By Olivia Tiffin, TIWP Student

“Hello Again–”…

A figure lays on the black, cold floor of the Abyss.

“We haven’t talked in a while,” its voice glum and sharp as it echoes through the void.

“Or, have we just spoken?” it asks, no expression as its empty masked face glares up into the abandoned, shadowed, sky.

“It’s dark,” it whispered through the searing cold as it lay on the bitter floor. Yet is it floor? The…ground felt of ice from that which you lay in hoping to make an angel in cold powder, only to find the snow iced over forming shards of sharp glass.

“I don’t mind the dark anymore. After, forty eight months it becomes.…” The figure paused. The world, bare if you could call it that, paused with it.

“Tiresome.”

A mask clothed the figure’s face. Blank and still, nothing but two, black blots painted in a rush, resembled eyes, upon the lifeless face.

Its voice faded. Raspy and dull, so fragile, as unused things become.

It wore a dark, aristocratic vest upon a black shirt. The vest was lined with intricate white spirals and branch-like patterns embroidered near the edges.

The figure laughed, through bare, stiff movement.

“I imagine I must introduce myself,” it said, clinical amusement in its voice. A smile plastered wide behind the mask it called a face. “But suppose death has no face.” The words echo somehow through the black abyss.

“For it would be, unpurposeful. Death need no face but bloodied blades it needs to collect its victims, and to paint its crimson portrait of crop fields trampled by fallen armies plunging to their unchangeable fates. And their many corpses left stacked and scattered upon the portraits field.”

“I apologize, I get carried away when monologuing to voices in my head.” The figure scowled grim and cold. “After all, there is little more to do in this void I am trapped in.”