The rocks split from a flash of his scythe, and the ground opened further into a sprawling cavern dominated by a subterranean lake. The sound continued to mount as though the world itself was suffering. We still seemed to be descending into the Earth, and the air was growing warmer and denser now. Troubling thought, but made more so by the growing howl which began reverberating the rocks around me. вЂњWhat else is here besides you?вЂќДЄnd that is why questions are pointless. A vague darkness and a heavy damp smell made me guess that weвЂ™d gone underground, but I couldnвЂ™t say for sure. It was more like the rest of the world was moving around us while we stood still. I wasnвЂ™t running, or flying, or anything of that nature. вЂњHow can I try to comprehend something so beyond mortal knowledge?вЂќ My voice felt flat and dead compared to his overwhelming substance. I had too many questions, all fighting for attention in the forefront of my brain without any making their way out. If youвЂ™re lucky, IT will have gotten bored of waiting for you.

Before I knew what was happening, we were outside the hospital, moving at such a frenzied pace that the world around me blurred into a dizzying tunnel of flashing light. I felt myself swept up around him like dirt in a hurricane. My head ached from the strain of this knowledge as my lateness was burned into my awareness, imparted like an inescapable law of physics as unequivocal as gravity. I knew in that moment that nothing could hide me from the specterвЂ™s grasp, for he was the only real thing in this world. I clutched at my hospital blanket to cower from the intensity of the ReaperвЂ™s presence, but the once soft cotton now flowed like translucent mist through my hands. This is why we were taught without words to fear death. Reality flowed around his scythe like a brush through water colors, and I could see each elementary particle and time itself sunder across its blade. It was as though seeing a tiger after a lifetime of looking at a childвЂ™s crude drawing and thinking thatвЂ™s all a tiger was. The less real my room became, the more real the figure was, until presently it existed in such sharp actuality that nothing beside it seemed real at all. It was transformingВ into a figure beside me. With each passing moment, the world was becoming less realвЂ¦Д«ut all that sight and sound вЂ“ all that being вЂ“ it wasnвЂ™t simply disappearing. It seemed as though every sound was an echo of what it once was every sight a reflection.

I was still in the hospital room, but the bustle of nurses and the beeping machines lost their opacity as though I was mired in swiftly descending dusk. What if it isnвЂ™t death which is to be feared? What if it is what lies beyond?ДЄnd so troubled did I slip beyond mortal understanding, stepping into a world as far forsaken by reason as I was now from life. It wasnвЂ™t until I was finally drifting off to sleep that a final intrusive doubt bubbled in my brain: That thought brought me great comfort as I felt the last erratic struggle from my heart against the inevitable conclusion I approached. When I was dead, I wouldnвЂ™t be capable of experiencing anything, so fear still had no cause. While I was alive I wouldnвЂ™t experience death, so there was no reason to be afraid now. Even as I lay dying, it seemed silly to me that I should be afraid of the emptiness which reason promised to expect. We have witnessed it, caused it, measured and recorded it to the last dying spasm of neuronal flickering. And so we cling desperately onto even the most dreary and anguished lives, suffering any known evil over our release into the beyond.Д«ut death is not to be feared, because death is very well understood. We think it the final frontier вЂ“ the greatest imaginable unknown from whose penumbral shores no traveler may return.

That is why we humans, in our naive misunderstanding of the universal order, are gripped by the mortal fear of death. No monstrous visage discovered yet has been as terrifying as the infinite potential for horror which exists before the mask is removed. There is no fear as potent as the fear of the unknown.

Grim reaper scythe