5 minutes
In that moment, everything was quiet. The ethereal forms of the dead were lingering nearby, and yet they did not speak. It had been the first time in a decade that she couldn’t hear someone muttering in her head and, ironically, that was the moment when she wondered if she had finally cracked.
20 minutes
She focused on the feeling of weightlessness, the complete lack of strain on any inch of her body. It was a remarkable feeling, one she had grown much too comfortable with and longed for often. Despite the incomprehensible vastness of the planar, she could almost feel at home. She began to picture it, four sturdy walls, a comfortable seat beside the fire, a shelf filled with books. She pretended she could feel it, the warmth and the comfort, and wondered if it could be enough.
2 hours
An elven man in his 30s was sitting across from her. He was the first to break the silence, repeating his same set of phrases over and over. His voice was desperate, begging her to hear him. She had learnt not to let it get to her.
Something about the man was familiar, with deep, sad eyes set in a face curtained by black hair, almost as dark as the void around them. Her vacant gaze examined the blurry details of his form as he finally left her. A line of spirits followed after him, mumbling their own questions.
10 hours
She hadn’t thought to wonder why no one had woken her yet. She couldn’t be sure how long she was gone, nor could she quite remember where exactly she had left her body. The tavern? No she hadn’t been there in months. Her home? She glanced about herself to see if she could pick out any details in the greyscale surroundings, but realised there were none. So, she was somewhere open, maybe a field.
That’s right. A field. She remembered it all now. She’d gone walking again, somewhere off the east coast. So there was no one there to pull her from her reverie. No one but herself.
This realisation dawned on her with an odd sense of…lacking. Lacking importance. Lacking warning. She couldn’t worry. Didn’t worry.
3 days
Faces came to her mind and faded just as quickly, each one seeming less and less relevant. A few lingered longer than they should have, but she struggled to remember what about them was so crucial. Soon they were just features, bright blue eyes on a pale face, ink splattered across war-torn skin, auburn hair pulled into a ponytail, a sword held firmly in a gloved hand, black hair…Black hair.
The elf from before?
She glanced about herself again, but the train of thought escaped her when she realised there were about thirty more lost souls than the last time she looked. Every single pair of eyes was turned towards her expectantly. She couldn’t remember why she was the one they were staring at, what she could possibly do to help them.
She looked to herself. She looked to them.
They were all bundled up together like a school of fish. She was the outlier. She must have been standing with them and broken away. That’s why they were staring at her. They wanted to her to re-join them in their huddle, they were waiting for her to step back over. She could feel in her chest that she longed to be with them and she couldn’t understand why she had left them in the first place. She belonged with them.
And so she joined them
8 days…
12 days…
23…