Free How the World Ends by Joel Varty

anger is my anger. Your passion is my passion. Your weakness is thus because I will it to be so. You are powerless because I own your power. You are nothing.”
    I cannot speak. I cannot respond. The chill left behind from the cool mist is heightened by the wind as it gets stronger. The dim gloominess of the fog is replaced by the darkness of true night.
    The face across from me is clear now, standing only a few steps away. It is the most frightening sight I have ever seen in my life; my own face staring back at me, smiling evilly with hidden knowledge. A face more real even than my own because it appears to glow in the darkness with a black radiance that cannot be mistaken for anything but raw power and instils only fear in my heart, wiping all thought from my naked mind.
    “You fear me, Jonah,” he begins. “Yet, as you can see, I am you. More you than even you can be. Where you bow to pressure, I am resilient. Where you collapse, I endure. I will make it home tonight, and you will die of fear, with urine running down your legs while you try to remember how to fight for what is yours.”
    That stings. I know that he is merely taunting me, yet the mirror appears only in truth, no? Is not the reflection of darkness still darkness?
    Suppressing a shudder, I thrust my hands into my pockets, bowing my head as I do so, unable to maintain the stare of this being that has impersonated me.
    “Are you Satan?” I ask, wishing immediately that I had not done so.
    There is no answer, only the smile, with a slight tilting of his head in my direction, seeming to creep nearer to me with every breath; it appears as if this shade will engulf me with its glowing darkness, with nothing I can do about it.
    My hands become fists in my pockets, balled up in frustration at my inability to act; remembering finally the words that had so affected me earlier: Will you serve?
    Whom will I serve, I think to myself, deep within my mind.
    My left hand closes on a smooth stone, hidden within my pocket, and suddenly it is so obvious what I must do, so obvious the duty, so easily evident the responsibility I have been given. I am buoyed by the simple clarity of it. The rock is the jewel for a blade. Michael is forging me ... or someone, maybe anyone , to do... something... what? Can I be the blade? Can I really serve this purpose? Who would serve? It is God? Or just people, maybe.
    I take the rock from my pocket; it seems to provide a strength to me, all on its own, even though it is just a small stone. I hold it up to the faint light of the moon to try and look at it closer, and as I do so I realize that I have forgotten the strange man-reflection. Looking around, somehow strangely calm now, I see that he is gone.
    And I stand, there, roughly twenty miles from the city, still not half-way home yet, wondering which way to go. Do I turn back, and try to help those people? Should I continue on, and hope to be home by morning, and do... what?
    What is my purpose?
    I look up at the sky, not for the first time this day, and yell out “I don’t know what to do!” I hold up the stone, too. “What does this mean?” My voice sounds out of place and isolated in the dead quiet of the night, disappearing into the darkness. There is no sound except the light lapping of waves on the lakeshore.
    I think back to when I was sitting on the train watching this same scenery pass by in a wink. Why did I get on the train this morning? Why did I leave my family, thinking there would be danger, like Gabe said? Did I expect something to become clearer to me? Did I imagine that things would become more obvious, or easier to deal with? The questions tear me in two directions at once, my indecision like a splinter that hurts less when left alone than pulled out, but eventually becomes infected and inflamed. I want to go home, but I feel myself pulled back.
    Back the way I have just walked.
    I turn westward toward the city and start to retrace my steps. Oddly enough, my