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In a dream you feel like nothing. Usually, you do not realize: you do not think about the ground beneath your feet and how the grass does not feel; you do not think about the weightlessness of your comb; you do not think about the air you're forgetting to breathe. But every so often it's as if you jolt yourself awake and you realize, you suddenly become aware of all you cannot feel and, most importantly, of the wrongness of it all. That this is not the way it should be: that you have a body and the world forgot.
That's what overtook her when she entered the Dark World: that off-kilter sense of nothingness, and the overwhelming wrongness it came with. For perhaps half a second she was confused, before it hit her as in her dream: she was nothing.
There is a certain pressure to being alive, a gravity merely to existing, the weight of your body dragging itself down, relentlessly pressing on your joints. It takes effort to breathe, a push to move your chest, lungs contracting and expanding and pulling your skin along with it. Blink, and there is a split-second hit when your eyelids come down, a subtle sliding over the surface of your eye. Being alive is to feel, feel an infinity of twitches and touches and tensions so small as to be nearly non-existent, but not quite. Not quite.
It was all gone. There was no skin, no sinew, no muscle or bone, nothing to contract or expand or push or pull. Gravity was suspended along with her joints and weight, nothing to press her or drag her down, nothing to anchor her to the ground. But she was not floating: she touched the earth but could not feel it, no pressure on her soles or knees — she was connected purely by sight. What were once her feet were draped on the ground as light, bending around the gravel and the dust, casting shadows on the rocks.
No — they must still be her feet, for what else could they be, and yet they could not be her feet either because there was no connection to the rest of her, nothing holding her together. All that was once flesh and blood was now nothing but moonlight, a loose form against the night, faint and fickle, flickering in the wind. She reached out to touch the walls and went flat against them, her arms — what had been her arms — too long, moving with the walls, illuminating the cracks and ridges of the brick without ever feeling them. She reached for the doorknob and it glittered beneath her, shining in the light, bright and inviting and utterly removed. There was no feeling behind her touch, and of course the handle it not move an inch. There was nothing she could do, no weight she could throw behind her touch in an effort to press it down. There was no pressure to begin with. No touch.
There was nothing for her to hold. Nothing for her to move. Even herself — did she move herself? What was she now? Her arms were no longer arms, streaks of light on the wall far outstretching her body; her feet were no feet, draped over dust and dirt, bent in a way impossible; and where was the rest of her? Hanging in the air? On the half-dead leaves of flowers a ways away, those roots of twisted trees behind them? How far did light stretch, and how much of it was her? Where did she end and the rest begin? It did not feel different, the light on the leaves or roots or walls or dirt. Far off in the distance she could see the shadows of monsters, and the light touching them felt just the same as her. Just as little as her.
She was nothing, and nothing has no beginning and it has no end. It cannot be held, it cannot hold.
It cannot do anything.