• ONE
    I went from one darkness to another.
    I woke from the yawning chasm of a dreamless sleep, to the dark bedlam of the world in which I found myself. I knew nothing save for pain and cold, and the sensation of liquid creeping down the side of my head. Water? The only fully-formed word I could bring forth in the chaos that was my mind at that point. It was more like a prayer,actually, a one-word chant to a God that clearly wasn't watching over me that night. It was a monumental effort to move my arm enough to feel my head. The pain filled me, throbbing in time with my heartbeat, slow and droning. My fingers sluiced delicately through a thick liquid. [i]Blood is thicker than water[i][/i] I began laughing manically at this thought, and the sound frightened me, hollow and mirthless as it was.
    I moved my head through an Olympian effort, enough to survey my surroundings. I did not at all like what I found. I was entrenched in a wreckage of twisted metal and shattered glass. Beside me, there was a man. He was slumped over and fearfully still. His face was framed with shining red, mangled with gashes that would never heal. I supposed that he was dead. I did not have any recollection of who this man was, or why I felt such crushing sorrow at the idea of his death. I turned my eyes to the night. There was a field, possessing only dead and dying grass adorned with the glittering frost of a winter's eve. Then the sky, blacker than jeweler's velvet, scattered with stars, their silvery essence brought into stark relief. They and their mother moon supplied the evening's only light. There was nothing else to be spoken for, merely the sea of glittering grass and the sky meeting at the horizon, the moon and the stars and me. Alone.

    TWO