Threshold

He opened his eyes, to find security in the asterisms. Orientation relaxed the waking vision's grip, his throat unclenched with a sigh. As he breathed out, reflexively, the pit breathed from him. Trepid, he lowered his stare into the lightless expanse.

By place he counted back time, the anterior shrouded by a labyrinthine canyon, a trap he had thought eternal. Freed, he came out onto a littered and sulphurous moor, that descended onto salt tundra. There the wind had belched up a long squall of dust; northless, untethered, he flickered across the scrub until spat out on a basalt plain, trackless and corrugated in strange configurations. It graduated into a wide, shallow stair, that banked on chalk cliffs at the cusp of the world.

Here was a vast emptiness, in it no features to distinguish near from remote; an immense hollow - not like a chamber, he discerned no boundaries but the line where he stood, and the eclipse of the sky. As if he had found the sunken sun, an extinguished megasomatic entity, the corpse of a star.

Here he stood in lasting contemplation of that unknowable space. Motionless; time's surrogate prosody hung.

Longer, he brooded the solitary articles at his feet: Two stones, fist-size and worn.

Then, ponderous and resigned, he traded them, then walked out to the brink.

"Lord!" spake behind him.