I woke up choking on light.
It wasn't warm or bright in a comforting way—no, it was white, pure and endless and suffocating. My eyes stung the moment I opened them, like I'd been staring at a hospital ceiling for hours. Except this wasn't a ceiling.
There wasn't a ceiling. Or a floor. Or a horizon.
Just white.
And people.
Hundreds—no, thousands—of them.
They stood frozen all around me in perfect grids, each about two steps apart, each trembling, panicking, mouthing silent screams I couldn't hear. Their faces were colorless, washed-out like faded photographs. Everyone was dressed the same way—loose, white clothing that blurred into the world around us.
"Is this heaven?"
"?!" I touched my throat. What a weird feeling. I definitely spoke just now, and yet I couldn't hear any sound come out of my lips.
Is this what being mute feels like?
"What the fuck is going on?" Again with that weird feeling around my throat. It was like an itch I couldn't scratch no matter how hard I tried.
Before I went crazy trying to figure out what was going on, I decided to try and make a sense of my situation first. I noticed two things.
One was that despite everything and everyone else being shades of white, I still had color.
The only color here was me.
When I looked down, my hands were still my hands—tan skin, faint scars, the wristwatch I never took off. Somehow, I was still me. But everyone else looked like ghosts.
Before me, a woman pointed at a man signalling to his skin and I could almost make out the words coming out of her lips.
"Why are you all white?"
And the man responded, "What do you mean?"
"Your skin!" She then said something that appeared to be, "Honey, did you forget that you're black?!"
That brought a chuckle out of me despite the current situation. Okay so, it turns out that we all could still see our own colors, but everybody else is pure white.
"What the hell…" I tried to speak—and again, my own voice didn't come out. Not even a whisper.
Panic hit like a freight train. I stumbled forward, but something invisible stopped me mid-step. My shin slammed against air.
"Urk!" I held my shins in pain.
Another step, and my hand hit the same wall. How odd. There was something here, keeping me trapped. No, it was better to say that I was trapped inside an invisible square, barely two meters wide.
Every other person was, too.
Rows and rows of humans boxed in by nothing, trying to scream, trying to move, some clawing at the invisible walls like animals in cages. Their mouths opened wide, but not a sound reached me. The silence was total—like someone had erased the sound itself.
I banged a fist on my unseen wall. Nothing. No vibration. No echo.
The realization sank in slow: This wasn't a dream.
I slapped my cheek.
Hard.
Twice.
Still white. Still trapped. Still no sound.
Then came the second thing I noticed.
My chest started to tighten. The familiar dizziness began to rise—heart racing, throat closing. Oh no, not now, not here. I tried to reach for my meds, but my pockets were empty. Even my phone was gone.
But then… nothing happened.
No hyperventilating. No shortness of breath. No panic spiral like before.
Just confusion.
"…What the hell?" I whispered—or at least, I thought I did. My lips moved, but no sound came. Still, I could feel my voice, like the world had muted me but kept the vibrations.
I pressed my hand against my chest. My heartbeat was steady. Too steady. Whatever was happening, it was overriding my anxiety entirely.
A little ray of sunshine despite the entirely otherwise fucked-up situation I was in. Another slap to my own face, and I realized truly that this—whatever this was—was realer than reality.
Then the world changed again.
ZOOM!
No sound, but vibrations from the force unravelling before our eyes.
Above us, light began to gather—no, color. A flicker of something red in the distance. It was the first color I'd seen besides myself, and it was growing brighter, burning its way into the white like a sunrise.
"Ugh. . ."
I had to shield my eyes from the brightness before it eventually died down a bit. God, why couldn't I have worn my sunglasses before this entire thing happened?
The crowd turned their blank, colorless faces upward as the red deepened, molten and alive. A circular shape formed, swirling like a miniature sun. The temperature didn't change, but my stomach dropped all the same.
Then came the wings.
Two massive, radiant wings unfurled from the red light—each feather made of shifting glass and fire—and from their center, something looked back.
An eye.
A giant eye.
It blinked once, and the entire space dimmed for a heartbeat before flooding with light again. A slit pupil, black and vertical, cut across its burning iris, and the wings flapped lazily, scattering motes of crimson flame that vanished before touching anyone.
Every hair on my body stood on end.
Someone beside me tried to scream. I couldn't hear them, but their open mouth and shaking shoulders said everything.
The eye's pupil moved in ways no pupil should, rotating, splitting, dilating, and contracting all at once. And then—impossibly—it spoke.