Fall

Fall.
The darkness around kept flowing backward — at first only a gentle touch, but once it had tasted, it grew rougher, more eager. Like something that had just realized it had been starving for a long time — and the more it fed, the more ravenous it became.
The being felt nothing but the hollow beneath — stretching open, growing deeper, as though the darkness were drawing a long, slow breath in preparation for something.
No wind. No sound.
Only speed — and the strange stillness living at its very core, like the heart of a dead star: the outside a blazing fire poised to consume everything, the inside cold as an empty husk, a hollow shell of ice hiding beneath a skin of burning heat — as though it were incinerating itself, and wished to take everything else along with it.
If someone had been watching from the other side of the dark, they would have seen a streak of light.
Only that. A streak of light, and then nothing.

And then somewhere in a place where darkness ruled, that streak of light came down in silence — sudden and yet invisible, as though it had always been there and no one had ever noticed.
The darkness remained darkness. Unmoved. Unwelcoming. The being appeared within it the way a drop of water falls into an ocean — not a ripple, not a trace. Simply that. Appeared.
They came from no particular direction.
Near — near enough that it felt like breathing just beside the ear, the sounds so loud and clear the being thought they could be touched. Then far — like the voice of someone calling from the other side of a mountain the being had never seen.

*Where is this?
Who am I?*
They drifted past and vanished before they could be recognized — things without shape, without weight, leaving behind only a strange hollow, as though the being had just missed something important without ever knowing it.
Then everything broke — not with a bang, not with light, but with silence. The kind of silence that can only be born from something that has tried its hardest to exist, and then could try no longer — and let go. Everything collapsed inward, slowly, as though even time did not wish to watch, until there was nothing left to collapse into. No echo. No trace.
Only silence remained — dense and heavy, falling like snow through the dark.

Then the being saw it.
A point of light. Small — so small that one had to look for a long time before daring to believe it wasn’t simply the mind deceiving itself. It flickered like a flame before wind — though in that silence so absolute, so still, not even a falling needle would make a sound, let alone any wind dare enter.
And yet it drifted there, as though challenging the dark — saying: I am here.
Near, then far, drifting in a rhythm without name — slow and adrift, as though something had grown weary of searching long ago, but had not yet found a place to rest.
The being wanted to draw closer — and yet stood frozen in place, caught between curiosity and a fear it could not name. Because there was something about that point of light, something vague — not quite a thought, not clear enough to be called instinct — a wordless sense that the thing drifting there, if touched even once…
Would dissolve.