Glass

I rose from my world. A room? Barely that. An enclosed space.
How had I lived? I looked around and saw others, huddled tight against themselves. Holding on.
The new world was dark. It was all darkness. There were a few others walking around, but they looked distracted, lost. I wanted to ask, "What now?" But I sensed it was the end of the line. I had journeyed far to get where I was, only now it didn't seem so far at all.

A ghost looked me in the eyes.
"You're new."
I nodded and when he didn't speak, I asked, "What is this place?"
The ghost bent down and picked up what looked to be a shard of glass.
"This is no place. It is the absence of place. It is where you stand to look at the world you are from."
"And, how do I move on?"
A smile. "There is no going forward and no going back. This is the World of Worlds. It is what spawned your place and mine."

I walked around and thought about where I had left my body. In a sliver of glass I had picked up, I looked back on Earth. A dark, broken man, bewildered by his own emotions. Thoughts too long to identify. No hope or peace for him. That man was I.
Only now I had no emotions to feel my way across the world of shadows that I walked in. But in remembering the idea of a "zombie," a thought did come to me. There was beauty, after all, in even the darkest feeling. A light reflected. Or so it had seemed. But truly it was a light in itself. There was no place it reflected. For reality was darkness, shadow, and glass.
Beauty was an illusion, and the only beauty was in illusion.

"Excuse me. Where am I?"
I had so badly wanted to leave my body, my exhaustion, behind. Here was one as I used to be, the light of illusion fading quickly in his eyes. "This is an in-between," I said. "A place beside worlds."
The man sighed and smiled. "How do I move on from here?"
"You have to be careful. There are so many who will lie to you so that they can trap you and keep you here. I was stuck here without hope for a very long time because they lied to me. There are only lies here."
"So, how do you know we can move on? Where do we move on to?"

I had looked hard at my earth body. Even in something so animal as that, I had thought, there was beauty.
So why was there no beauty in this place of ghosts? I had no answer. As on earth, there was no answer then. There never would be. I knew that. I knew that truth was nothing.
There was no moving on, no place to move on to. There was only illusion, to make life bearable with beauty. There was only hope.

I reached into a pocket.
"Take these shards of glass. Hold on to them and don't let anyone tell you there is no moving on," I said.
"What do I do with them?" he asked. He looked so human still.
"Wait." I said. "One day, you will begin to fade in this world. On that day, swallow the handful of shards, and you will move on to the next plane. It's a few before the High Plane. You're almost there, so don't give up."
He seemed to think hard.
"How do I know you're not lying to me? How do I know you're not like the others?"
"You can choose their path or mine. But because what I tell you is true, you will eventually choose the way I've shown. You know as well as I do that there is hope, even in a world of shadows."