A pitch-black emptiness.
An empty void with no form, no edges, nothing.
That was where Kaya found himself in now.
Darkness had closed in so completely that the world he had once known now felt like it had been completely erased.
He didn't want to believe this was really happening, but eventually he had to accept the truth, he had lost all of his senses and this was how hia eternal rest, the final stage of his disease, would look like.
But acceptance wasn't as easy as he thought it was. He thought that he would be content. Kaya might have still been young, but since the start he knew that this would be his reality, so he thought he had been prepared for this moment, and he really was.
But...as he was finding out now, thinking about being able to accept something and actually accepting it were unfortunately two different things.
"I don't want things to end like this..." He thought silently, the realization settling in slowly, painfully, like something he had been avoiding for a long time.
A pent up sadness from the unfairness of his life all came flooding out at once, he didn't find it fair that he started losing his senses while his friends didn't, he didn't find it fair that he couldn't see his parents, he didn't find it fair that he couldn't enjoy something as simple as ice cream.
"I...just wanted a normal life."
The boy cried and was saddened for what felt like forever. As he had found out though, nothing lasts forever, and even his overwhelming sadness started fading out over time, blending into regret and anger, an unstoppable rage at everything and anything.
"This isn't fair!!!" The boy screamed out into the void, a voice only his thoughts could hear.
The boy swore and cursed as if to declare war to the world itself. But nothing answered, no one was there to receive his anger, only silence followed.
Eventually after what might have been an eternity, even those strong emotions which Kaya had restrained for all his life, simmered into silence.
There was just no point in any emotion. There was no one to comfort him when he was sad, there was no one he could yell at to calm his anger, there was no one to receive his happiness, and so, his emotion had become meaningless as well.
Deciding he had suffered enough from his emotions, he started to ignore them, letting them blend into the nothingness he was becoming.
How long had it been? A week? A month? A year? A decade?
The boy didn't know, and at this point, he didn't care to know anymore.
At first, Kaya tried to keep track of time. He still had his thoughts to accompany him, which was a sliver of hope he held onto, his last bit of self.
He tried everything to keep track of time, but everything eventually got lost to the endless void.
"How old was I...before I entered the void?" The question came suddenly and surprised even himself. He knew it should have been easy to answer, anyone would know their age...but he had no answer for it.
With time, even his sense of self had started to the sink into the darkness of his reality and dissolved.
The void had taken more than the boy knew, more than a as fair, and even then, the void took more.
Thoughts used to accompany his days, the small, stubborn voice that kept the boy tethered to reality, the occasional question, or random memories he remembered.
Even without sight or sound, memories let him hold on. But memory was not eternal and had thinned. Faces blurred. Names slipped. The taste of bread, the sound of laughter, the sharp color of the sky, all of it faded until nothing could be recalled.
With time, the void had slowly taken everything away from the boy.
The thing that had once been his last small rebellion against this oblivion, his sense of self, had also been erased.
Day and night had folded into one flat black.
Without any point of reference, existence became silence, until at the end of it only one question remained.
'Am I even alive?' that sole question lingered in the boys mind.
The feeling of not existing began to look like relief. Peace. Quiet. No more holding on, no more enduring, no more reaching for things that could no longer be found.
The concept of giving up flashed across his existence, and with it, a calmness settled over the boy like a soft blanket.
Letting go suddenly felt easy as he had nothing to let go of anymore. To be part of this nothingness called the void felt welcoming.
And so, the boy finally succamb and become part of the empty void.
No more ache, no more hurt, no more struggle, no more remembering.
Nothing.
From that moment on, time disappeared as a concept as a whole.
An eternity could have passed by in an instant, and an instant could have been as long as an eternity.
Lost, in the flow of time, a seemingly single moment after surrendering himself to the void, something appeared in the endless void.
A faint blue dot.
At first it was no more than a pinprick, so small it might have been an imagination. But it stayed. Not a shine so much as a presence, quiet and stubborn.
It should not have been possible. This was the void, an endlessly empty black nothingness where everything was erased until it became part of the void.
This faint blue dot shouldn't be able to exist. And...it shouldn't have been possible for the boy to see this faint blue dot no matter how big it was, because he had nothing left to sense with. Every sense was taken from him, and he had even sworn his very existence away.
So why was he able to see the faint blue dot, and why was it...making something stir inside of him?
A distant star in the dark.
It felt... strange.
The feeling arrived uninvited. The feeling of strangeness, the feeling of anything at all shocked the boy to his core, because he had believed feeling was gone for good.
"I can...sense it." The thought surfaced, small and trembling.
The sentence was barely formed and already it felt fragile, like the first breath after being underwater for all his life.
The word felt impossible.
A sliver of hope began to creep into the boys wakening thoughts.
"Could it be? After all the losses...after giving up...could there still be a thread left? Or...was this the light at the end of the tunnel?" The boy who's thoughts only faintly started to return thought carefully, his thoughts moving slowly, unsure.
Whatever it was, a burning hope rose inside the boy.
Kaya came to the conclusion that this would either be a new beginning or the end, and he was content with both. But surprising to even himself, he hoped it would be the former, a new beginning.
"'If I can sense that faint blue dot, then maybe...just maybe I am not entirely alone. Maybe this isn't the end." the boy thought, and what had been a small ember at first, quickly started catching flame, thawing and warming his once forgotten hope.
The boy had wanted to let go, he had almost accepted his fate and given himself to the void. But maybe that wasn't what was fated to happen after all.
He was sure now, he did not want peace after all, he wants to fight, he wants to sense, he wants to-
'I want to live!!!'