no direction and no destination. And so, we walk, we walk until we can walk no further. Restlessly, ceaselessly, as beggars, towards a blind sun that is neither dawn nor dusk, like an idol before us, one that hears no prayers, one that watches us in our gravestep until our feet are blistered and bloodied and broken, until we can do no more than to continue walking and walk further still, until all thought of stopping becomes a heresy akin to the murder of the self that has no life left to take.

Perpetual is the existence of those seeking yet unable to find death, for there is none to seek, an unending permanence is the knowledge of there being nothing as empty as waiting to die, yet it is all that nourishes, all that sustains, the journey for which remains forever upon the horizons.

Hel is a place within this small black book.

A notebook, no larger than a matchbox, that weighs more than the halcyon respite I seek, as though the countless names scratched within its pages held some gravity over the small thing. Strange, that something amounting to little more than blackened unlettered goatskin, supple and worn by the thousand hands of signatory’s past, and frail yellowed scritta paper, autographed with a memorandum of names now forgotten, peasants of wealth and princes of no-one, vassals all to the inevitable, could hold such enormity.

Eighteen ounces was my price, a single bullion brick the colour of burnt gold that gave twenty thousand reasons, twenty thousand dollars worth of chance at another life, only then would I scrawl my patronym with the rest. And for my sins they accepted, allowing me to consign my fate to which there is no return, for mortality in the presumption of eternity, to flee that inevitability, elude that to which I am doomed, however ephemeral, like all better men and lesser before me I abandon all defiance in the face of that which is to come.

To turn back would be a futile act, for that point has long gone from my sight, and now, all that remains is to take up this crooked quill, to dip within a dirtied pot of liquid night, and by the flicker of a flame long due for death, I too, scratch my name into this ledger of acquiescence.