Evan Watson, 11th, West Marshall High School, IA, (Fiction) "Of Light and Dark" There existed no sunrise. There was no morning or midday. There was no calm, shadowy, brown-colored, and cool-winded evening. Not a fleck of dust was kicked up from the rock with the gravitational prodding and pulling of some distant satellite. There were no oceans. It was dry and weightless and lifeless. The dead thing sat there amidst the void, writhing, crawling ever closer to death. There was no realization, no comprehension of the crawl towards some ultimate rest, as the crawl had already been completed for it. A passerby would not look upon it and notice, for no passerby existed. The only ocean amidst the gray was the black. Nothing around, forever, endlessly and infinitely, but the blackness. The ocean was surrounding, constantly encroaching, and bitter. It was a cold place. The only place they had ever been. The Betwixt was the bordering edge between life and death and between harmony and discord. The waves of the Betwixt crashed against nothing and the waters retreated into nothing. Space/time felt no conviction inside the Betwixt. There was no meaning nor reason. The startling thing was the noticeable fact that, as the waves crashed and fell back through loops of infinitely tumulting nothingness, the sands of Alreality (what the regular space outside the Betwixt was called) would wear away. To observe this is to wear away as well. A single spire, what appeared to be a single lantern floating dead in the ocean, cast off from the shattered remains of some sunken excursion, stood tall from the rocks. It shattered the ocean and commanded it. The ocean endured, though; it could not speak or react, for it was an ocean. Oceans do not feel. Not for an incalculable distance was any light seen save for this spire. The station had been manned for an amount of time by three men. They agreed to the task. They made their choice. The station was commissioned shortly after the first ships arrived in the new plane; for humanity, it was no world, but rather, a dimension. A place where the z-axis is as accessible as the x and y, and matter failed to behave appropriately and there was no relative nature to time. To newcomers, then-passerbys, the station was a beacon in the darkness. A fog made of nothing was difficult to navigate, so this spire was the guide. Since the time of humanity’s great relocation had ended and the settlement of the Black Eye galaxy had finished, these stations were, without saying, rendered obsolete. No soul would desire to travel via spacecraft to these reaches of the universe.
66
