I died on a Tuesday.
There was nothing cinematic about it. No white light, no voice calling my name, no montage of childhood memories. Just the wet click of my throat closing around a mouthful of cheap miso ramen, the television flickering with some late-night stream I wasn't really watching, and then the slow, stupid realization that I couldn't breathe.
I remember thinking, very clearly, This is how it ends. Not with a bang. With noodles.
After that came the dark. A dark so complete it had weight. I floated in it for what felt like seconds and centuries at the same time, waiting for the next thing. Oblivion. Judgment. Reincarnation into a fantasy world with a talking goddess and a cheat skill. Anything.
Instead I felt chains.
They bit into my wrists first, cold iron that burned colder than ice. Then my ankles. Then my throat. My body (not my body) jerked upright as though someone had yanked on invisible strings. Something vast and ancient flexed inside my chest, a heart the size of a cathedral bell tolling once, twice, three times.
I opened eyes that were not mine.
The first thing I saw was fire that had no color. It hung in the air like torn apart, sheets of black flame stitched together with screaming faces. Three figures floated in the center of the blaze, taller than mountains, faces hidden behind stone masks cracked by eons. Their presence pressed against my skull until I felt my thoughts begin to fold like wet paper.
One of them spoke. The sound was not heard so much as endured.
THE RED RIDER HAS FAILED.
THE SEVENTH SEAL REMAINS UNBROKEN.
THE SENTENCE IS OBLIVION.
I tried to answer. My mouth moved, but the voice that came out was not Elias Kane's. It was tectonic plates grinding together, a dying stars coughing up their last light.
I felt the chains tighten. The fire crawled closer. My skin (someone else's skin) began to char and regrow in the same heartbeat.
Panic, real and human, finally arrived.
"Wait," I croaked. The word came out small and ridiculous in that cavernous growl. "Wait, this is a mistake. I'm not him. I'm not—"
The middle mask tilted a fraction. The fire paused mid-roar.
SOMETHING ELSE WEARS OUR WEAPON.
The chains slackened, just enough for me to draw one ragged breath. I tasted iron and old as creation.
"I was promised oblivion," I said. My voice cracked like a child's. "This is worse."
Silence. The kind of silence that happens when gods are thinking.
Then the leftmost mask lifted a hand the size of a continent. A gesture almost gentle.
A hole opened beneath me. Not darkness. A mouth.
I fell.
The last thing I heard before the void swallowed me was a sound no human throat should be able to make: a laugh, or a sob, or both, echoing from inside my own ribs.
Somewhere very far away, something that had been waiting ten thousand years for its rider to come home felt the saddle shift under a new weight.
And the sword chained to my back woke up hungry.