Sebastian Edward was dying. He'd been shot twice by his own father. The culprit, Sebastian Fischer, had followed him all the way into the alley and pulled the trigger twice on his own son.
They had an argument, which was more or less a violent exchange of words. His father, Fischer, had blamed him for the deaths of his sister and his mother. But the problem was, he never even had a sister. His mother died in a car accident years ago, so how exactly was that his fault?.
Edward, still only eighteen, believed his father had begun losing his mind and ran away from home. His father had attempted to stab him with a knife . The idea of dying sent shivers down his spine. Staying with his now "mentally unstable" father was not an option.
He intended to pretend to be insane and hole up in a psychiatric ward for as long as possible. That was one of the better options he had.
It was already past eleven at night, so casually strolling around wasn't exactly a good idea. With the heavy downpour, if anything dangerous were to happen, no one would hear anything, much less come to his aid.
He turned into an alleyway and heard a loud sound go off. A sharp sensation drilled through his body as he went down to the floor. He could barely move. A somewhat large silhouette stood over him and pointed a gun at his body.
"Ah, it's you. If you wanted to kill me so badly, you could have done it while I was asleep".
The person showed no signs of replying.
"Wait, how could you even afford a gun?" Edward made a pathetic attempt to laugh, but the person pulled the trigger again, aiming for his intestines this time.
The person standing over him was his own father, Sebastian Fischer.
His father left immediately after the second shot, leaving Edward to his demise.
Edward was going to die. No one was going to find his body in time to save him. He didn't believe in heaven or hell. He didn't believe in the afterlife or purgatory. To Edward, once a person died, they simply stopped existing. That was why the idea of death was always terrifying to him. He couldn't fully accept the reality that he would no longer exist. To him, ideas of life after death were just convenient ways humans used to cope with the reality of what death truly is: a state of nonexistence.
"What... I'm actually dying..."
He was afraid—terrified of death. He could no longer move any part of his body, and he felt his vision getting dimmer.
The excruciating pain could barely let him think.
In the last seconds of his life, tears dribbled down his eyes.
" I was wrong. Maybe this world is actually ugly."
Tuesday, 21st April 2018 — Edward Sebastian died.
…
Huh? I'm alive? Wait, was that a dream?
He touched the place the bullet had pierced his body and there was not even a sign of an injury. Something felt wrong,he quickly realized that his body was smaller,his hands as tiny as that of a six year old.
He used his hands to feel over his face and regained some composure. He'd been living in this body for the past six years.
He laughed out loudly "i'm alive! Hahaha!!!".
Hearing the squeakish childish sound of his own voice,he burst out laughing again.
He was now a six year old boy rolling around hysterically on the floor.
"Perhaps this is reincarnation? No it's safe to say this is the after life?
He didn't believe in heaven or hell or any sort of existence after death for that matter. To him, life after death wasn't possible.He believed that for that to happen—for any sort of survival after death to occur—it would require the existence of the human soul. And as far as he was concerned, there was no evidence of such a thing existing or ever having existed.
"It doesn't matter now, does it? The proof of it is here. I'm still alive, aren't I? So humans do have a soul. Intriguing."
In that moment, he cast aside the beliefs he had held onto his entire life. He internally apologized to all the people he had tagged as fools for suggesting something as "stupid" as a separate existence outside the human body. He chuckled to himself again. He was clearly the foolish one here. And he was now living proof of that.
He tried dashing outside on his tiny legs but stopped instantly. If he attempted going at that pace he knew he was going to roll himself over, he could only imagine the consequences that type of fall would have on his delicate body.
He stopped at the door and turned back to admire the house he was in . It was nothing special, it looked like a giant plain box with one room in it but he didn't care.
"How simplistic, what's this? the thirteen hundreds?"
He opened the door and inhaled the air outside.
He looked at the hundreds of people passing by and smiled to himself.
"How beautiful, this really is heaven".
"Wait, maybe this is just my life flashing before me before I die, I did have a good imagination after all".
He did something he shouldn't have done,he picked up a small stone and threw it at the man in front of him.
He turned his head angrily, and began walking towards him .
"People should really keep their kids on a leash"
"uh oh" he'd begun to realize the severity of what he'd done. He'd seen that look hundreds of times, that man was coming over to enact physical violence. If he got hit by a man built like that he would probably die for real.
A woman appeared to block the advancing man.
"Please" , she bowed her head. "He didn't intend to do that, pass on your punishment to me instead"
"What the.."
"Fine". His clenched first ran through her face before she could even raise her head. Instantly sending her to the floor.
He spat on her body and went on his way.
"You should be more careful Lucius". She forced herself to whisper from the ground while smiling.
"Lucius? I remember now, that's my name".
Lucius was frozen with shock,not because of the brute from a few seconds back but because of the apparition in front of him.
She got up and touched his face. "I suppose you were lonely inside".
"Mom?mom?"
The person in front of him was his dead mother,or more accurately a perfect replica of his mother from her younger days.
