Prologue

Slowly and silently, he stopped and stood with his shoulders slouched over, looking at what was left of an old, wooden building.  Half of the building seemed to have been torn straight off by the passage of time, and what was left of the other half was covered by bushes, mosses, and vines.  He did not care to give it any thought beyond that it was there.  There were much more important things to think about.

After staring at the structure for another moment, he slowly dragged his feet to the left, drudging towards a slightly slanted pole he had seen before.  It looked as if it had been holding up something, and red paint was still in the process of chipping off of it.

He sat down under the pole and rested his back against it.  The voices of those he had come with had already died off in the distance, and he was left all alone.  Not even the sound of birds chirping or the wind blowing could reach his ears, and he would not care even if they could.  There were much more important things to think about.

He lifted his heavy head and moved his heavy eyes up from the dirt he was staring at.  He looked up and into the forest around him, but he did not care about how beautiful it was.  He looked up even more into the canopy of lime and green above him.  The weight of all his thoughts and empty questions seemed to drain into the back of his mind, as if gravity was pulling them down.

His mind was completely blank, yet it felt so full.  He did not try to concentrate on anything; he did not feel well enough to try.  Every time he had previously simply ended in a bad headache.  Every emotion he had ever felt or could see in his memory seemed foreign to him, almost as if he did not have it.

Suddenly, and without any previous warning, a thought came to his head.  He tried to put it to all of the events that had just occurred.  He could not, and did not want to think hard on it; it might just make him sad again.  A single phrase came to mind, and in a small, lifeless voice, he said it aloud.

“I should be dead.”

Nothing mattered anymore.  Nothing mattered to him, and nothing seemed to matter to anyone else.  He had no answers, and did not care to ask any questions.

His exhaustion was reaching its limit, and sleep was slowly creeping up on him.  The last coherent thought he was able to produce before succumbing to what was becoming white noise in his head did not seem to have any basis with how he felt.

‘Peace.’