It was a delicate, isolated field. The mottled, almost rotting green of fresh grass stretched for miles and miles on end, bloodying the horizon emerald. The sky was a baby blue, empty as a cradle with no cloud within sight. At least its glass cage was gone, and now it stretched across the heavens freely, over fields upon fields of identical blades of grass.

There was no sun in sight, and yet it was as bright as noon.

A tree, rooted in the middle of the field, was the one of the two oddities in its field. First, a tree stripped naked of its leaves and ripped off of its bark. Time had, once again, been cruel. All that was left of the tree was a skeletal wooden hand, open and pleading, as it reached towards the intangible sky. Its roots weren’t even visible, buried six feet under the forgetful earth. The other oddity was a well, brimming with water, right next to the corpse tree. Entombed by weary old bricks of stone, the dead water was as still as the clearest of glass.

The faint, common, boring, predictable rustling susurrus of grass joined a quiet cacophony as the wind plucked the rasping branches of the dead tree. Other than their hollow, silent symphony, the field was as silent as a tomb.

Open space suddenly began to shift. Twist. Turn. Space wrapped around itself and out emerged a little girl, no older than nine. She donned a freshly knit blue jacket, and her semitranslucent gold hair danced dutifully along with the silent symphony. Her face—no, she didn’t have a face, only a gaping hole of empty white leading to nowhere. It was as though her face had been burned away, then frozen, until not even emptiness remained.

The faceless girl wandered across the fields of grass, her shoes softly crunching against dirt that hasn’t moved since the beginning of time. She strode endlessly, seemingly without purpose, and walked circle after circle. Her feet, somehow, seemed to know where to go. By the very end of time, they finally lead her to the skeletal tree and the dead well.

She went to the tree first. Her soft, slender fingers caressed the bark’s grooves, following the peaks and valleys of the eternally dying tree. Her fingers traced time until they finally reached the tip of the fragile branches, and she found herself reaching for the sky as well. Her faceless face faced up towards the endless blue and her fingers stretched open to uselessly catch the spilling wind.

The faceless girl suddenly dropped her hand. Instead, she wandered towards the dead well nearby. She reached over the groaning grey stones and looked deep into the endless, unfathomable water below.

The water was a perfect mirror, and it reflected the monotonous blue of the sky for all of its life. Yet now, underneath the gaze of the faceless child, it panicked. The girl wasn’t reflected, only a solitary crescent moon. Sharp as a scimitar, it stabbed through the sky and hung solitarily in the sky. The girl looked up. There was no moon in the sky. Yet, when she looked down, there it was, luminescent in a midday, sunless sky.

She reached out one dead, glass-blown hand to catch the moon. Her fingers caught the intangible water, and the moon dissolved. Yet, as soon as she tried to scoop it up, the water slipped between her fingers. The moon returned with its luminescent beauty. She scooped it up, all the more, her hands reaching for the crescent, but her dead hands caught nothing. Nothing.

 Tears, red as blood, suddenly drooped down into the well. They fell from the faceless face of the child, appearing seemingly out of sheer emptiness. They fell without sound, without crying, without sobs, but fell they did, with a soft plop that finally shocked silence awake. Scarlet poisoned the water, ruining its reflective perfection until thick crimson tears choked the dead crystal water. Yet, no matter how many bloody tears rained, the moon remained glowing in the pool.

More and more tears fell. The girl stumbled, her feet tangling together with the grass. She waltzed clumsily until she hit the dead tree in the face with a Bang! Stumbling backwards, she tripped over her own feet and fell straight into the well of her own tears. The water wrapped around her, embraced her, loved her, and thus entombed her. Her own blood rushed into her lungs, and her faceless features were dyed crimson. In other words, they were no longer blank—they were blank red.

The faceless child sank, deeper and deeper, into the bottomless well. The light from the sunless sky faded as darkness caressed her nonexistent eyes. Bubbles emerged from her faceless face, red and fragile as glass. They popped once they reached the surface, their little lives winked out of existence, all the while the faceless child sank ever lower. One last tear of blood leaked out of her resolutely blank face, one last silent scream that suffocated underneath the endless, unfathomable waters.

And the grass remained as cheery as it has ever been.

***

The dead girl was pulled out of the well.

Her golden hair was drooping wet, her blue jacket sopping with dead water. Her drenched shoes fell onto the stupid grass, tumbling into their reluctant embrace and sinking into the ungrateful soil.

A shadow, long and lingering, loomed over the girl. She stared deeply into the faceless face of the girl. She found nothing, and that was enough. The girl was dead, long dead. And still the wind whistled its cheerful melody as it cruelly played the tree corpse nearby like a fiddle. Still the grass waved along in their dance, apathetic to the death of a little girl in an infinite field.

“I can’t even give you a proper burial here,” she said. “You deserve much better than to be buried in such grounds.” She brushed her own golden hair apart as she knelt down to carry the girl. The shadow’s build seemed awfully similar to the faceless girl’s, it seemed. And she was dressed in the same knitted jacket, wore the same shoes, everything. Yet was she? It was hard to tell. Her entire being was a flickering, wavering shadow, resolutely dark underneath the sunless sky.

There was one stark difference, however. She did have a face. It was cloaked in shadows, but it was still there, with the soft curves of the crook of her nose, the sweetness of her lips, and the slight bulge of her cheeks. But most obvious were her eyes, shining bright between her eyelids. They weren’t blank, nor were they a childlike hazel. They were pure violet, violently bright. And they brimmed with energy.

Those violet eyes pierced down at the dead, faceless girl below her. “I’ll make sure you deserve better.”

A rope suddenly appeared in her hands, a glowing purple rope crackling coldly with flaming power. She tied the rope on one of the dead branches. She wasn’t sure if it’ll hold, but it must.

She tied the other end of the rope around the dead girl and tied a quick, makeshift noose. She stepped back and admired her work. Now the girl was no longer drowning, no longer buried. She hung next to her fellow dead, there for all to see.

“Now that’s beautiful,” remarked the shadow. She smiled sadly.

Her eyes, her unnaturally purple eyes, suddenly noticed the moon in the well. “Ah, so that’s why.” And she laughed a little, a soft, bitter laugh. As she laughed, the horizon began to burn.

The well suddenly burned up, its infinitely deep pool of water flash-frozen in an instant. The moon vanished, just as quickly as it came, like a flash of light in eternal darkness. Around the very edges of the horizon, purple flames shot up into the sky, covering up the serene blue sky with violent violet.

The fire spread across the panicked grass, consuming them all in its almighty rampage. The weak burnt away at blistering speeds. Soon enough, the dead girl, the dead tree, the well, and the shadows were surrounded by walls of sky-high fire.

The shadow gave the tree one last pat on the branch before she walked into the flames, disappearing forever. The purple flames consumed what’s left, incinerating the frozen well, burning the zombie tree, and finally smoking the hanging body.

The rope caught on fire. It spread. It choked the dead body with its freezing grip, burning deep into her neck. The girl’s blank face was finally full of something—vicious, violet flames. Her body crumbled into nothing. The whole world crumbled into nothing. All that was left was frostfire, burning, freezing, until even nothingness itself crumbled to dust.

***

The dead tree finally grew a single green leaf, right next to the rope that hung the dead girl’s body. The leaf drifted off from the tree, into the unknown.