A sterile room held its breath around him.
The air was cold, unnaturally so, pressing against his exposed skin like a quiet accusation. There was no chatter, no distant footsteps, no reassuring murmur of life—only the faint, mechanical hum of a place that existed to keep people alive without ever promising they would be.
He tried to sit up.
His body refused.
The command traveled through his mind with practiced certainty, but his limbs answered with nothing. Not pain—worse. Absence. As if strength itself had abandoned him without farewell. He sank back into the narrow bed, the thin mattress offering no comfort, only confirmation that he was still here.
Where here was, he did not know.
White light bled into his vision from above, too clean, too unforgiving. A hospital room, he realized distantly. The smell of disinfectant lingered in the air, sharp and invasive, stripping the world of warmth. He swallowed, throat dry, and felt the effort drain what little energy he had left.
Fifty-four years old.
The thought came unbidden, heavy with finality. A man long divorced, his marriage reduced to paperwork and silence. Children who no longer called, no longer answered. Connections severed so thoroughly that he could not remember when the last conversation had truly mattered.
He stared at the ceiling, searching it for answers it did not possess.
How had he come here?
No memory surfaced. No accident, no warning pain, no dramatic collapse—only this hollow present. He could not tell if this bed was a temporary stop on the road back to life or the last station before it ended. The machines offered no reassurance. The room gave no signs.
For the first time in years, stripped of routine and obligation, Thomas wondered—quietly, fearfully—whether this was how it ended.
Not with noise or regret.
He closed his eyes.
Pitch darkness swallowed him whole, immediate and absolute, as though the world had been extinguished the moment his lids fell shut. No light lingered behind them. No shapes. No echoes. Just an endless, suffocating black.
One thought surfaced, slow and unguarded, drifting through the void of his mind.
So this is it.
Suddenly, the darkness fractured.
Memories began to flash before him, not gently, not in order, but violently—like a reel of film torn from its frame and forced to play all at once. He was no longer lying in the void. He was watching.
His first cry tore through the silence, raw and helpless. A red-faced infant in trembling arms. Then childhood laughter, fleeting and fragile, swallowed almost immediately by years that blurred together too quickly to grasp.
His first heartbreak followed—young, naïve, devastating in the way only a first loss could be. The look on her face as she walked away lingered longer than it should have. Then the job. The one that was supposed to secure everything. The one that slowly, quietly tore his family apart. Late nights. Missed calls. Empty chairs at the table.
The memories did not slow.
His marriage surfaced next, bright and cruel in its contrast. Vows spoken with certainty. Smiles that had once been genuine. He watched it unravel frame by frame—arguments, silences, doors closing harder each time. The divorce papers appeared without ceremony, final and cold, stripping years down to signatures and dates.
It felt as though death itself was mocking him, parading the lowest points of his life before him with deliberate precision. Every mistake. Every absence. Every moment where he had chosen wrong—or not chosen at all.
At least it wasn't all misery, he thought desperately.
One memory pushed forward, warm and painfully vivid. The day he married her. The light in her eyes. The way her hand had squeezed his, as if the future was something they could face together. It had ended horribly—yes—but that day had still been one of the happiest of his life.
The thought barely finished forming before everything collapsed.
All the memories rushed him at once.
Joy, regret, love, loss—crashing together in a single, overwhelming torrent. His mind buckled under the weight, senses drowning in a lifetime compressed into seconds. There was no escape, no order, no mercy.
Only the crushing realization that even now—at the very end—his life refused to let him rest.
He gasped and bolted upright.
Air tore into his lungs as though he had been drowning, his chest heaving violently, sweat clinging to his skin. For a moment, instinct screamed hospital—machines, sterile light, the quiet threat of finality—but the sensation beneath him was wrong.
The bed was enormous.
Heavy fabrics pooled around his legs, the mattress far too soft, far too indulgent, yielding beneath his weight like something meant for comfort rather than survival. His pulse thundered in his ears, strong and frantic in a way it had not been in decades.
Slowly, cautiously, he turned his head.
Deep crimson curtains framed tall windows, their thick folds filtering the early morning light into a muted, wine-colored glow. Above him, a canopy arched overhead, its fabric embroidered with gold-threaded patterns that caught the light faintly, almost reverently.
This was not the hospital.
This was not any place he recognized.
His heart pounded harder at the realization—not weak, not irregular, but powerful. Alive. Too alive.
He lifted his hands, expecting age-spotted skin, trembling fingers, the familiar stiffness of joints that protested every movement. Instead, smooth skin met his gaze. Long, steady fingers. Unmarked. No scars. No discoloration. No pain waiting beneath the surface.
He flexed them slowly.
Tendons shifted beneath flesh that had not yet learned how to ache.
"No," he whispered.
The voice that answered him was wrong—unfamiliar. Lower than a child's, higher than a man's. It cracked faintly at the end, betraying its youth.
He slid from the bed, his bare feet sinking into a thick rug woven with intricate, deliberate patterns. The room was undeniably expensive, every piece of furniture placed with intention rather than excess. Nothing was cluttered. Nothing felt random.
Along one wall, shelves rose neatly toward the ceiling, packed with leather-bound books whose spines bore titles he could not yet read—but somehow knew did not belong to his world.
And standing there, breathing hard in a body that was not his, Thomas understood one terrifying truth.
Whatever awaited him in the darkness… had not been death.