Elias had never smiled so much in his life.
He sat at a small table outside a café in Italy, sunlight spilling across the cobblestone street as he took a bite of his pizza. The crust was warm and crisp, the cheese soft and stretching between his fingers. For once, the world felt alive around him strangers laughing, glasses clinking, pigeons pecking at crumbs. He snapped a few pictures, each one a small attempt to freeze happiness, though he knew no camera could ever capture peace.
Tomorrow, he would be in another country.
And so he went standing beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris, feeding swans at a lake in Denmark, and walking through quiet temples in Kyoto. Each day, he moved as if time were chasing him, trying to collect fragments of a life he had never dared to live.
Then came the day in the hospital.
He sat across from his doctor a kind man with tired eyes who tried his best to sound gentle. The words still landed like stones. Brain tumor. Inoperable. Six months to a year.
Elias didn't speak. He only looked at the X-ray of his own skull that strange shadow near the center, growing in a place no surgeon could touch. It almost felt poetic to him, that something inside his mind would be the thing to end it.
When he stepped out of the hospital, the air felt sharper than before. The city lights below seemed smaller, almost fragile. He stood on the rooftop of his apartment building, feeling the wind brush through his hair.
He was only twenty-eight.
No relationships, no family of his own just a quiet man who spent most of his time behind books, behind screens, behind excuses. An introvert by nature, he used to think solitude was safety. Now it just felt like silence waiting to swallow him whole.
He tilted his head toward the stars scattered, countless, unreachable. For the first time, he wondered what came after all of this. Would death hurt? Would there be anything left of him once his mind his very thoughts dissolved?
The wind carried no answer. Only peace.
And maybe, that was enough.
So he began to plan his last journey not as a farewell, but as a quiet acceptance. He sold what little he had, packed his camera and a small notebook, and booked a one-way ticket to Switzerland.
The land there was everything he imagined mountains rising like gods, rivers running silver beneath them, the air so pure it felt alive. He wandered through the valleys, touching the grass, closing his eyes, listening to the hum of the wind.
Every breath felt like a prayer.
Every step felt like the last one he would ever take.
But deep inside, beneath the peace he pretended to wear, something trembled. Fear. Not of dying but of not knowing what waited beyond. He had seen people die in movies, in stories, in silence, but never knew what came after the closing of the eyes.
Would it be darkness? Would it be nothing?
He didn't know.
That night, he lay down in the meadow, the one he had grown to love. The grass was cool beneath him, the stars wide and still above. The wind brushed against his face gently, almost like a whisper. He felt small but not insignificant. For the first time, he thought maybe death wasn't an ending. Maybe it was a return.
He smiled faintly.
"Maybe it will be peaceful there," he murmured to himself.
And for a moment, he believed it.
...
The afternoon sun hung low over the Swiss meadows, bathing everything in gold. The air smelled faintly of pine and clean earth, the kind of scent that made you forget there was a world beyond this one.
Elias sat in the middle of the grass, his bag beside him, camera lying silent. His shoes were off. He wanted to feel the ground beneath his skin, wanted the soil to remember him even if no one else would.
The hills rolled endlessly before him, and far in the distance, the peaks of the Alps shimmered beneath a halo of light. It was breathtaking, the kind of beauty that hurt to look at for too long.
He watched the clouds drift lazily across the sky and thought about how strange it was that life, no matter how painful or short, still managed to be beautiful in its small, fleeting ways. The laughter he'd heard in Italy. The woman who smiled at him in Japan. The taste of pizza under a summer sun.
He had done what he could. And for once, he regretted nothing.
A soft breeze brushed his face, and he closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the warmth of the world one last time. When he opened them again, he looked down at his hand trembling. His breathing had grown shallow, each inhale a little heavier than the last.
He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, only to see red.
Blood.
He stared at it quietly, not afraid just aware. His time was finally here.
He gave a weak chuckle, the sound barely leaving his throat. "Yes," he whispered, voice trembling, "it will be peaceful there."
His eyes began to close slowly. The light faded, and the hum of the wind grew distant, softer, until it was gone.
For a long while, there was nothing. No pain. No sound. Only stillness.
Then, faintly, light.
Elias opened his eyes again.
The sky above him was no longer gold. It was morning pale blue and endless, like a freshly painted canvas. The grass beneath him was the same, yet somehow brighter, greener, more alive. Even the air felt lighter, carrying a quiet hum that wasn't quite a sound but something deeper, something felt.
He blinked in confusion, sitting up slowly. His body didn't ache. His head didn't hurt. The trembling in his hand was gone.
"...Heaven?" he muttered under his breath. "Is this... heaven?"
The question hung in the air like a whisper.
Then, from somewhere behind him, a calm, deep voice replied rich and steady, with a tone that carried both authority and warmth.
"Good day, Mr. Elias Verne."
Elias froze.
He turned quickly, his heartbeat if he still had one skipping.
Standing a few meters away was a man. He appeared to be in his fifties, tall and composed, dressed in a sharp black suit lined with faint, glowing symbols that seemed to shift like living ink. His hair was neatly combed back, his mustache trimmed to perfection. A pair of black gloves rested over his stomach as if he were waiting for this very moment.
He smiled faintly, polite, almost friendly. The kind of smile a man gives before delivering a life-altering truth.
The wind brushed through the grass between them, and the world felt suspended quiet, expectant.
Elias blinked, his thoughts racing. Who is he?
He looked again at the strange symbols glowing faintly across the man's suit. They weren't letters not from any language he'd ever seen. They pulsed softly like veins of light.
Elias opened his mouth, but no words came. His throat felt dry.
The man tilted his head slightly, studying him with calm, silver-gray eyes that seemed to hold the weight of ages.
For a moment, they simply looked at each other one human who should be dead, and one being who clearly wasn't.
The man adjusted his black gloves, his movements precise and deliberate, then spoke again his tone cool, refined, almost too calm for this kind of moment.
"It seems," he said softly, "that your time among the living has come to an end. But your purpose… is only beginning."
Elias could only stare, the sound of the wind rising faintly around them, carrying the scent of the earth the same earth where he had once promised himself peace.
He didn't understand what this place was, or who this stranger was, but something deep inside him knew instinctively that this wasn't heaven.
Not yet.
And as the man in the suit took a step forward, the sunlight glinting off his gloves, Elias felt a chill crawl down his spine.
The symbols across the man's suit pulsed once, brighter, as he extended a hand.
"Welcome," he said, his voice smooth and absolute.
"To the place where laws are born and broken."