Chapter 106: I'm dead? Well... That's new.

They say that when you die your mind flares in one desperate attempt to latch onto consciousness and you see a sort of highlight reel of your life. I can assure you that whoever came up with that piece of information has never been through the experience of death themselves, because at the very least it is not what happened to me. 

The van hit me at what was likely close to a hundred miles an hour. As expected, the human body doesn't react well to those sorts of speeds and I was flung like a rag doll through the air until I bounced, cracked my head off the tarmac, and likely slid several feet. That first hit onto the ground was what did me in. Immediate unconsciousness followed. Well, I say unconsciousness, that was just what it felt like for the first few moments. Sort of like that in-between state when you are almost awake but not quite awake. Then I started to feel things again. There wasn't pain like you would expect after being hit by a fast moving vehicle. The uneasiness in my stomach had also subsided entirely, and that heartbreak I felt had disappeared too. But it still felt like I had a body, and although my surroundings were completely black and had no discernable light source I could still see my body, which was both naked and curiously undamaged. Not even the ugly bruise from Saturday's night out was there. 

An inky black shape shifted in the darkness. It was a dark that was darker than the dark around me. A pure black, a void so deep that it would likely drive someone insane if they looked at it for too long. It drew closer, and I could distinctly make out what looked like a velvety hooded figure. 

"Well, that's odd," the figure said, its voice seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. "I was sent to collect the soul of a small girl and yet.. Here is a fully grown adult male… most peculiar indeed."

"Collect… the soul?" I asked, my voice echoing around the blackness and my mind reeling at the implications. 

"Hmmm, a fully conscious adult male who is able to generate enough will to talk in the void, now that is even more peculiar," the voice continued, curiosity obvious in its tone. 

The darker than dark shape surged forward until it filled my vision entirely. The thing was immense. Stretching up for what seemed like an eternity, and as wide as anything I had seen before, the shape of a colossal hooded man. For a moment the scale of it all robbed me off speech, robbed me of even thought, as I tried to comprehend the unspeakable horror that had materialised before me. 

"What… Where…" I stammered, unable to form a coherent sentence. 

"Oh my my, come on you can do better than that… and in truth it is I that should be asking you those questions little human. How did you come to be here, and what did you do with my charge?" It pondered, the questions sounded almost rhetorical, and considering the unbridled fear that was racing through me I doubt I would have been able to answer anyway. "No? You can't muster the will to speak again? No matter, I don't need your words to tell me what has gone wrong."

A smaller blotch of the inky darkness detached from the larger whole and flew through the void toward me. I did what anyone would do in that situation, I dived out of the way. I felt a surge of annoyance from the being, as if it had been offended or surprised by my action, or rather even my ability to act. Then I felt the blotch strike me in the back of the head. 

I was brought back to the moment it happened. The moment I stopped at the zebra crossing. The moment I heard the sirens. The moment I saw the kid walking across the street. The moment of impact. The moment I hit the ground. The moment the light in my eyes faded and I was erased from that world forever. Then I was back in the void, a place where moments seemed to have no meaning anymore. 

"Craig Lyre, date of birth the third of december nineteen-ninety-four, date of arranged death the fifteenth of august twenty-fifty-three. Those are what your numbers are supposed to be, what your file would read if I were to search it up back at headquarters. Yet here you are, your body deceased and your soul ready and waiting to cross the Veil to The Maw. This should not be. You should not be dead, Craig Lyre," the void creature said, seemingly to itself. 

"I'm dead?" I said, also to myself, "Well that's new." 

I felt amusement from the creature, amusement that once more quickly returned to being puzzled and rather annoyed. "You have died almost forty years too early, Craig Lyre, and for that I am truly apologetic," it said. "I can assure you that this sort of thing does not happen often, and that when it does we try to offer reparations in any way that we can before you inevitably join the rest of your race in the chasm of The Maw."

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I began to feel a little overwhelmed. In the space of only a few minutes I had died, been transported to what a massive void being described as the Veil, found out that I shouldn't have died at all, and had also seemingly been told that all human souls ended up in something called The Maw. 

"What do you mean by reparations?" I asked, swallowing my fear and my confusion. I needed to piece things together, use that logical thought Sophie had always gone on about. 

"Before you enter The Maw," the creature began, "You must live a full and meaningful life. While your life was, on average… well just average really, you didn't really achieve anything bar the heroism that landed you into this situation. In most cases, when someone lives a life unfulfilled, we allow reincarnation into their own world. But when reparations have to be made in these rare situations we… well we push the boat out a little."

"What does that even mean?" I asked, my patience with this otherworldly creature growing steadily thinner. 

"You will be given the opportunity to exist on another plane. Join another world as if it were your own, and also to retain the memories of your life in the dimension you just left. I will drop you into a new world, one where you can succeed and prosper in ways that will fulfill you, so that eventually you too may join your species in The Maw," the creature explained, once again overwhelming me. 

"You keep mentioning this maw thing, what are you talking about?" I asked. 

"Very well, as in accordance with the reparations I am forced to answer all questions you see fit to direct at me. What you learn now no mortal before has discovered, so steel yourself against the truth Craig Lyre, lest it turn you mad," the creature warned, though in truth I wondered how I wasn't mad already. "The Maw is the great well at the bottom of all dimensions. The being that holds the multiverse to the law and order of death. It consumes the souls of those who have lived a worthwhile life, and with the energy it gains from those souls it keeps the multiverse stitched together, afloat in the endless turmoil of the void." 

The souls of dead people were fed to a giant unthinkable horror at the bottom of the multiverse. That was what this giant creature had essentially said. The human soul was an immortal thing just as religions across the globe said, but you didn't go to heaven or hell, you were shoved inside the equivalent of a deity so it could absorb your energies and give life to the rest of the multiverse. The human soul, the very essence of what made a living being alive, was reduced to mere fuel. It sickened me, and I am sure that if I was a body and not just an ethereal figure standing in the middle of infinite nothingness I would have been sick. As it was I swallowed heavily and took a deep breath. 

"Think I'm going to file that revelation under freak out later," I muttered, and felt another surge of amusement from the creature before me, "you said that you were going to send me to another plane of existence, another dimension, so that I could live a fulfilling life. Where exactly are you sending me?"

"I will be sending you to a realm where you can thrive to your absolute potential. In a sense, this will be a realm where your wildest dreams come true. The multiverse is an interesting web of reality. While it is powered by The Maw the many realities themselves are formed by one another. Every dream any sentient being has ever had, every thought or whimsical idea, splinters the very core of infinity, and molds it in ways that not I, nor any of the Maw's envoys, could possibly understand. Sentience forges the fabric of reality, reflections upon reflections up an ever branching and ever more intricate chain of existence. You shall be given the life of your most powerful desires, you will be sent to explore the stars."

"The stars? What do you mean I will be sent to explore the stars? I'm hardly an astronaut," I scoffed, out of all the fantastical and horrific things this beast had explained, it was finally starting to sound like the thing itself was mad. 

"Now now Craig Lyre, spoilers."

With that the darkness began to fade away into a darker form still, inky black upon inky black oppressively surrounded me until I passed into the bliss of unconsciousness.

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