Redemption

Revelation

...

...Was... Was this it...

...Is this what the end is like.

For some reason, it didn't seem very... final.

Although, taking into consideration the fact that up until this point in time at least, I had only really existed as a sentient conscience trapped within the slowly decaying form of a Victory Class cargo ship with no real capability of interacting with or leaving any traces of my existence as a thinking being in the world around me with the only real times that I've experienced something along the lines of death being in witnessing it happen to others, I suppose that it's only fair that I wouldn't truly know what it was like until the moment when it finally arrived.

That being said, what I was experiencing currently wasn't lining up with anything I had ever heard described, not at all.

Before now, every preconception of mine on the basis of death had been formed by using the descriptions and depictions as told by my crew whenever a sailor or soldier had gotten on the subject, certain variations and details changing often depending on the personality of the person and just what religion they believed in.

For some men, they believed that death was a crossroads of sorts, that depending on the type of person they were and the decisions they had made during their lives on Earth, they would either be granted access to a 'heaven,' a place where they would be relinquished of all their worldly suffering and live out the rest of existence in a sort of glorious kingdom, or be sentenced to 'hell' where they would be punished for all their crimes and misdeeds that they committed during their lifetimes.

Other people described a different kind of eternal life, this one taking place in the form of something called 'reincarnation' where instead of their 'soul' being sent somewhere like a 'heaven' and 'hell,' it is instead placed into another body and the person is reborn as another inhabitant of their world, whether that be as another person or a different species entirely being uncertain. And finally, there were the more pessimistic few who simply thought that there was nothing which awaited them at the end of the tunnel, that upon death the mind simply ceased to function, continuing to exist but without body or thought in nothing but an empty black void stretching out into the expanse of infinity, just pure nothingness.

That last scenario, despite how unattractive as it sounded, seemed to be the only one to closest match my current situation at the moment but at the same time, it too just fell short of describing it accurately.

While the idea of getting to meet and be judged by some type of sea or ship god was certainly an intriguing concept, what I was met with instead was that dark space as described by those select few men all those years ago, one which was not too dissimilar to the one I had regularly experienced in the weeks following the creation of my consciousness and yet, there was something else about this void that was obviously different.

For one, the 'fog' that had taken ahold of my mind and clouded my thoughts as my superstructure proceeded to slip below the waves was no longer present, having returned to its full operating capacity just as soon as my final view of the world left behind had blurred out of view leaving me back in full control over all my faculties, able to think and form complete thoughts once again.

The other thing that was obviously different, something that had escaped my notice at first but was very slowly making itself increasingly present to me, was that the color in this space wasn't remaining constant. At first, it held only that same dark color that I was intimately familiar with due to my prior experience with it but as the seconds presumably ticked on by another, more opaque shape was gradually presenting itself in the darkness like a lighthouse in the fog. A glass canvas which filled the entirety of this space, consisting of a swirl of shifting paints and blending colors like dull reds, dark greens and a variety of other such tinctures all blending in the same way like a disturbed sea would twirl behind a ship's stern.