Pain.
Unimaginable, soul-rending pain.
That's the last thing I remember before waking up on a massive, monochrome couch. The sensation still clings to me—phantom agony crawling across every inch of my body like echoes of something that tore deeper than flesh.
That being—he—did something to me.
I can still feel the aftermath humming beneath the surface.
I open my eyes, slowly. My vision's a blur, like I'm underwater. My face throbs. It feels swollen, like it's been through a dozen rounds with a freight train. I try to sit up, or at least glance around.
Nothing's changed.
The same corner office with its stark black-and-white theme. The same ferns by the floor-to-ceiling windows. Even the view outside—floating islands, impossible stars, that endless whirlpool beneath us—it's all still there.
And him.
That thing—that so-called divine being—is sitting at the marble desk, typing away furiously at a laptop like the fate of the multiverse depends on a spreadsheet. His eyes never leave the screen. His fingers are a blur. It's like he's trying to win an argument with God in an email thread.
Then, without even glancing at me, he speaks.
[Name's Sam, by the way. Didn't have time for pleasantries before I had to exorcise your soul like a corrupted file in the cosmic mainframe.]
I tried to sit up straight, wincing slightly. When I did, Sam looked up from his screen and offered a soft, almost apologetic smile.
"How are you feeling?" he asked.
"Better," I replied groggily.
That was a lie.
The moment I glanced down at myself, a surge of primal fear gripped me.
Back during our earlier conversation, I wasn't in my usual body. I had taken on a kind of luminous, featureless form—like a humanoid silhouette made of pure light. It felt strange but oddly comforting. Neither Sam nor I seemed bothered by it.
But now… now the light was gone.
What replaced it was a body that looked like it had been sculpted from crystal-clear glass—fragile, hollow, and horrifying. Every inch was veined with fine fractures. Thousands of hairline cracks ran along my limbs, my torso, my hands… like a porcelain doll seconds from shattering.
I could feel each one of them.
Tiny pulses of pain radiated from every fissure—some dull, some sharp, all real. It felt like I was barely holding myself together.
And the more I stared at the cracks, the more the terror grew. Not fear of death exactly, but something deeper—existential dread, as if I was watching my very being come undone thread by thread.
"S-Sam, what's happening to me?" I asked, my voice unsteady, but calmer than before.
Oddly enough, even though the fear clawing at me was deeper and colder than anything I'd ever known, I wasn't panicking.
In fact… I was surprisingly lucid.
Looking back, I'd been acting pretty unreasonably. Sure, the situation is completely FUBAR—cosmic horror, metaphysical weirdness, and now a body that looks like it belongs in a museum's "Fragile—Do Not Touch" exhibit. But at least I'm not alone. I have someone—something—trying to explain things. That's more than most people in my... condition can probably hope for.
Really, things could've been much worse. I could've woken up in a writhing pit of tentacled void-beasts, in a dimension where geometry bleeds and logic is optional. You know, standard eldritch nightmare fuel.
By comparison, a monochrome office with a god-tier desk jockey isn't so bad. If this is my personal version of the afterlife, then I guess I got the "mildly cursed but manageable" package.
Still, there's something darkly funny about it all—like a patient politely asking their cardiologist about a massive, pulsing tumor growing out of their chest. As if naming it might make it less real.
Upon hearing my question, Sam gave me a sorrowful smile and let out a quiet sigh.
[I suppose I'm partially to blame,] he said gently. [I didn't exactly do a stellar job explaining things last time, did I?]
He leaned back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head, eyes drifting shut for a moment as he spoke. [I've got good news and bad news. Which do you want first?]
I steadied my breath, bracing for impact. "Start with the bad. I need to know."
Sam opened his eyes again, and for the first time, there was a weight behind them—a kind of mourning reserved for ancient truths.
[I'll remind you,] he said, voice low, [that I can read your thoughts. And your analogy, bleak as it was, isn't far off. While you don't have a physical body anymore—so no stage-four cancer in the traditional sense—you are suffering from something far more... foundational.]
He paused, then spoke with grave clarity.
[Your soul is experiencing what we call soul rupturing. In essence, your very being is coming apart at the seams.]
I stayed silent. He had mentioned something about my soul rupturing earlier… Better to let him finish this time.
[You need to understand,] Sam began, his voice calm but deliberate, [what you're experiencing has only occurred twice in all of recorded existence—and both times, it involved divine-class entities. For mortals like yourself, soul rupturing was always a theoretical possibility. No one ever dared—or bothered—to test it.]
He gave me a look that said the rest before he said it. [And for good reason. A mortal soul undergoing this process… well, let's just say the leading theory is total erasure. As in, no afterlife, no rebirth, no echo. Just… gone.]
If I weren't made of cracked glass, I'd have gone paler than the marble desk he was sitting at.
I swallowed whatever passed for breath in this form. "Seeing as you didn't toss me into the cosmic incinerator the moment you saw me, that means I'm still... fixable? Right? Right?"
Sam didn't answer right away. Instead, he silently motioned for me to follow, leading me into a side chamber through a door that hadn't been there a moment before.
What lay beyond defied all conventional understanding.
The room was a vault of horrors and marvels—eldritch entities, grotesque and ancient, suspended in floating glass orbs or bound in place by chains etched with celestial runes. Their writhing forms pulsed against the constraints of elaborate magic circles inscribed into the floor and walls, the geometry of which seemed to shift subtly when I wasn't looking directly at them.
On one side of the chamber stood a sprawling workbench—a curious hybrid between a chemistry lab and an alchemist's atelier. Racks of vials and flasks, each filled with strange luminescent liquids, were meticulously organized. Tubes twisted like vines through metallic and crystal contraptions, each whirring or humming with arcane purpose. A massive cabinet loomed nearby, its transparent drawers neatly packed with herbs that shimmered with inner light and minerals that glowed as if breathing.
Opposite it, an impossibly tall bookshelf was embedded into the wall itself. A miniature library of sorts—though "miniature" only by divine standards. The tomes, scrolls, and grimoires it housed radiated a quiet, ancient intelligence. Letters floated off their pages and reassembled midair in glyphs that hinted at deeper truths—truths I instinctively knew I wasn't ready to comprehend. Merely looking at them stirred a sense of awe, like hearing the echo of a thought the universe once had.
At the center of the room stood an altar—smooth, obsidian-black, yet glowing faintly at its veins. Resting atop it was a glass dome, and within it, two delicate glass statuettes.
One was a blooming flower—graceful, elegant, nearly alive with vibrancy. The other resembled a dragonfly—its wings so thin and intricate that they shimmered like starlight as they beat softly within the dome. Both figures were in motion. Subtle, slow, but undeniably alive.
My breath—or what passed for it—caught.
"This is—?!"
Sam's voice came calmly, effortlessly, like a thought crossing from one eternity to another.
[Souls. Minor ones. Non-sentient.]
He stepped beside the altar, hands clasped behind his back, eyes trained on the dome like an archivist admiring a curiosity.
[The difference between those and you is like the chasm between a shadow and the thing that casts it. A proper explanation would require a decade, three analogical universes, and a whiteboard the size of a star.]
He turned to me then, offering a faint smirk.
[What you should take away from this, however, is simple: as a sentient soul, you cannot reincarnate into anything like that. So rest easy. No demotion into a blade of grass or a gnat for you. You're far too complicated for that kind of downgrade.]