Veil of Time: Chapter 1
How will a soul unshackled from flesh perceive the world? What signs will it carry—will it see and hear as we do? Does this soul even exist?
Questions like these flickered through my mind now and then, but I never hunted answers. Yet, as they say, man plans and God laughs—so I got my answers, out of the blue, and, genre-true, at the worst damn time. Peak career, personal growth, life humming along. Fancy way to put it, but dead-on: when everything's golden, fate's got a knack for a gut punch—and at its nastiest, you're done. I was done.
Death's not just scary for the mystery ahead—it's the getting there. A dumb fluke, a few deep slashes, and I'm bleeding out, absurdly. Sudden clarity, adrenaline, heart pounding—all speeding it up. Darkness creeps in, melting resentment at the mess. Thoughts fade into that black, everything's gone—then, boom, something blows wide.
Words can't hack it—barely scrape it. Imagine you've always been blind, deaf, scentless, touchless. Sensory shock, maybe, but you're still blind and deaf the old way. Yet there's this sense of the space around—alien, ungraspable. No up, no down, no sides; it's beyond three dimensions—vast, swallowing all.
Fear locks your mind—in this place, you shred apart. Not forgetting yourself or swapping skins—no. You feel it, every speck of awareness tasting those specks peel off, drift away, bleed into the void. You know you've lost chunks, but what they were? Gone. Like watching a body flake to dust—you see it break, know something's slipped, and for a split second, it feels normal, like it's always been so. But deep down, you know it's wrong; logic's scraps whisper you'll whittle to nothing.
No clue how long I hung there, but at some fuzzy point, dread flipped to resolve—gotta shift this. Balling up what will I had left, I focused, clawing to keep my bits from scattering. Didn't stick at first—plenty slipped by then. Big chunks, probably; can't weigh what you don't recall losing.
Once I'd locked the particles from drifting off, I tried hauling back what I'd shed—though what that was, I couldn't name. Just reached out, snagging whatever, pinning it down. Against my bets, those bits either wouldn't latch or hooked briefly then tore free, dragging more of me along. It plucked some soul-string, and—screw safety—I doubled down, hell-bent on sucking something from the sprawl around me.
No pain, no weariness here. Hard to call my wins—over time, though, nabbed particles quit bolting and clung tight. But then: how many for "whole"? Whole who? Real talk—who's "I"? Were these my bits? Each speck hauled a crumb—association, memory sliver, old opinion, stray thought. All over the map, logic screaming they'd clash. A nagging wrongness blocked me from syncing a knight's ironclad fortress life, a genetic engineer's "Second Fleet" gig, or some mutt's scruffy days. Fragments piled endless—ragged, mismatched scraps I hoarded anyway.
"Who am I?"—obvious ask, but the answer's weight sat miles off. Priority was grabbing bits to not dissolve, to patch as much "me" as I could. Even fresh in here, I'd felt half-baked.
Then, one shift hit. A shred of my mind glimpsed life. Like I was kicking again—tiny, crib-bound, wooden rails boxing me in, if I knew the name for it. Folks buzzed around, fussing, tossing weird looks. I caught it in bursts, edge-of-mind flickers. Yeah, edge—but real life, a straight-arrow timeline, ticking now. Couldn't peek past, like with shards. So why's "I" still stuck in this hostile void, primed to rip me apart? Not fully pieced yet. Shards missing. What's nabbed ain't sorted. That it? Gotta wrap it…
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A festive vibe hummed in a cushy house in Crawley, south of London. The Grangers were toasting their second kid's eleventh birthday—Hector Granger. Hermione came first; Hector rolled in the next July. All could've been swell, but for his freaky headspace.
From day one, Hector barely twitched. Baby him never cried—not once. Dirty diaper, empty belly? Mute, zoned out, like he wasn't even there. Took heaps of time to watch him. Sometimes, a single look snapped him back—brief bursts of doing stuff on his own. Rare, fleeting—tough as hell for Emma and Robert.
Later, while Hermione toddled and babbled her baby jabber, Hector—who oughta at least crawl—stayed checked out, popping in now and then for tiny growth spurts.
At three, he just stood and walked—no buildup, nada. Goal? Shift from one nursery corner to another, chasing sun.
Same deal with every kid milestone. He'd kick off a skill, face blank, eyes lost in space. Spooked Emma and Robert. Freaked little Hermione. Rattled the nanny they hired—work waits for no one.
Time passed, and Hector scraped some independence. Still cut off from folks and the world, he poked at his own cryptic gigs—staring, mulling, whatever. That's what the house guessed when he'd lock on a wall for hours. "No doctors?" you'd think. They went—tons. No one had jack. Encephalograms and scans, though, lit up crazy—his brain buzzed full-tilt everywhere. Theories stacked, but no answers stuck.
Take this: when the mood hit, pencil and paper in reach, he'd whip up a photo-sharp drawing in minutes. Of what? Beats me—wild, inhuman shapes and gizmos, laced with logic no one could crack. Ran through everything he did. Once, he crammed three notebooks with micro-formulas—Robert's math prof pal fried his brain trying to decode 'em, landed in hospital a month.
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