BLACK

When you’ve been everywhere, where do you end up? When the cards are all on the table, when we can see exactly what the situation is, when there is no more concealment or prevarication.
It seems as though you have been everywhere else, and now you come to this place, the place of endings. The Black.
You stand in dust, dark grey and gritty. Before you is a simple door, gigantic and featureless, dull and black.

Is this it? Is this all there is to the Black? You feel disappointed. This is not good enough. Your disappointment seems to fit this place.

You bang on the door. It is made of lead, the sound is faint and low, a dull reverberation.
Nothing happens.
You bang again. And again.

Then the door moves, scraping and scratching across the grit. It swings inwards, creaking like the door to a vampire’s castle in a horror film. Beyond the doorway is a vast, furrowed field, set with the stubs of harvested grain. The sky is cloudy and the land is a dusty brown.

At the other side of the field is a dark, imposing building, maybe a mausoleum. You step onto the dry soil and walk towards it.
Dust rises around your footfalls. The palace of the Black looms before you. You step up three narrow, high steps of dull black stone and pass through the portico. You are standing in a vast, silent room. The distant walls are lined with statues and tombs of forgotten gods. The whole place reeks of inconceivable gulfs of time. The very dust looks ancient, the first dust that ever settled, way back at the beginning of everything. At each quarter is a timepiece, ticking, or dripping, or burning. In the centre, before you is a square obsidian table.

You have come here to end something. This is the place where endings are made, calmly and completely.
But first, you must pay your respects to the deities of the Black. Their Names are legion, and most of those Names have long since been forgotten, ground down into the dust of time. So we will honour the principle of the Black in one name: SATURNUS

Lord of agriculture, steward of the fruitful earth, Lord of Time and wielder of the sickle that cuts and ends; the Terminus. Bareheaded, we come before you and salute you in your Temple.
Hail Saturnus!
Let the silence fill you; open yourself to the Presence that stands behind it.

Now you may place upon the table whatever it is you must leave behind forever.