The story
He was barely eight years old when he discovered that the human soul can float away from the flesh without permission or warning. On a freezing dawn, Camilo felt a sudden tug in his chest that detached him from his bed. Astonished, he looked down at himself from above, turned into a tiny silhouette sleeping soundly beneath the blankets of his bedroom. The strange lightness lasted a sigh; the air soon grew thick, imbued with a metallic cold that froze his thoughts and foreshadowed dread. Drawn involuntarily outside, he floated out to the patio, bathed in the pale glow of an imposing moon.
It was there that he saw her. Standing tall amidst the silence, a woman with deep, dark skin seemed to devour all the nocturnal clarity around her. Her eyes were not human, but two bottomless pits overflowing with blind hostility. In her right hand, she wielded a long, curved scythe with a rusted yet merciless blade. Without uttering a word, the apparition lunged at the boy's defenseless spirit. Camilo tried to back away in the air while the swipes of the scythe whistled just millimeters away, threatening to sever the invisible thread tying him to life. The moonlight bounced off the metal with each fierce thrust, until a freezing brush seemed to reach him, plunging him back into his body with the violence of a free fall.
Waking up brought no relief, but rather an unbearable physical agony. With the first rays of dawn, a crushing headache drilled into his temples. Camilo tried to get up, but constant vomiting and a soaring fever knocked him back down onto the sheets. Distressed to see their son turning pale amid incomprehensible moans, his parents quickly wrapped him in a ruana, a traditional woolen poncho, and rushed to the nearest medical center. The emergency room diagnosis was terrifying: the little boy was in an inexplicable critical state, fighting in an abyss that science could not categorize. Against all odds, after hours of anxiety, the boy's pulse suddenly stabilized, as if the shadow had decided to postpone its harvest.
Years later, fate put a price on his existence once again. Now an adult, a workplace accident with a high-voltage cable discharged thousands of volts into his body, instantly throwing him to the border of death. Amidst that collapse, Camilo passed through a tunnel of blinding light and felt the dizzying force of a forced rebirth. However, he found no peace in that transcendental vision, but rather the same ancestral cold from his childhood. He understood then that that dark woman with the scythe had never forgotten him; that the thread she tried to cut that night was still in her sights, patiently waiting for the inevitable moment when the light must go out forever.