Counting backwards from the day he died it had been five years since he'd seen her. He remembered her funeral like it was yesterday, he'd seen her corpse when she was declared dead, he'd watched them lower her into a coffin. So then what exactly was this?
Well it was clearly not the after life.
She hugged him tightly with tears running down her eyes. "You've finally spoken".
A fourth possibility rose in his mind...
"Was all of that just a dream?"
...
" Are these my memories or the memories of the person known as Sebastian Edward?"
That would have explained the reason why he was looking at an alive version of his mother.
But those thoughts vanished as quickly as they came. He remembered it—the last few seconds of his life, the feeling of wanting something sweet, the pain in his body, the blur in his vision. He remembered what it felt like to die.
This was not something he could simply forget or pass off as someone else's memory. It was the experience of death.
Death itself wasn't exactly painful. It was like a state of sleep. One would not know what happened around them while asleep; death was like that as well.
The pain stemmed from the physical torture that robbed your body of its normal functions—your own
consciousness watching yourself drift into the abyss, the psychological horror of seeing life slowly escape your body and knowing that, in a few moments, you would no longer exist.
If hell existed, that would probably be it.
It was this hell Edward Sebastian, now reborn as Lucius Callisto, had experienced.
That was how he knew. Six years ago, in some other world, he had lost his life and had somehow been reincarnated.
....
Eden was an endless world filled with sights one could only recognize as a miracle, a world that could only be conceived through the imagination. It was heaven, the eternal abode humans from Lucius's previous world would always wish to go. Species of animals Lucius had never heard of existed in abundance, and plants incapable of even surviving on Earth stretched endlessly across fertile soil.
It had been two years since the memories of his past life returned to him; he was now eight years of age.
Him and Ariel were currently hunting fish from a river inside a forest. They'd wandered far away from any human residence, but they were clearly not in any danger. Plants and animals capable of causing harm were separated by an entirely different layer of reality; Eden was truly a world of endless miracles.
"Why not just freeze the entire river? You'll save both of us a whole lot of trouble," Lucius began adjusting the position of the mini spear in the water.
"Is your attention span that short? Listen, I know I've said this a million times, but freezing the fish would render their skin useless. You're really not that sharp, are you?" Ariel had added that last bit to annoy him; she barely had anything to do most of the time other than that.
"It's not called skin for fishes, brat. Eh...wait, but I guess that won't be the same for this world."
"You could do this any other day, so why now?" Lucius was tired; he'd rather spend his days indoors daydreaming about gigantic eagles than spending it out in the sunlight.
"You say that but never seem to have anything better to do."
"Listen, brat..."
"Don't brat me; we're the same age. If you were any good at making clothes, we wouldn't be here."
"Now why would I ..."
"Oh! There's one." With the arrival of an apparent sauna fish latching onto her spear, she stretched backward, attempting to pull it outside the river.
"Oh no! No! That's not a ..." It wasn't a fish; it was one of the krevnir, a nine-foot crawling reptile that fed on ciscas as well.
"Lucius, don't just stand there, help me!"
Lucius began pulling her from the waist, but the underwater animal had more strength than both of them combined. After all, they were both eight-year-old kids.
"How about you let go of the spear!"
"No way, you have no idea what you could use a krevnir's skin for."
"If you don't let go, you're gonna be swimming with it!"
"He isn't bluffing. Wait! Wait! Wait!"
They both let go at the same time, and the imbalance of pulling forces sent Ariel crashing down on Lucius.
"Ahh, blegh, uhh."
"How cute," Ariel smiled devilishly. "A big brother eating his little sister's hair." She had fallen backward on top of him, so pieces of her silver hair had naturally entered his mouth.
"Oh? Now you're the little sister?"
Lucius lay faced up and closed his eyes. The period where the sea breeze would blow north had arrived; he wanted to enjoy it to its fullest.
"Hey, hey? What are you doing? Who's gonna keep me company if you fall asleep? Hey Lucius, wake up!"
She ruffled his body backward and forward, but he made no intentions to answer her; he wasn't asleep—he was simply ignoring her.
"If you wake up, I'll make you one of those ice swords you love so much."
"Deal," Lucius quickly jerked forward.
"Tch, damn freeloader," she shot him a disgruntled look and attacked his shoulder playfully.
"So? What should we do next? If you don't want to suggest anything, trust me, I have lots of ideas."
"But... but what about the fish?" she pointed sheepishly at the river while making a cute pouting face.
"If you're still interested in tussling with reptiles, you can hang around here all you want. You've made as many shikadels as ..."
"It's sh-ena-dels. Also, where are you going? Wait! Come back! I'm gonna get lost!!!!"
.....
"Woah," Ariel mouthed in surprise. "Where and when did you find this place!"
They had arrived at a gigantic waterfall; its base formed a water body that kept flowing vertically forward, eventually reaching the Trigen Sea hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Their path through the forest was dark and filled with obstacles; the leaves on the trees were wide and didn't allow any sunlight to pass through. Fortunately enough, there were no trees in the areas Ariel would usually go fishing. It allowed enough lighting for one to put their guard down.
