Darkness was the whole world. Time had no edges. Thoughts came and went like distant weather, and only one kept circling: I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
The words weren't his. They pressed in from every direction—thousands of voices begging for one more breath. When sight relearned how to be sight, he saw them all around him: gray drops in the black, drifting the way snow drifts—only not falling, he realized, but sinking, all of them sliding toward a light that did not grow so much as wait.
He tried to move, to steady the nearest sparks, to hush the sad voices scouring the dark. No hands answered him. No legs. He was only a gray bead of light like the others, sinking through a cold that felt like deep ocean, unable to help no matter how badly he wanted to make them stop sounding so sad.
Then the texture changed beneath him.
Far below, a faint firelight smoldered. One by one, like rain, the crying lights slipped through an unseen surface and dropped farther on. When his turn came, he passed it too—like breaking a lake's skin in the wrong direction—and the dark became a moving corridor, a pipe with water for walls and roof and a strong current in its belly, pulling the gray toward a Gate so vast distance could not make it small.
He saw steps vanishing inward and, beyond them, a glow like fire behind rock. On either side, skeletons taller than buildings leaned from the carved stone, skulls canted as if listening for names.
Around the stream glided something like wardens—ghost-pale shapes with faces mended wrong, circling the gray lights like inspectors in some grim ritual. One paused, reached out, and plucked a spark from the current.
Bruce watched as the gray light struggled in the ghost's grip, then slowly began to change. The light stretched and thickened until it took on a human outline, its face broken and scarred, a workman's helmet still perched on its head—and through the helmet, a metal pipe skewered cleanly through skull and jaw, as if the horror of its last heartbeat had been burned forever into its being.
The ghost sank, joined the others, and began to circle again—one more in the gathering of lost ones. Every soul here bore the marks of how they'd died: burns, cracks, missing pieces, gashes that glowed faintly with the memory of pain. They swam in silence, but their mouths moved, shaping words that Bruce couldn't hear but somehow knew:
I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
Nearby souls brightened with gray sparks of panic, trying to break away. They fled toward islands of bone scattered through the water—mountains of ribs and vertebrae, skulls of every shape imaginable. Some Bruce recognized—human, animal—but others were too strange: skulls with too many teeth, too few eyes, jawbones that curved like anchors, the remains of creatures that had no place in any Earth he knew.
The ghosts gave chase, though they seemed unable to reach the fleeing souls. The little gray lights—now he understood they were souls like him—moved with no plan or mind, only a primal reflex that filled this place: the instinct to not die, even here where dying was already done.
But the islands betrayed them. One by one the bone-mountains crumbled to dust, dragging the souls down as the ghosts caught up, clutching at them with hands that weren't hands, their faces frozen in anguish and disbelief. The water shook with the chorus again—thousands of thin, hopeless voices echoing the same line:
I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
From above, still falling, Bruce saw the truth of this dreadful tide. The ghosts wore the eras of the world like tattered uniforms:
—A nurse's cap, still wet with blood.
—A soldier from the first great war, clutching nine dog tags that jingled faintly as he swam, refusing to release his fallen brothers.
—A carpenter missing a hand, dragging the ghost of a saw.
—A boy in a school uniform, one shoe gone.
—A woman in rags, her mouth open in a soundless prayer.
The chant threaded through them all, thin as rain, relentless as gravity.
And through the haze, Bruce noticed something: the ones who kept moving, who did not stop or turn back, were left untouched. The wardens drifted aside to let them pass, as if only stillness invited death here.
But where were they going?
Bruce's eyes—if he still had eyes—followed the stream downward to the massive Gate, its light flickering behind pillars of bone and fire. He wanted to believe it was salvation, that beyond it lay rest or heaven or something merciful.
But the longer he stared at the Gate, the less it felt like safety at all. The glow no longer seemed like firelight but like a furnace behind stone, waiting to swallow everything that touched it.
Whatever this place was, Bruce knew. Judgment waited at the foot of those stairs. After that there would be no turning back. This was the end of the road. No Frank. No Amber. No stairwell to run back up. No more doors to knock. No more "try again." He had done his best and failed; this was his final stop, drifting down with all the sad souls he'd wanted to help but been too weak, too slow, too stupid to save.
As he neared the current, the wardens turned. Arms widened like nets. Their faces were a museum of the dead—miners and nurses, soldiers and students, men and women and children from every age of history, all their last wounds made permanent. They didn't look as though they meant to guide him to the Gate. They looked as if they meant to make him one of them. Their mouths shaped the words before the sound reached him.
He looked up into the black sea of the ceiling and asked himself if this was it—no more blue sky, no more green world, no more wondering what waited beyond the clouds people had laughed at him for dreaming about. They'd laughed when he said he wanted to be useful like Neo or a comic-book hero. Still, he would have liked to try. To do something truly useful. To make people smile.
