Freewrite #17. This short story was written as one of a series of quick exercises designed to be both an outlet for refining vague ideas and an opportunity to improve the flow and dynamics of my writing. As you reach the ending, please keep in mind that it was not written with the intention of slighting or commenting on the beliefs of any social groups whatsoever. It's just a story... an exploration of impossibility.

The world is empty. It's so quiet that I can hear my veins flexing with each beat of my heart. It's so still that I can see the blood flowing behind my eyes, a ghostly reflection of motion on my retinas. There's nothing to pull me out of myself. There's nothing out there to focus on. There's nothing.

It chills me to know that, but it's a certainty that's lodged firmly in the center of my spine, tingling its way like an errant spark from synapse to synapse as it travels the nerve paths of my body. No matter what my will says, no matter how hard I try to ignore it, I can't help but feel the nothingness in every part of me. It's as autonomous as my heartbeat, and I haven't the skill to suppress it. I can only wallow in it, drowning in the knowledge that I have been thrown into an empty place to exist alone.

I cannot change it, so I will wait... I will drift and listen to the song of my body. I will make my own motion. I will be my own company for as long as I must because I must.

Light flashes in red, green and blue from all sides, vicious darts of energy that end as often as not in screams and death. I watch them coldly, knowing as I do that one will probably come for me soon, but such is the way of things. My kind started the cycle of hatred that has come around to us, and a very large part of me believes that we deserve the violent end we have arrived at. The rest of me aims, fires, ducks, reducing the innumerable enemy by one.

I am dreaming. Or is it merely remembering? Whichever. It doesn't matter that it hurts to dream, that the imagines stab imaginary wounds that tighten the muscles banding my shoulders. Dreams are better than nothing.

Their return fire spits rock and grit into the air by my face, and I turn my head to shield my eyes only to find her there with her blood-slick face shoved too near to mine. I recoil, growling at her in my surprise and frustration, but she only smirks and says something crass before popping up over the ruins that are our shelter to cut down another of their little toy soldiers.

I can hear her sandpaper voice, like an echo in the emptiness, and a muscle in my cheek spasms under a sudden surge of loneliness. In another time and place, the strength of my reaction might have made me laugh, but as it is, I want to cry instead. I never even liked the militaristic bitch, yet I would give anything to have her here with me now, someone to help me absorb all this emptiness. Of course, that's quite impossible...

The bolt that takes her in the chest is bright blue and singing a perfect B-flat until it slices into her ageless flesh and falls as dead as she does. I don't bother to catch her; it would be wasted motion, and she's not quite in a position to appreciate the gesture. Really, I'm more inspired to sigh, and I do so, wiping the splatters of warm, blue-black blood off my face. One down, how many to go?

Not many. I look at the positions around me and see more still, empty bodies than living fighters, and I know that we won't be able to hold them for more than a few more minutes. It could be disaster, but in that moment, there's a static crackle that dances across my skin and sets the fine hairs on my neck on end. My smile is a grim one, but one nonetheless as the spreading front of energy tells me that it might be alright. It's like one of those old, lighted signs, blaring to the world that the threshold has been breached, and it gives me hope for the first time in ... in too long to remember. It inspires me to reach down and gently close her staring eyes before I dart out into the open in my mad rush to reach the circle. There isn't any more time.

Time. Oh, there's so much time, now. I turn it to dreams and exercises, to vain efforts to stretch myself beyond nothingness and drag myself out, claw my way back to ... anywhere. Somewhere. I have to will my heart to beat, now, or it will stop due to sheer apathy. I have to remind my muscles how to move every once in a while, lest I lose the ability entirely. In the times when the memories recede, I play games with my own brain, forging new paths, finding new patterns, tickling my cells with signals the likes of which they've never felt before. Still, though, the emptiness gnaws at me. I suppose it's only a matter of time...

The seconds tick by like an eternity as my stride eats up the distance. I can feel the heat, every now and again, of a close miss, and my body is tense in anticipation of the one that will burn into it, spreading the agony that I know from past experience. I've been lucky before, but I don't actually expect that luck to last through to the final hour. I haven't lived a good enough life, especially for the millennia since the revolution. I have too much black ether clinging to my soul to be worthy of surviving this day.

That's why I'm stunned when I throw myself behind the last barrier and find that I'm still breathing. The air flows in and out, not seeming to leak through any new holes in my body. The blood pumps through my veins, apparently unperturbed by any breaks in the vessels that carry it. Fingers move. Toes wiggle inside my heavy boots. Hell, even my ears are fully functional. The fact that I have lived through the gauntlet of laser fire amazes me to the extent that I waste precious seconds just sitting there, eyes wide and mouth agape as the stones around me explode in tiny showers of rock and the screams of the less lucky ring out from the aisle.

I'm shaken from my stupor by a spectacled labrat, and he grabs my arm, leading me to the apparatus and the crackling nimbus of energy that writhes around the rend they've created in the fabric of space. I stare at it for a moment, listening to him telling me that I must go quickly, that there's no more time. Others have already gone, and if we are to survive, we must send as many as possible before they can destroy it. He tells me all this, but really I'm not listening. All I can think of is how beautiful the rift is and how completely it contrasts with the ugly reality we've made for ourselves.

The thought from my dream sticks with me for a very long time, and as I play my games and pass the infinite time, I can feel it always tickling at the back of my mind. A reality that we made for ourselves. A reality that we made...

The labrat gives my arm a shove before turning away to find others, perhaps to help others. I know what he wants of me, and even while my thoughts are on the stupid choices my kind have made and the ignorant mistakes that have lead us to this end, I bend my knees, crouching to prepare the leap that will take me away from the consequences of our towering arrogance. That's when time slows down, and the laser beam that has cursed me streaks into my sight, a blood-red blur aimed like an arrow at the fat, metallic regulator sustaining the rift.

Horror hits me, but it doesn't stop me. Mid-leap, it's far too late to do anything more than watch as light explodes from the ruined mechanism, rippling through the open threshold that is meant to take me to another world, a safe place. I watch it flow, watch it warp and twist and change in the instant that it swallows me whole and snaps shut behind me. I feel myself plunge into the raw center of existence, my body spasming as the electricity there dances over my skin. I hear myself shout a warning long moments too late, smell the ozone scent of power, taste the blood in my mouth as my teeth clamp down on my tongue.

And then nothing.

Lots of nothing. Aeons and millennia and god-forsaken eternities of nothing that I'm so inexpressibly tired of. I choose to change it, and it no longer seems outside of my reach. I choose to build it into something wonderful, and after all this time, I know that I am very much capable of doing so. I want to create something that will be better than the place I came from, and in doing so, I will pay homage to the honorable enemies that my kind wronged.

With a smile, I stretch an immortal hand out into the emptiness and speak for the first time since that bloody day when we Elves finally lost the war.

"Let there be Light."