The Outsider

 None are allowed to explore the world outside of Zerathur's house. Not because there's danger, or something being hidden; Rather, it's just empty. There is nothing after the woods. No sea, no tree, no animal, no hope, no despair; There is nothing that lives and nothing that dies. There couldn't be. The stars have faded eons ago, the last black holes evaporated, there's nothing left but him, his home and his forest.  And yet, here at the very edge of the treeline, something wanders in from the darkness. At first it has no shape, no will of its own, no words to voice its primitive thoughts. But He does. He nurtures it, He dwells with it, He for it. Through every waking hour, a majority of His thoughts are poured into it. When sleep does take Him, so do the dreams of things that are no more yet could be again.  The phantoms are gone. Zerathur sits alone in his living room, earbuds on, a song in repeat yet nothing in his head but static. Their music is too loud. He takes off his earbuds and carefully places them down to the side, but the very sound of his clothes shuffling with him is like running his skull against a grater. He's not sick, he doesn't have a headache, not with all the healing spells inbued into his bones; Yet, everything hurts .  Zerathur stands up and starts heading towards the doorway, hoping to make it back to his room to rest. His breathing is too loud. And so he stops breathing. His heartbeat is too noisy, throbbing against the base of his skull, and so he stops that too. The pain grows worse. The vision goes blurry. Everything cascades like a curtain being pulled back at the sound of a thousand, thousand voices, and they all say the same thing:  I know what you are.   He reaches out and grabs it by the neck. Feeble muscles fight against that which shouldn't be grasped, he wrestles it to the ground as it squeals and cries. The skin melts off and burts from its seams to reveal the red pulsating flesh beneath. It twists and writhes, bending its bones in impossible geometries until they break, screaming in despair and laughing in divinity. It dies there and then, cackling in its madness and choking on its viscera.   Zerathur raises himself from the grisly scene. His heart flutters back into beating, his lungs take in a fresh breath of air, the world is quiet again. And thus he collapses, whisked away into dreams of eternity.