If he could, he would take these sad souls with him. He would carry their pain, their sacrifices, their shame and all the bad, no matter what it cost. He just wanted to help them somehow. If only he could have another chance to try and be better.
Please, he thought toward whatever might be above. Give me a sign. Let me make things right. Change more lives. Maybe I'm a fool—but if this place is real, then why couldn't a second chance be real, too? Please, let me help these people dream again. Let me take the wrong and the pain and the shame on myself. Give them another chance. Give me the burden. Please. I want to believe in miracles. Just once more. Even if I don't deserve it, show me one.
The crack raced across the ceiling of the underworld like a fault in night. It shattered.
A pillar of white dropped—sun-bright, baby-soft—splashing radiance through the corridor. The wardens scattered with a hiss like torn silk. From the silt below, a mountain of white flowers heaved itself upward—petals like paper flames—blooming so fast it sounded like rain. When Bruce touched them without hands, they lifted him—an island of softness rising against the pull. The air—if this place had air—suddenly smelled of first snow, cut apple, clean linen in sunlight.
Something hovered in the light, small and haloed. Wings like down. Eyes like summer water. A voice arrived that tried very hard to be thunder and landed closer to nap-time whisper:
"B-behold," it breathed, and then, after a tiny, nervous cough, "The… the d-d… descents of time are running out."
A pause. The little being glanced offstage, as if checking notes only he could see, then pushed on, braver:
"The hour dr—draws near. H-humanity is… um… fractured. You are not united. The stars are not empty—there are others out there, and more others beyond them. If you don't grow fast—together—one day they will come and take what is yours. S-so you must become one people, and strong, and… and nice about it—but also fast." The small chest puffed. "Yes. F-fast."
Bruce blinked (if blinking was something he could still do). Is this God? It felt like God. It also felt like God had borrowed someone's cape and then tripped on it.
"Okay," Bruce said in his head, carefully. You want… world peace? Tech? A united human nation? That's a lot. I'm just— He glanced down at his non-hands. —light?
The little God's glow deepened—less theater now, more real. "I… I c-can't do all the talking," he admitted, almost shy. "Not all-knowing. Not all-powerful. I get tired when I make big things, and then I need a nap." (The flowers trembled in agreement.) "But I can give you… this."
He reached out. The touch wasn't a touch; it was warmth deciding.
My child, the small voice said, steadier now, "you know the shape of what comes. Change it before the hour runs out. Unite them. Hurry. Please."
A spark moved from the Godling to Bruce—white as noon, soft as milk. It sank into him and found his center. His gray brightened—ash to milk, milk to snow, snow to living white—until what beat in him was a heart made of light. Around it, a thin circle drew tight, a shield that wasn't separate so much as self. When fear pressed, the circle hummed; when sorrow rose, the heart steadied it. (It would be small at first, minor, almost forgettable—a starter flame that grows like muscle with use, kindness, and discipline. But it was the same family of warmth that lives in suns: a condensed gift of making—healing, mending, life. )
Bruce tried to salute, or nod, or something respectful. He managed only a bright, bewildered yes-feeling. Time running out… got it. Move fast. Help people. Don't leave anyone. His mind leapt to stairs and knocks and low-and-go. If time is short, we start now. We move. We—
"Um, not now-now," the Godling squeaked, as if hearing the plan form. "First you have to, uh… become again. S-sorry. It's a process." He lowered his voice to mystery: "You will go up by going in."
Bruce stared. Be… reborn? Me? Really? Every part of him wanted to argue with the physics of it. Another part—older than doubt—wanted only to carry, to be useful.
Below, the current burned like a slow galaxy; the Gate held its breath; the wardens trembled at the edge of the light, suddenly shy, as if remembering they had once been gentler.
Bruce turned his not-face toward the stream of tiny embers and thought as hard as a man can think without a mouth: Keep moving. Don't stop. You're almost there. It felt like three quick knocks on a burning door.
The Godling fluttered, pleased. "Good. Good! I, um, have to rest now." A little yawn escaped, too honest to hide. "Be brave. Be kind. And… w-work on your hurrying."
The flowers lifted him higher; the pillar opened like a white throat into day.
Up, through the white, through the last thin skin of the old night—
—and darkness again, a different dark: warm, close, patient. The cold of judgment went away; this had the hush of held breath. Time loosened into tides. Hands that were not hands turned and tucked him the way a blanket is tucked around a sleeping child.
He became a spark, then a single cell with a white ember at its center. Division. Measure. The quiet mathematics of making. The outline of limbs, the curl of a spine, a tiny engine learning its pace beside the light-heart that kept the beat—small, not flashy, but there, waiting to be practiced, lifted, grown.
Somewhere far above (or within), a very small God whispered, already drowsy, "Go f-fix them, okay?"
Bruce tried to answer with a heroic line and managed the mental equivalent of a thumbs-up.
Help them. Move fast. Don't leave anyone.
The light-heart agreed, pulsing once, twice, like a promise.