Plantae Homogenesis, "Riley"

Part 3

Riley shifted his body a minuscule distance closer to the pond that had once been his source of solace. Now however, with the water fetid and stagnant, it served only as a cruel reminder of his impending demise. He was dying, he knew. The long hours- days? weeks?- he'd spent in this lightless room all but guaranteed that eventuality. He could feel the energy seeping from his body minute by minute, drawing him ever closer to the point of no return, of death. His throat burned with thirst, though mercifully his stomach had stopped its insistent growling days before. Was it days? He couldn't remember. There was no life here anymore, no light. Everything else had died long ago, all the plants and trees, the flowers, leaving only him. Only him, in this perpetual darkness. This shadowland that even his own light, faint as it was, could do nothing to dispel. He was dying.

He struggled to move even an inch closer to the pond, the only source of water available to him. Rancid as it was, it would probably kill him quicker than the dehydration that drove him forward, but he was so very thirsty. So thirsty. He could have wept from the pain of it if he'd had the moisture to spare. He inched his right hand a bit further and felt the cool liquid brush against his fingertips. So close. He tried to rise, to turn over, to move. To take the filthy, diseased water into his hands and use its cooling touch to ease the fire in his throat, but the act was too great for his weakened body. He couldn't see, couldn't move. A prisoner in his own flesh as his body screamed at him for sustenance that he couldn't provide.

His body grew oddly numb, distant, as it sought to preserve what little remained of his strength by shutting down unnecessary functions. He breathing slowed, deepened, paused, began again. His heart skipped a beat, two, thudded slowly, paused, beat. He lost the sensations around him in a haze of emptiness, the dirt beneath his cheek, the water on his fingertips. There was nothing. Nothing to ground him, nothing to keep him from being swallowed by the empty silence that pushed at his awareness. The blackness that would destroy him, mind and soul as it had the once beautiful garden that had become his tomb. With a final sigh that was barely more than an exaltation of breath, he let the darkness take him under.