...Beginning of Another

Something floated in the dark.

Weightless. Silent. Forgotten.

For an eternity, there was nothing.

No thought. No sensation. Only the void—an endless, suffocating expanse that swallowed all traces of who he had been.

Then—

Fragments clawed their way back.

After a while,

His consciousness returned....and with it, the pain.

The cold that had gnawed at his bones.

The dull throb of his bruised muscles.

The way his lungs gasped every time he breathes.

Choking on the coppery flood of his own blood.

The paralyzing helplessness of knowing that no one would come.

And the hollow, final shudder of his heart as it surrendered—

Ending his life.

———

That moment was long gone.

He had tried, at first, to cling to time—

counting every second, every minute, every hour, every day.

But eventually, the numbers blurred.

There's only so long a mind can hold its focus before even the act of counting loses meaning.

Months? Years? Centuries?

Time passed unnoticed in the abyss,

leaving only the certainty that it had been far too long.

His existence had stagnated—

reduced to a faint pulse of consciousness adrift in the dark.

If this was the afterlife, then the living had it all wrong.

There was no divine judgment awaiting. No scales to weigh the good and the wicked.

There was only this: an endless, indifferent void where the soul drifted, fraying at the edges.

So this was how it would end—not with fire or redemption, but with his essence unraveling, thread by thread, until nothing remained.

How terrifying.

He had never imagined death could be so cruel. So empty.

In life, he had already forgotten everything.

So a part of him had hoped that, in death, something might return—

even just a clue.

But there was nothing.

Just a grievous feeling, slowly sinking in:

He was alone.

No one had looked for him.

In a way, he had died long before the end—

like a centuries-old tombstone with its nameplate worn smooth,

forgotten.

He was empty—hollowed out by the absence of connection, forgotten even while he lived.

There were even people who had wanted him gone. They beat him until his world blurred. Until his body broke. Until everything he was bled out onto the ground.

Every attempt on his life shattered a piece of his memory— until his mind became an empty casket.

Maybe that's why he forgot everything.

Or maybe… if he had lived differently—

Perhaps he would have remembered something:

A name.

A purpose.

The faces of those he loved.

But those memories were gone, eroded by the relentless grind of time or stolen by the void itself.

All that lingered was the unbearable weight of regret, a shadow that clung to him tighter than any memory.

And the silence—oh, the silence.

It pressed against him like a living thing, suffocating in its stillness.

It whispered that he was nothing.

That he had always been nothing.

That even this faint spark of self would soon dissolve.

He was starting to lose his mind.

The void was not just a place; it was a predator—

gnawing at his sanity,

with time as its eternal accomplice.

Each moment stretched into infinity.

Each thought looped back on itself, warped and distorted.

He screamed into the dark, but no sound came.

He clawed at the nothingness, but there was nothing to grasp.

His soul trembled on the precipice of madness, teetering between awareness and oblivion.

And yet, something strange began to happen.

The more his earthly memories faded—his name, his home, the life he had lived—the clearer the void itself became.

It was as if the loss of his past unshackled him, allowing him to *see* the abyss for what it was: a crucible where souls were stripped bare, their lives erased to prepare them for what came next.

Most souls, he realized, forgot everything here. The void was a great equalizer, dissolving memories of joy and pain alike so that whatever lay beyond—rebirth, transcendence, or annihilation—could begin unburdened.

That was why the living could not recall their past lives. The void ensured it.

But he was different.

His memories of Earth had crumbled, yes, but in their place, the void had etched itself into him.

He remembered the cold, the silence, the weight of eternity. He remembered the terror of his own fraying mind, the moments when he had begged for oblivion only to be denied.

These were not memories of a life, but of a *death*—a limbo that had marked him in ways no mortal existence ever could.

This was the haunting truth: his madness had preserved him. The very fracture that threatened to destroy his soul had allowed him to carry the void's imprint forward.

He was no longer the man he had been, but neither was he a blank slate. He was something else—a ghost of regret, a shard of eternity, a soul scarred by the abyss.

The silence pressed harder now, as if sensing his defiance. It wanted to finish its work, to erase even this fragile awareness.

But he resisted, clinging to the fragments of the void that had become his only truth.

And then—

A rupture tore through the dark.

Not gentle. Not kind.

It came like a scream through silence, a crack across the sky of his mind. The void, once endless and oppressive, shattered, and something surged through the fracture:

light—blinding, searing, alive.

It wasn't warmth. It was pain.

As if existence itself rejected his stillness.

The cold that had wrapped around him like a shroud was stripped away, layer by layer.

Something deep within him convulsed. A phantom heartbeat. A flicker of breath. His soul spasmed, as if being forced into a shape it had long forgotten.

He didn't move—he couldn't.

But the light moved through him.

It dug into his essence, not lifting him gently, but ripping him from the void like flesh from bone. Every scar the abyss had carved into him, every scream that had never left his lips, came alive in that moment.

And then—

he fell.

Not through space, but through memory.

Through pain. Through silence. Through himself.

Faster. Harder.

The light stretched before him, not a path but a maw, devouring everything behind him.

His soul—shattered, scorched, stitched back together—was thrust forward.

And in that moment,

he was reborn.

Not on Earth, but in a world strangely familiar.