The void was boring.
That was Elijah's first coherent thought after getting his brains blown out... No fire, no brimstone. Just a profound, directionless nothing.
He was adrift in the universe's most underwhelming afterlife.
So this is death. Figures it'd be the one thing that actually lives up to the hype of being completely underwhelming.
He knew where he was headed. Guys like him always did. The express elevator down. First class ticket to the hot place. He'd lied, cheated, stolen, and killed his way across four continents. Racked up enough sins to fill a filing cabinet in whatever cosmic DMV handled these things.
He was fine with it.
Doomed from the start, really. He could still smell the cordite on his father's coat, see the cold glint in his mother's eyes as she counted stacks of foreign currency on their kitchen table. The Snow family crest might as well have been a skull and crossbones.
By twelve, his hands knew the language of tumblers and pins better than they knew piano keys. You didn't escape that life. You just chose how you wanted to be buried.
The family motto was simple: take what you can, die before they catch you, and make sure the tailor gets paid.
He'd managed two out of three. The corpse part was questionable given what a Desert Eagle round did to a human skull.
The thing about floating in eternal darkness was that it gave you way too much time to think. Elijah would've preferred the fire and brimstone. At least that would've been interesting. This was just his own thoughts bouncing around with nothing to distract him.
And there was one thought that kept coming back.
One regret.
I wanted the world.
He'd been close. So close. Another year, maybe two, and he would've had enough money to disappear. Buy an island. Or a vineyard. Something that didn't involve looking over his shoulder every five minutes. But that was the joke, wasn't it? Guys like him never got the world. They got used by people who already had it.
A weapon.
A tool.
That's all he'd ever been to Viktor Volkov. To Dmitri. To everyone who'd ever hired him for a job. The gun that fired when pointed. The knife that cut when swung. He'd had fun with it, sure. The adrenaline. The money. The women. God, the women.
But at the end of the day he'd still died in a parking garage over eight million euros and someone else's daddy issues.
Could've been worse. Could've been food poisoning.
Time passed. Or maybe it didn't. Hard to tell when time wasn't really a thing anymore.
"Fuck!" His voice, or the memory of his voice, echoed in the nothing. "Just send me to hell already! What are you waiting for? An engraved invitation?"
The void didn't answer.
Then it did.
Three doors appeared.
The doors floated in the darkness at equal distances from each other. Each one was identical. Plain wood. Brass handles. No markings. No signs. No helpful little plaques that said "Heaven This Way" or "Abandon Hope Ye Who Enter Here."
Just doors.
Oh great. A cosmic game show. What's behind door number one, folks?
What was left of Elijah drifted closer. He tried to examine them for differences. Some hint. Some clue. But they were exactly the same. Down to the grain of the wood.
"Seriously?" He directed the question at whatever cosmic force was running this show. "This is how it works? Multiple choice?"
No answer.
Maybe it was chance. Roll the dice and see where you end up. Or maybe it was predetermined. The door you picked was the door you were always going to pick. Free will versus destiny. The kind of philosophical bullshit that monks spent decades meditating on.
Elijah closed his eyes.
Metaphorically. He didn't have eyes anymore. But the intent was there.
He pointed at one.
That one. Final answer.
The door opened.
Something grabbed him. Not hands. Not anything physical. Just a force that hooked into whatever made up his consciousness and yanked.
The void tore apart.
Reality bent.
He was being pulled through a space that shouldn't exist. His body, the one he didn't have anymore, stretched. Every atom of his being spread thin like taffy in a machine designed by a sadist. Pain erupted. White-hot and all-consuming.
The kind of pain that made getting shot in the head feel like a massage.
FUCK FUCK FUCK THIS IS WORSE THAN DYING WHY IS THIS WORSE THAN DYING
Colors exploded. Sounds crashed. The universe folded in on itself and spat him out the other side.
He fell.
Down.
Down.
Down.
He slammed into something solid. Something real. Something that had mass and weight and all the physical properties he'd been missing.
A body.
Elijah gasped.
Air rushed into lungs that burned. His chest heaved. His heart hammered against ribs that felt too small. Too fragile. Everything was wrong. The proportions were off. His arms were too long. His legs were too short. Or maybe it was the other way around. He couldn't tell because his brain was still trying to remember how having a physical form worked.
He tried to sit up.
Vertigo slammed him back down. He focused on a single, vital sensation: the burn of air in his lungs. Breathing. The simple act was an anchor. Breathing meant alive.
Alive meant not hell. But if this wasn't damnation... then what in God's name was it?
His vision cleared.
The room around him looked like something out of a tech magazine. Minimalist furniture. Clean lines. A desk with a monitor that was thinner than his phone used to be. The walls were white. Too white. The kind of white that came from people who had cleaning staff.
Elijah stumbled to the window.
His legs didn't want to cooperate. They moved wrong. The muscle memory was gone. He felt like a puppet whose strings had just been cut, his brain sending signals his limbs refused to properly obey.
He caught himself on the wall and pulled back the curtains.
The sunrise blasted him in the face.
He squinted. Blinked. Waited for his eyes to adjust.
A beach.
White sand. Blue water. The kind of postcard-perfect ocean view that real estate agents used to justify criminal price tags. Palm trees swayed in a breeze he couldn't feel through the window.
The sky was so blue it looked fake.
Where the hell am I?
He turned back to the room. The computer on the desk glowed. The screen saver was some generic nature scene.
Elijah walked over to it. His legs were getting the hang of working again. Muscle memory was starting to kick in even though these muscles had never been his before.
He touched the mouse.
The screensaver vanished, replaced by a desktop background of anime women in lingerie.
Icons lined the left side of the screen. Documents. Photos. Games. Normal stuff. The kind of digital life everyone had.
His eyes went to the bottom right corner.
The clock read 7:47 AM.
The date was June 15th, 2026.
Future. I'm in the future. Or maybe I was in the past? Time travel. Great. That's not confusing at all.
But that wasn't what made him freeze.
Next to the clock, in small text, was the user profile name.
Amon Von Rosen
Elijah stared at it.
"Amon." He said the name out loud. It felt foreign in his mouth. "Von Rosen."
He looked down at his hands. They were pale. Smooth. No scars. No calluses from years of handling weapons and climbing buildings. These were soft hands. Rich kid hands.
"Who the fuck is that?"