Dark Thoughts (short story)

The link was severed and Dark came to himself shaky and dazed, his senses confused, his thoughts scattered and silence echoing through him like a death toll. Am I dead? Is this it? Is death then to be alone and isolated? The thoughts thundered strangely through his mind with full force, like a dammed stream that has finally broken loose. Where were all the others? He wondered confusedly, trying to search without really knowing what to search for. I must be dead. He thought to himself, with dismay. He couldn't think it could mean anything else. This pall of utter aloneness and uncertainty. His own thoughts and feelings continued to echo eerily through his mind. The sense of others he had been raised on and depended on for his entire life  seemed to have been ripped out of his head all at once. There was nothing but himself. It was terrifying. What do I do? The thought echoed eerily through his mind with no clear answer evident. No replies or responses were triggered and no feelings of love or urgency came back to support and comfort him, the way they always had in the past. Frightened and desperate, Dark frantically tried to find what had always been with him. but it was hopeless. He didn't know how to find something that had always been a part of him. He felt empty, desolate.
    As he stood alone, just trying to will back the others, emotions all his own seemed to spring up like a fountain of water. So much so that for a moment, he thought himself no longer alone. But startled joy quickly gave way to disappointment, fear, confusion, loss and bewilderment. Slowly though, he really started to feel on his own. A thrill ran through him and as he explored himself fully. The way his thoughts seemed clearer and somehow louder, no longer a weaker voice that followed and was often hindered by the thoughts of others. The way his emotions seemed deeper, somehow how more meaningful, and not clouded or influenced by the way the others felt. For the first time in his life, Dark felt self-awareness.
    There were no others pressing in with their own thoughts and emotions, crushing his personal feelings that in turn were pressed upon others. If this is death, then it is a cruel trick for I have never before felt so very alive. Those vital minutes of Dark's newfound awareness were cut short very suddenly as something within him clicked. A whirlwind of thoughts and emotions descended upon Dark's shifting thoughts, crowding his mind and breaking his fleetingly found freedom. But Dark refused to be crushed.
He knew what it was to be aware and to be alone and ultimately, to be free. The others felt his discomfort and heard his confused and jumbled thoughts and they became afraid. Why would you want to leave us? We are a part of you as you are a part of us. Dark tried to explain, to describe his experience even as he battled for his own mind - for his own space, in an environment that was not made for such things as individuality and singular thoughts.
    The others couldn't conceive. They felt his emotions but couldn't apply them, had nothing comparable to which to measure. All they knew was that Dark had suddenly vanished from them, and when he came back, he was no longer the same. He thought things that made no sense and felt things that did not fit and wished for things that others had never dreamed of. He was a different person from the Dark they had known. One who craved Aloneness and emptiness.
He no longer fit into their spectrum of understanding and so, was no longer a welcome entity. How can you desire life without us when we give comfort and safety? Dark was frustrated by their lack of understanding and imagination. They refused to see, for they had comfort and contentment and did not desire change. They did not know of awareness and so did not miss it. They were numb to their own sensations and so did not seek them. They could not imagine having only singular thoughts and so did not care for it.
It is not the emptiness I desire but the freedom that it embodies. The thought drifted across the minds of the others, bringing a turmoil of emotions raging through the link that was as life. And with those emotions came thoughts never before expressed. Dark couldn't know the impact he was having, for to him it was all crystallized in one single moment of clarity in which the link had been severed for those now very precious few moments. But the others became frightened, and fright soon gave way to anger and hate, their emotions bleeding over into others still and as one, they attacked Dark. Lashing out with their minds, they crushed his voice beneath their own. They shoved his emotions and feelings aside, slowly strangling out those incandescent thoughts and forever silencing the self who was known as Dark.
But they could not silence Dark's thoughts or the idea of Aloneness that he had sparked.