The first thing I felt was the cold.
It wasn't the gentle chill of autumn mornings or the biting frost of winter. This was something else entirely.
It was the cold of absence, of something vital being carved out of the world and leaving only hollow space behind.
It pressed against my skin, my bones, the very essence of whatever I was now, and it whispered promises I couldn't understand in a voice like stars dying.
I should have been terrified.
But terror requires a body to feel it, and I wasn't sure I had one of those anymore.
The last thing I remembered was light, blinding, impossible light that swallowed everything.
I'd been somewhere mundane, doing something forgettable, and then the world had simply... ended. No pain. No dramatic final thoughts.
Just light, and then this, this floating awareness in a void that tasted of copper and forgotten dreams.
"Interesting," a voice said.
It didn't come from anywhere. It simply existed, resonating through whatever passed for my consciousness in this place.
The voice was neither male nor female, young nor old.
It was the sound of questions without answers, of doors opening into rooms that shouldn't exist.
"Most souls scream," the voice continued, almost conversational. "Or beg. Or try to bargain with concepts they don't understand. You are simply... observing."
I tried to speak, but I had no mouth.
I tried to think clearly, but my thoughts kept sliding away from me, slipping into corners of my mind I couldn't quite reach.
There was something important I was forgetting, something about who I'd been, what I'd done, why any of it mattered.
"You died poorly," the voice said, and there was something almost like pity in it.
"A life of quiet desperation, ended by quiet accident. No glory. No meaning. Just... cessation."
I wanted to be angry, but the cold had seeped into everything, numbing even my sense of self.
The voice was right. I knew it was right. I'd been nothing in life, a background character in my own story, and now I was nothing in death, too.
"But potential is not the same as achievement," the voice said, and now there was something else in its tone.
Interest? Hunger? "Your soul carries patterns. Resonances. Possibilities that were never explored."
Something shifted in the void.
The cold receded, just slightly, and in its place I felt... warmth? No, not warmth. Potential.
The sense that something could be different, if only I was willing to pay the price.
"A world exists where your patterns would flourish," the voice whispered, and now it seemed to come from everywhere at once, pressing against the edges of my awareness.
"A place of power and peril, where the weak are devoured and the strong carve their names into the fabric of reality itself. You would not remember me. You would not remember this conversation. But you would remember enough to be... different."
I should have asked questions.
I should have demanded to know what price I would pay, what rules would bind me, what horrors awaited in this world of power and peril.
But I was dead, and the dead have nothing left to lose.
"Yes," I thought, or maybe I said, or maybe the void simply understood my intention and translated it into meaning.
"Yes, I'll go."
The voice didn't laugh. It didn't congratulate me or warn me or offer any final wisdom.
It simply said, "Then drown, little soul. Drown and be reborn."
And the void filled with water.
Not metaphorical water, not symbolic water, real, physical, undeniable water that flooded into my nonexistent lungs and burned with the desperate urgency of survival.
I thrashed against it, fought against it, felt my sense of self dissolving like sugar in rain.
I was drowning.
I was dying.
I was screaming.
The sound that tore from my throat was wrong, too high, too raw, too desperate.
I tried to form words, to demand answers, to do anything except make that pathetic wailing noise, but my body wouldn't obey me.
My arms flailed uselessly. My legs kicked at nothing. My eyes burned with the harsh brightness of a world I didn't recognize.
"It's a boy," someone said, and their voice was warm and exhausted and impossibly, beautifully human.
"Thorne, it's a boy."
Gentle hands lifted me, wrapped me in something soft, pressed me against a heartbeat that thundered with life and love and relief.
I tried to speak again, to explain that something had gone wrong, that I wasn't supposed to be here, that I remembered things I shouldn't remember.
But all that came out was another wail.
And in the corner of my vision, in the shadows that gathered where the candlelight couldn't reach, something watched me with eyes that held the memory of stars.
I closed my eyes and pretended I hadn't seen it.
Some things, I was already learning, were better left unacknowledged.
Welcome to my second life.
Try not to drown in it.