The land was barren, the sky was black, and the silence, the stillness, was intoxicating.

She inhaled a deep breath of the dark, motionless nothing that surrounded her and smiled at the shadows that bloomed large, finally at peace. Every inch for miles was destitute, not a single creatures stirred. Perhaps there were none left? She didn't know, didn't care; she simply bathed in the quiet of the almost drowning solitude and laughed under her breath. The only sound in her ears. The silence was deafening.

She had always wondered, if she had to lose a sense what would it be, and time and time again she returned in her imagination to losing her hearing. Now, with nothing near to make a sound, the world itself seeming to be silenced, she knew that she had always been right. The lack of anything vibrating in her inner ear was the most peaceful experience she had ever known. Her craving of the childless place she stood in was overwhelming her state of being and she only wished it would go on forever.

Afraid to take a single step in fear that it might jump start the sounds of existence she stood motionless, absorbing like a sponge the blackness of it all.

She remembered being told as a child that people needed some sort of sound, or quickly they would go insane. In a completely sound proof room, where quite literally there was not a single sound that could encroach the room and the longest someone had been able to stay was twelve minutes. Twelve minutes? That was all they could stand? She had been standing there for close to and hour, and had barely moved, so enraptured by the screams of nothingness. Was she going mad? Was this what madness felt like? Questions of why or how hadn't even crossed her mind. She was bathing in the lack of any single thing or motion or sound, and wondered, was she already mad?

Anther wave of the oblivion washed over her body and she felt welded to the ground, as if moving even a finger were impossible. She was a part of this nothingness, and her silence was no more a choice than a submission, a total abandonment into the barren black that surrounded her. Her eyes closed, her lungs inhaled deeply, quietly, the soundless air that held her still.

The darkness was complete.