On their way here, she'd latched onto him like a toddler. He had to constantly remind her that they hadn't gone through a layer yet.
"We're gonna go ice skating."
"Sk-at-ing?"
"Yeah, it's a word I made up, hehe. It means to pirouette... in this case, vertically on ice."
"All words are made up. This skating thing of yours sounds fun and all, but there's clearly no frozen water body here, and there won't be till winter."
"What if I asked you to freeze the entire Trigen Sea?"
"There you go spouting nonsense again, and here I thought we were going to swim."
"First of all, you can't swim. Second of all, swimming in this tide would kill you. Third of all, it is, in fact, possible to freeze the Trigen Sea."
"So you can do it?"
"I meant possible for you, idiot."
"Ho..."
"Stop barking and listen. Your sixth limb allows you to control water as an extension of your body; that's how you're able to create those ice blades. You've recognized the shape of frozen water and are capable of replicating it repeatedly."
"..."
"Let me finish. But you've made a mistake: water or ice doesn't have only one shape. It's the illusion your brain has created. The brain is capable of sending signals to every part of the body to control it. That's why you're able to move your arms and legs. The human body is made up of millions of cells, or building blocks, on a tiny level, just like water. To move parts of your body, you don't directly move the millions of cells themselves, but the arm or leg as a whole. It's the same thing you do when you create ice sculptures: instead of directly controlling millions of water molecules, you create a whole for each part. You following?"
Ariel nodded in agreement.
Lucius continued: "Just like any arm or leg, if natural phenomena or objects were to interact with the brain, it would send and receive signals. The signals you receive are what help you determine the internal structure of water and alter it to form ice. In other words, you need to treat everything from here to the Trigen Sea as part of a whole and freeze it."
Ariel quietly stroked her chin before replying to him:
"If what you're saying is true, then the water itself is like ink on a paper, or a past memory."
"She really is sharp for an eight-year-old. Yes, everything you see can be treated as information in your range of observation. That's why everyone is capable of using alchemy."
"Everyone but you."
"I'll ignore that."
Ariel gasped, covering her mouth while staring at him like she'd just seen him for the first time.
"Could it be... are you actually smart?"
"Well, you definitely are. If someone had attempted explaining all of this to me when I was eight years of age, I wouldn't have understood a thing."
I'll ignore that last remark. Now hurry up. There's something I've been dying to try."
"No." Ariel squatted at the river's bank and ran her palm over the water. "Judging by your own explanation, trying to freeze that much water would practically fry my mind."
"That's certainly the logical conclusion to come to, if you were an eight-year-old who learned physics, that is."
"But you did give me an idea." Ariel placed her palm above the water and closed her eyes. She focused her mind on the pulsating sensation she felt from the water. The chirping of birds and rustling of leaves were filtered by her range of focus; her mind had become completely silent. She could even hear the flow of blood from one part of her body to the next.
Lucius noticed the speed of the water upstream had begun to slow down massively. Crystal lattices formed at the places where water joined the soil.
All the water traveling forward from their line had been completely frozen. Crystal lattices spread out in mass from Ariel's position, from the waterfall to the depths of the river; they had completely become a stationary ice sculpture.
"What did you do?" Lucius decided it was okay to interrupt after she stepped foot on the now crystalline water.
"I used it to reshape the water molecules. Basically, all the water from the point I can observe has been frozen. The rest of the water that flows into the sea has been separated. There's probably a big thousand-foot hole should we make it there. The rest of the water from the mountain above the spring keeps pushing down on us, but it won't matter as long as I'm here. The water is still receiving the contraction signal from me."
"How long can you handle that?"
"The spring water starts from the Euphrates River above this mountain, so as long as I'm not asleep, I should be able to handle it."
"She's able to reach as far back as the mountain? Impressive."
Ariel stretched her hand towards Lucius, inviting him to come join her.
"Do you trust me?" she said.
"This water was over a thousand feet deep. If you lose focus, we die."
"So yes?"
"No."
Lucius kick-started their descent by dragging her down the river's frozen slope. They were now moving smoothly at top speed.
"Is this what you meant by skating? What exactly is the fun in this?" Ariel shouted.
"This isn't actually skating; we're just gliding down a frozen river for fun."
"Focus and enjoy the ride. Don't let go of me at any cost."
Unlike Ariel, Lucius enjoyed the thrill of this experience. It was like being in a high-speed race car; it wasn't a feeling one could simply simulate anywhere else.
They kept gliding downwards until it happened: Ariel lost focus and lost control of the water.
... ... ...
They both lay faced up at the setting sun. Ariel wasn't moving; the cold water had almost completely turned her body numb, and her clothes were completely soaked. Wearing them on her body was asking for trouble.
"This is bad," Ariel managed to whisper.
"Well, it could get worse if someone finds us here with you not wearing any clothes."
"I think I've gotten a cold," she managed to whisper.
Ariel turned towards him and asked: "The person here right now,Is it really you or a double?"
"A double".
"where is the real you?"
.....