I've died many deaths.
Each one changed me. Some were large, tectonic shifts that cracked my foundation. Others were small, hairline fractures barely worth noting. Some deaths were instant, sharp, surgical amputations of who I used to be. Others were slow, grinding erosion that took years to complete.
I died when I realized my parents weren't parents, just biological contributors playing roles they never auditioned for.
I died every time my body failed me. Every crisis. Every hospital bed. Every morphine haze, where I had to rebuild myself from cellular wreckage.
None of those deaths took me to the afterlife.
None except this one.
Twenty-one years.
A life that chalks up to two words, stamped across my existence like a coroner's verdict: Wasted Potential.
The machines don't care about poetry. The rhythmic beeping doesn't spare me more than a second before reminding me coldly, mechanically, efficiently—that I'm dying.
Not fighting. Not struggling. Just... fading.
The morphine makes everything distant. Wrapped in a cloud. My thoughts move like cough syrup.
But they're still sharp enough to cut.
Twenty-one years, and what do I have to show for it?
Good grades. Video games. Broken hearts. Self-loathing refined to an art form.
That's my legacy.
That's what my "potential" amounted to.
That's what all that intelligence bought me.
A hospital bed in Cairo and a morphine drip.
I opened my eyes.
The fluorescent lights are far too bright. But then again, it seems everything is bright when you're dying.
To my left: my father.
His expression is carved from steel. Severe. Sharp. Contemplative. Stoic in a way he's hardened over and over through decades of surgical detachment. The same eyes that have watched many die as he tried his best to save them, watch his own son pass slowly. He doesn't cry. He never cries. But I can feel it. The struggle to hold it in.
To my right: my mother.
She's bawling. Clutching my hand as if trying to stop me from being lifted to God right at this moment. As if the tighter she holds me, the more tethered I remain to Earth.
Her sobs are loud. Performative? Genuine? I've never been able to tell with her. She's always been theatrical.
I don't know.
I don't think I care anymore.
I forgot the last time I cared about death.
The morphine makes thinking about it difficult.
I closed my eyes again.
The darkness is easier. Less harsh than the fluorescent. Less chilling than my father's gaze. Less heartbreaking than my mother's tears.
My breath is shallow. The pressure on my chest like the weight of the ocean, deepening.
The beeping slows.
Incomplete.
The word echoes in my skull.
Just: Incomplete.
And the worst part?
I knew. I always knew.
I knew my own potential. I understood what I could've been.
I just... didn't.
Procrastination. Escapism. Self-sabotage dressed in a pretty pink dress and labeled as realism.
"Why try when my body will fail me anyway?"
"Why build when it will all come crashing down sooner or later?"
"Why care when nothing lasts?"
Why care when I won't last?
Why care.
Excuses.
All of them.
And now I'm here.
Twenty-one years old.
Dying.
Inc-
And then there was darkness.
Not the darkness of closed eyes, or a room devoid of light.
True darkness. Absolute. The kind of darkness that makes you question if you've ever seen light.
It was maddening.
I have no body. I have no heartbeat. I have no breath.
Just an awareness of self. Consciousness without form.
Floating.
Drifting.
So this is the afterlife. My goods and bads weighed on some cosmic scale. My positive and negative karma tallied in ledgers I'll never see. My sins and virtues catalogued by entities beyond comprehension. This is not Hell. This is not Heaven. This is simply nothing.
This is death.
This is what comes after.
A nothing.
Emptiness.
I died the way I lived: incomplete.
And now I'll drift in this state forever. A fragment of a person who never became whole.
Wrong.
The voice doesn't come from an external source but from within. As if someone - no, something - was speaking directly into my consciousness.
I try to respond, but I have no mouth. I try to look, but I have no eyes.
Just an awareness.
You're not drifting. This is just my waiting room.
Waiting room?
One moment it was dark, then it happened. As if I was witnessing the birth of the universe itself. As if God were replaying a languid memory of his greatest act of creation. The darkness split, creating a tiny, minuscule atom of light that seemed to fold into itself before exploding with a flash of white.
What the fuck? One second, it was dark, then the next, I was sitting in a chair in someone's corner office.
Between a dreadful mix of fear, excitement, and violent motion sickness from such an experience, my mouth hung open in disbelief. The violent need to vomit was the only thing that made me close it. I looked down at my hands, then used them to feel my heartbeat. I'm alive. How? Why?
I worked hard to steady my breathing, closing my eyes as I imagined it—calming, steadying. Anything but the thumping war drum that it is now.
I quickly looked up at the man on the other side of the desk. He was tall and lean, with pale gray skin that bordered on colorless, like he'd been hung upside down and drained of all his blood. His eyes seemed to flash between a dark black and a completely pupilless state.
He wore a perfect black three-piece suit without a single wrinkle. Thin black leather gloves. A single silver cufflink shaped like a scythe adorned his right wrist. Looking at his eyes, all I felt was a cold chill sharper than anything my father could ever give me. A faint, instinctual fear that seemed to predate humanity was ringing alarm bells in my head.
And the smell that seemed to waft in the air with his presence. Like old books and formaldehyde, a nauseating but reminiscent scent profile. He adjusted his single cufflink with a deliberate slowness, his eyes focusing on me with the stillness of a corpse. He hasn't even blinked.
"Welcome to the home world of Recruitment Division -1. I am the division head, Cain Verloren."