I died in a suit.
Yeah, I know. We get buried in them too, but that's beside the point. It wasn't exactly a legendary send-off. No swelling music. No tragic betrayal. No dying declaration that leaves everyone misty-eyed in the theater. Just a worn-out office drone, running on caffeine fumes and expired willpower, stepping off a curb like a half-conscious sleepwalker. There was a horn—shrill, slicing through the world—then headlights, molten white, swallowing everything whole.
Then—
Nothing.
Not pain. Not regret. Not even the decency of a final oh-god-why thought. Just absence. A flatline across the universe. A cosmic "mute" slapped over reality. No up. No down. No me. My consciousness thinned to a whisper and then to static and then to less than static. Just the suggestion that I had ever existed at all.
And then… I woke.
The air hit like a punch. Thick. Metallic. Wrong. Rust scraped along my nostrils; soot coated my lungs like wet ash; every breath sent a sting through my ribs—ribs I didn't recognize as mine. A coppery tang crawled across my tongue. Bitter. Electric. Like licking a broken battery and a knife at the same time.
My heart slammed in my chest—but the rhythm was wrong. Too fast. Too hollow. Too crisp. It hit like something mechanical forced into flesh it didn't trust.
Silence pressed down around me like wet cloth. Broken only by the slow, deliberate drip of… something. I tasted it before I smelled it: iron, decay, old blood. It coiled through my gut and made my muscles twitch with nausea.
My eyes snapped open.
Jagged stone ceiling. Torchlight flickering with awareness, flames dancing like they were watching me wake up. Shadows bent at angles that would've made a geometry teacher cry. Every crack and mark on the stone felt intentional—like a sentence carved into the architecture. A grammar I didn't yet read but somehow felt brushing against my mind, whispering categories and clauses.
I sat up. My muscles felt foreign, like badly installed software. The floor was rough, cold, unforgiving, biting into my palms. My movements were too smooth in some places and too stiff in others. A body wearing me rather than the other way around.
Bodies surrounded me.
Hooded. Collapsed. Frozen mid-gesture in the chokehold of their final moment. Eyes waxy and glassy, mouths stuck open in silent, unending screams. The chamber reeked: sweat, burnt wick, blood, rot mixing with something hotter—fear. Thick enough to taste.
My skin crawled, gooseflesh prickling up my arms. Somewhere under the panic, beneath the rising urge to bolt, came a whisper:
Observe. Learn. Stay.
I tried to speak.
Instead, a sound emerged—soft, melodic, wrong. Notes that didn't belong to my vocal cords. My tongue moved like liquid intent, slipping and reshaping like it wasn't a muscle but a tool with its own logic.
My hands trembled. Porcelain-white. Fragile-looking. Fingers long, delicate, nails slightly too sharp. Joints bent with a disturbingly elegant precision. My wrists were thin, almost translucent. I flexed them. They responded like obedient machinery, not flesh.
Then I saw myself in a piece of polished metal.
Silver-white hair spilling over narrow shoulders. Skin smooth and glassy, like sculpted ceramic. Eyes enormous and reflective—liquid crystal catching the torchlight in prismatic shivers.
A doll.
A weapon.
A thing.
The summoning circle beneath me pulsed in slow, heartbeat-like waves. The rhythm climbed my legs, threading my spine, clutching my ribs. Each step I took reverberated across the chamber—hollow, ritualistic. It wasn't just sensing me.
It was claiming me.
A dull thunk echoed from the hall. Then voices:
"No way… they actually pulled it off."
"What did they summon?"
"Get ready."
The massive doors groaned open. Five figures strode inside like consequences made flesh. Steel flashed under torchlight. Cloaks trailed like banners. The air warmed, tinged with ozone. Energy crackled from their fingertips—sparks leaping, darting, hungry.
At their head stood a knight in crimson plate. Eyes sharp, measuring me with the cool calculation of a man deciding whether the deer in front of him is worth mounting on a wall.
"Witch," he said. "The cultists summoned a devil."
My throat tightened. "Wait—hold on, I'm not—"
"She speaks!" a mage barked. Light coiled into his hand, twisting into a spear humming with caged fury. "Get her before she casts!"
My legs staggered backward. Muscles refused to sync. Instinct screamed, but my biology answered with unfamiliar choreography. My heel brushed the circle. The pulse surged.
"She's resisting!"
"She's preparing something!"
"No! I—"
And then—
[System Initialization Complete.]
[User Interface Activated.]
[Choose Alignment: White | Black | Random]
A voice rang inside my skull. Smooth. Synthetic. Precise. Female-coded, but with that unnerving neutrality of a machine that had opinions but didn't need you to know them.
Translucent panes flickered across my vision. Not hallucinations—interfaces. Lines of code wrapped in aesthetic. They smelled faintly of ozone.
Electricity danced across my skin. Tiny sparks threading nerves that didn't belong to any known anatomy. Reality around me… flexed. Walls pulsed. Gravity hiccuped.
Then came the truth—not spoken, but dropped into my consciousness like a stone into dark water:
I wasn't summoned.
I wasn't born.
I wasn't chosen.
I was rewritten.
A fragment of the Null Sea.
A sliver of the dream of Someome.
A ripple in the sleeping mind of an Idiotic being, given shape because some hooded idiots poked where they shouldn't.
Gravity snapped sideways. The world lurched. My vision split into layers—possibilities branching, collapsing, reforming. Time didn't feel linear. It felt like a polite suggestion.
My senses flooded with futures. Centuries folded through me. Someone's influence laced the edges of thought like a quiet reminder that time was optional and doors weren't meant to stay closed.
I steadied myself. Barely.
The knight lunged. Steel gleamed.
Pain bloomed across my temple. Sharp. Electric. My balance shattered. The world twisted, weightless, and darkness swallowed half my sight.
And then, from somewhere deep inside the new architecture of my mind—
"I open my eyes, and the world feels… too coherent. Yet I feel threads beneath my fingertips—alive, waiting, shaped by hands I cannot see."
The chamber, the air, the shadows—they breathed with me. Twitching. Expectant.
Something inside me hummed. A potential coiled like a serpent waiting for permission to strike. Terrifying. Thrilling.
The first real thought—past fear, past confusion, past human limitation—was instinct distilled to razor edge:
Learn. Adapt. Shape. Move.
The cultists hadn't summoned a devil.
They had dipped their hands into the edge of creation's unhinged dream.
And now?
Now I got to decide what waking up meant.