Chapter 352 - Ask or no?
Scarlett stepped along the stone bridgeway, her gaze drifting past the illuminated railing and into the abyss below. The darkness stirred thickly, impenetrable and devoid of any sign of life or depth.
She’d never been one to fear heights in any debilitating sense, but they undeniably made her uneasy. It was the peculiar awareness of emptiness beneath her feet — knowing that nothing but void separated her from solid ground. That just one misstep, a slight loss of balance, could mean plunging into oblivion. And then there was the slightly errant thought of how that might feel.
She supposed that’s what some refer to as the ‘call of the void’, though she wasn’t quite sure she entirely agreed. To her, that phrase implied a twisted curiosity or an almost irresistible temptation to explore the perilous and foreign unknown just beyond one’s reach. Her feelings about heights weren’t nearly so poetic or intriguing, though. She simply found them disconcerting. They made her feel…exposed. Vulnerable, in a way that wasn’t quite fear, but close. And then her mind, unhelpfully, told her that understanding that feeling further would help overcome it, even if that was stupid.
She suspected most people felt the same. That they just mistook that primal discomfort and a desire to conquer it for some trendy concept they’d picked up from a book or video.
Frankly, the actual so-called ‘void’ could stay unexplored, as far as she was concerned. She had no desire to chase thrill for thrill’s sake. The world she inhabited already offered sufficient experiences. She wasn’t opposed to new ones, but she didn’t see why they had to be reckless or dramatic to be valid.
Was that overly cynical? Or strange? Or was everyone else simply pretending to be more profound than they were? Or worse — was everyone else just a little too unhinged?
It seemed to her that you needed to be a very particular kind of person to feel the true call of the void.
A voice slipped beside her, soft and very clearly mischievous. “Don’t you ever look down and wonder, ‘What if I jumped? Should I try?’”
Scarlett turned her head to Rosa, who gazed into the depths with a faint, amused smile playing at her lips.
“…Once again, Rosa, you reinforce my assumptions about your thought processes.”
Rosa’s eyebrows knitted slightly as she looked over. “Why do I feel like I was just insulted?”
“I am certain it is merely your imagination.”