Trembling, the spirit went through the gate, dissolving into the mists of the beyond.
“I wonder…” said death peering into the darkness. He let the fragmented thought hang in the otherwise silent ether of the hallway. No echo returned. For the first time in what might be called eternity, the frightful loneliness of the place, of the undecorated transition, the emptiness, came on him with full force, and with it, desire. In his very core, he felt want. It was like memory, recollection, but of what—of nothing, he told himself. Nothing he could say. A memory of something that never was, of something that had been before, before he ever was, long before there was any before. A want for he knew not what was in the dried marrow of his bones, a want he had never known before but which spoke with a dreadful authority of something original, sacred, and far more real than the shadows death knew. A taste, a flavor, a phrase, like something from a dream, effervescent and unformed, a reflection in a pool of something. The sudden realization that this hallway was the ruins of a house that once held many rooms. Now it was an empty hallway, a tunnel with a light drawing the travelers along.
He felt alone as he gazed out into the mists of the beyond.
Tale Told 