He remembered dying.

  The pain. The silence. The cold inevitability of it.

  No last words. No noble exit. Just the long fall into something black and final.

  How strange it was–to be both nothing and something at the same time.

  He didn’t remember what killed him. Only that it had been… inevitable, utterly inescapable.

  It had the distinct taste of defeat under insurmountable odds. Of raging against the undefeatable.

  Like gravity. Like consequence. Like a natural law.

  And yet–he woke.

  His name was Archibald Alden. He remembered that much.

  The first thing he felt wasn’t clarity or pain.

  It was an unquenchable thirst.

  A blazing fire that seemed to consume him inside out.

  And in that fire he felt fragments of who he once was.

  He remembered the shape of ambition.

  The taste of defiance.

  The devouring hunger to be more than the world would allow.

  He remembered the bitterness of death. He remembered the struggle.

  …But not his parents’ faces.

  Not how they died.

  Not the feeling of love when he was knocked down.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  Not the touch of a lover in soft and quiet hours.

  Not the faded laughter of a friend long gone.

  Not the smell of rain washing away the world’s sins.

  Not what came after Earth fell—only that it did.

  That it cost him everything he once knew.

  That it left him utterly and wholly fragmented.

  Even before he awoke he knew it. He felt it in his being.

  There was a gap in him.

  A deep, gnawing absence where something used to be.

  And in that place…

  something else had taken root.

  He knew it to be a truth. As true as the fact that he died.

  It didn’t speak

  But it pulsed.

  Faintly. Quietly. Like a second heartbeat.

  A hum beneath thought. A whisper behind the mind’s eye.

  He didn’t know what it was.

  Only that it had followed him from the dark and that he could feel once more.

  The first thing he felt?

  Cold.

  He opened his eyes.

  Discordant yelling.

  Pale white light.

  They bathed him beneath waves of unintelligible information.

  The world was wrong.

  Or maybe it was him.