Henry blinked, and everything went dark.

No – that’s not right. He didn’t close his eyes, nor did he open them in the dark. This was more… more what Henry imagined blindness to be, something lost and missing. His mind clawed for purchase in this absence, but it only hiccuped and stalled. He tried to understand, but his efforts led nowhere, for he had no frame of reference. Nothing to measure and nothing to measure it against.

Yet, blindness wasn’t quite right either. Blindness was loss. But this… this was so much more than that – or possibly less. Something ripped root and stem from the yawning of his past until it failed to exist in the first place. How could he miss something that was never there to begin with?

Only – it took not just his vision, but his entire being. Stolen with barely a whisper into the empty expanse of eternity.

* * *

And in the shadow of a second, Henry was back.

His world shrunk as the edges bled foaming static. Color drained away to a dull sepia and finally to grainy shades of grey. The stumbling young man tried to take in large gulping breaths of air, but they slipped away like fistfuls of sand. Something deep in his brain began to scream and he noticed a ringing in the background begin to grow. His eyes darted left and right in a twitchy flutter of panic. He croaked out a soft groan before his thoughts burnt away to ash. A hand reached out, only to paw at the air. The screaming and ringing continued to build and the ground reached up to embrace him.

* * *

Henry Hill opened his eyes to a verdant field of green, the thick grass doing little to cushion the hard ground below. Face pressed against soil and grass, he took in a shuddering breath. With something between a grunt and moan Henry pushed himself up onto his knees, shaky arms struggling to support his weight. His head hung low as he tried to scrape together a semblance of thought.

He tried, but all he found was a dull roaring echoing freely between his ears. A vein in his temple begin to pulse while fear bloomed in the pit of his stomach. Swaying slightly, his feverish limbs trembled and sweat soaked hair fell over his eyes.

Henry stayed in place, panting into the rapidly fading light until a soft breeze murmured over his body. The wind promised cold nights on the dirty ground and sent a shiver down his spine. Reluctantly, he tore his gaze away from the grass and raised his eyes.

A wide and grasping tree filled his vision. Thick branches flowed down and away in sweeping curves, as if shaped by a weight they could not bare. Ancient, gnarled roots spread out from the trunk like bursting waves, sinking and rising from the earth. Henry crawled over the lush grass and eased himself into a small depression between root and trunk.

Mind pitted to a numb and hollow core, he drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped them in his arms. He let his head fall back against the tree and stared upward into the thick canopy. Eyes unfocused, he tried to wrangle something out of the maelstrom of wreckage in his head. As the seconds danced past, he slowly settled into something resembling focus, only to realize what he was looking at.

And so Henry began to scream.