An unconscious young man floated inside a seemingly infinite dark place. There was absolutely nothing as far as the eye could see, if sight could even exist here. It was similar to what humans 'see' when closing their eyes.
Absolutely nothing
The kind of nothing that swallows thought.
After an uncountable amount of time had passed ,seconds, minutes, years, he couldn't tell ,the man's eyes snapped open. A brief flicker of confusion surfaced in his gaze, before that confusion turned to fear… then to raw, animal terror.
The man kept turning around, desperately searching for something. His head jerked from side to side, his hands were outstretched, grasping for anything at all — warmth, texture, even pain — anything to prove the world hadn't been erased.
It was as if someone had shut off all five of your senses and threw you into the vacuum of space.
This man was Lucien.
He had died in a car accident. The memory wasn't clear, only flashes: the rain-slick road, headlights blooming like flowers of fire, the scream of bending metal. He had been trying to reach his girlfriend's house in time. She was in labour, alone.
As fate would have it, he was hours away from her, with no one to help her. No family. No friends.
Both Lucien's and his girlfriend's parents had abandoned them from the day they were born. The exact reasons were never truly known, though doctors and whispers from estranged relatives believed it was due to the peculiar and unsettling oddities they carried from birth.
Lucien had been born with a black tongue ,not bruised, not diseased, but naturally and unnervingly black, like polished obsidian. Even as an infant, it unsettled those who looked too long.
His girlfriend, Ava, was more startling still. Her skin was so pale that hospital staff believed she wouldn't survive past infancy. And beneath that deathly pallor ran veins the colour of pitch. Black blood, not red. When she was injured, the thick, tar-like liquid would well up, and anyone who saw it would recoil.
Neither of them cried when they were born.
And yet, through some miracle or some cosmic joke, the two cursed souls met.
Life was bearable when they were together. In each other's presence, they were not monsters, not mistakes, but people. They laughed in ways they never could in the company of others. When they were together, the world's cruelty became something they could spit in the face of.
Now, all of that is gone.
After realising he was in absolute darkness, Lucien's breathing sped up. The silence here wasn't simply an absence of sound , it was oppressive, pressing against his eardrums like cold water.
He couldn't hear his own breath. He couldn't hear anything.
His hands clawed at nothing. There was no ground beneath him, yet he did not fall. No sky above, yet he felt the weight of something unseen hanging over him.
It was as though the universe had been wiped clean, and he had been left behind by accident.
Staying in a place like this for too long was not something the human mind was built for. This Lucien was almost sure of.
'Where am I!?' He thought
The question echoed in his skull, but nowhere else.
Images flickered in his mind: the sharp screech of tires, a horn blaring, the crushing impact in his chest and then… this.
The panic burning in his gut was suddenly overtaken by a deeper ache. Not pain from the crash, but from memory. From the thought of her.
Ava.
Her face formed unbidden in his mind. Pale as moonlight, veins like black rivers beneath glass, eyes so deep they seemed to pull him in. When others looked at her, they saw a corpse that refused to rest. When he looked at her, he saw life at its rawest, most defiant.
They had first met under the flickering light of a half-dead convenience store sign. She had been cornered by three boys sneering, drunk, and cruel. Lucien never remembered deciding to step in. He only remembered the dull thud of his fist, the copper taste of blood in his mouth, and the surprised, unreadable expression on her face when the boys scattered.
She hadn't thanked him. She hadn't needed to.
From that night on, they were bound together. Not by romance at first, but by the understanding only outcasts could share. In each other, they found a place to exist. They built a life from scraps, half-paid jobs, stolen moments of happiness, and dreams that the world had no interest in letting them have.
And now she was somewhere he couldn't reach.
Suddenly, he felt something.
A ripple passed through the darkness.
Lucien froze. Something brushed his ankle not air, but something heavier, warmer.
He twisted, but there was still nothing to see. Nothing… except the unmistakable feeling of eyes. Dozens of them.
"Who's there?" His own voice sounded far away, like it was being pulled from his mouth by invisible hands.
The darkness pulsed.
"You should not be here yet" The voice said.
The mere sound of the voice of whatever it was that spoke caused a sharp pain in Lucien's head, nearly causing him to faint
Lucien's pulse quickened as he wondered what exactly the creature was talking about, "Why am I here, where is Ava!?"
"You need not worry, the pale one with the black blood is with you" The creature said
"Wha-"
Suddenly, the darkness folded in on itself. Sight was suddenly given back to Lucien as he saw Ava emerge from nothing. Her skin looked even paler here, as if the void itself was leeching what little warmth she had. He noticed a distinct lack of belly, which confused him but he decided now wasn't the time.
"Lucien?" Her voice was a trembling thing, fragile in the vast silence.
He reached for her without thought, and somehow she was in his arms in the next instant. Her skin was cold, but familiar. The only real thing in this unending dark.
"Two cursed souls. Born wrong. Marked from birth. You were not meant to meet, yet you did. You were not meant to breed, yet you did. This interests us."
Lucien held her tighter. "We don't care what you think. Just send us back."
The voice laughed. It was a brittle, humourless sound, like splintering bone.
"You dont seem to understand, you are dead and there is no back. Only forward. And forward leads through the gates."
The void trembled, and a faint glow appeared in the far distance. As it grew, the blackness began to thin ,not vanish, but peel back like rotting cloth. Shapes emerged: jagged pillars of weathered stone, each carved with symbols that made his teeth ache just to glance at.
The glow revealed massive gates of black iron, their bars twisted like the ribs of some colossal, long-dead creature. Behind them, shadows swelled and writhed, as if the land beyond was alive in ways it shouldn't be.
"Step through, and begin again. Refuse, and drift here until you forget you ever were."
Hearing those words caused Lucien to think. He knew if it was him alone he wouldn't hesitate to step through, the sheer terror he felt when he just woke up and the lack of sensation was terrifying. It was not something he could handle alone.
But with Ava here, he wouldn't mind either choice.
Ava looked towards Lucien, staring directly into his eyes, in just a few moments the both of them nodded at the same time while a smile found its way on their faces.
Together, they walked toward the gates. The iron groaned open, releasing a stench of rot and damp soil that clung to their throats. The air beyond felt thick, and wrong, and full of things watching.
As they stepped across the threshold, the darkness behind them snapped shut like the slamming of a coffin lid.
And so, Lucien and Ava's second lives began , at the threshold of Fear and Hunger.