It is silent here. Not ‘absence of noise’ silence. I can hear the Movement, slow and unchanging. I can hear crying. Someone is wailing. And yet it is silent, like laying still under dead earth where you cannot hear the sound of birds or the voices of family that just threw dirt over your body.

It is silent here. Not quiet, silent. Like the grungy scepters that hunch over unsuspecting children featured in artists imaginations, we hunch over our wards, watching and waiting for their transition to this place. Somehow we chose them, in a time whose memory has faded, having been exposed to the endlessness of this place, yawning and horrible, swallowing purpose and every feeling of love.

Someone is wailing in the distance. The sound struggles to reach me through the thick silence, finally squeaking past in a soft hoarse gasp. Whoever they are, they made it here. I resent them. I resent her.

The time for her transition is near, but sentiment and obligation stubbornly tie her to the flesh of her flesh, and bone of her bone. She does not know. How could she? It is a trap. She does not know. Nothing she can do will stop the painful tear that will bring her here, to the place where sentiment is going to trap her and she will learn hatred. Then she will forget hatred and learn to forget.

I’m locked here because of foolish words etched into the memory of this ether.
“I’ll be watching over you.”

She is my last one, my last promise.
Die.
So I prise her fingers.
Die.
White knuckling to life.
Die.
One by one.
Die.
I must get free.