8

All around emptiness bristled like a snow-drift. The white winds whipped the last spaces on the highest mountain and all he could see below was the pure whiteness of oblivion. The universe had collapsed on itself and he stood on a tiny patch of earth that had turned white like a frosted mirror. And in his ears, he heard the happy wailings of the devouring wind. He was becoming nothing. He was dissolving into negative space. And he felt it was worse than dying. At least with dying he would be falling away from the world into an unknown. Now he was falling from nothingness into something more horrible than nothing.

Even the moon had gone. The absence of the archangel had left him in the loneliest place in the world. There was now nothing behind him, and a bridge of dreams before him. He felt that he was living the meaning of his life for the first time.

In the space of that defining moment, he noticed that the bridge had suddenly become visible. He was about to move when the bridge became invisible again, tantalising him.

The wind had begun effacing the frosted mirror beneath his feet when the bridge appeared again, but in the form of water. Then it turned into a bridge of stone. Then it turned into a bridge of fire. And he knew instinctively, as the white wind began to efface him out of existence, that if the bridge turned from fire into anything else he would be doomed forever in nothingness.

Screaming as he had screamed when he fell into the abyss of invisibility, he ran onto the bridge of fire.