Sebastian Edward was dying. He'd been shot twice by his own father. The culprit, Sebastian Fischer, had followed him all the way into the alley and pulled the trigger twice on his own son.
They had an argument, which was more or less a violent exchange of words. His father, Fischer, had blamed him for the deaths of his sister and his mother. But the problem was, he never even had a sister. His mother died in a car accident years ago, so how exactly was that his fault?.
Edward, still only eighteen, believed his father had begun losing his mind and ran away from home. His father had attempted to stab him with a knife . The idea of dying sent shivers down his spine. Staying with his now "mentally unstable" father was not an option.
He intended to pretend to be insane and hole up in a psychiatric ward for as long as possible. That was one of the better options he had.
It was already past eleven at night, so casually strolling around wasn't exactly a good idea. With the heavy downpour, if anything dangerous were to happen, no one would hear anything, much less come to his aid.
He turned into an alleyway and heard a loud sound go off. A sharp sensation drilled through his body as he went down to the floor. He could barely move. A somewhat large silhouette stood over him and pointed a gun at his body.
"Ah, it's you. If you wanted to kill me so badly, you could have done it while I was asleep".
The person showed no signs of replying.
"Wait, how could you even afford a gun?" Edward made a pathetic attempt to laugh, but the person pulled the trigger again, aiming for his intestines this time.
The person standing over him was his own father, Sebastian Fischer.
His father left immediately after the second shot, leaving Edward to his demise.
Edward was going to die. No one was going to find his body in time to save him. He didn't believe in heaven or hell. He didn't believe in the afterlife or purgatory. To Edward, once a person died, they simply stopped existing. That was why the idea of death was always terrifying to him. He couldn't fully accept the reality that he would no longer exist. To him, ideas of life after death were just convenient ways humans used to cope with the reality of what death truly is: a state of nonexistence.
"What... I'm actually dying..."
He was afraid—terrified of death. He could no longer move any part of his body, and he felt his vision getting dimmer.
The excruciating pain could barely let him think.
In the last seconds of his life, tears dribbled down his eyes.
" I was wrong. Maybe this world is actually ugly."
Tuesday, 21st April 2018 — Edward Sebastian died.
…
Huh? I'm alive? Wait, was that a dream?
He touched the place the bullet had pierced his body and there was not even a sign of an injury. Something felt wrong,he quickly realized that his body was smaller,his hands as tiny as that of a six year old.
He used his hands to feel over his face and regained some composure. He'd been living in this body for the past six years.
He laughed out loudly "i'm alive! Hahaha!!!".
Hearing the squeakish childish sound of his own voice,he burst out laughing again.
He was now a six year old boy rolling around hysterically on the floor.
"Perhaps this is reincarnation? No it's safe to say this is the after life?
He didn't believe in heaven or hell or any sort of existence after death for that matter. To him, life after death wasn't possible.He believed that for that to happen—for any sort of survival after death to occur—it would require the existence of the human soul. And as far as he was concerned, there was no evidence of such a thing existing or ever having existed.
"It doesn't matter now, does it? The proof of it is here. I'm still alive, aren't I? So humans do have a soul. Intriguing."
In that moment, he cast aside the beliefs he had held onto his entire life. He internally apologized to all the people he had tagged as fools for suggesting something as "stupid" as a separate existence outside the human body. He chuckled to himself again. He was clearly the foolish one here. And he was now living proof of that.
He tried dashing outside on his tiny legs but stopped instantly. If he attempted going at that pace he knew he was going to roll himself over, he could only imagine the consequences that type of fall would have on his delicate body.
He stopped at the door and turned back to admire the house he was in . It was nothing special, it looked like a giant plain box with one room in it but he didn't care.
"How simplistic, what's this? the thirteen hundreds?"
He opened the door and inhaled the air outside.
He looked at the hundreds of people passing by and smiled to himself.
"How beautiful, this really is heaven".
"Wait, maybe this is just my life flashing before me before I die, I did have a good imagination after all".
He did something he shouldn't have done,he picked up a small stone and threw it at the man in front of him.
He turned his head angrily, and began walking towards him .
"People should really keep their kids on a leash"
"uh oh" he'd begun to realize the severity of what he'd done. He'd seen that look hundreds of times, that man was coming over to enact physical violence. If he got hit by a man built like that he would probably die for real.
A woman appeared to block the advancing man.
"Please" , she bowed her head. "He didn't intend to do that, pass on your punishment to me instead"
"What the.."
"Fine". His clenched first ran through her face before she could even raise her head. Instantly sending her to the floor.
He spat on her body and went on his way.
"You should be more careful Lucius". She forced herself to whisper from the ground while smiling.
"Lucius? I remember now, that's my name".
Lucius was frozen with shock,not because of the brute from a few seconds back but because of the apparition in front of him.
She got up and touched his face. "I suppose you were lonely inside".
"Mom?mom?"
The person in front of him was his dead mother,or more accurately a perfect replica of his mother from her younger days.
Counting backwards from the day he died it had been five years since he'd seen her. He remembered her funeral like it was yesterday, he'd seen her corpse when she was declared dead, he'd watched them lower her into a coffin. So then what exactly was this?
Well it was clearly not the after life.
She hugged him tightly with tears running down her eyes. "You've finally spoken".
A fourth possibility rose in his mind...
"Was all of that just a dream?"
...
" Are these my memories or the memories of the person known as Sebastian Edward?"
That would have explained the reason why he was looking at an alive version of his mother.
But those thoughts vanished as quickly as they came. He remembered it—the last few seconds of his life, the feeling of wanting something sweet, the pain in his body, the blur in his vision. He remembered what it felt like to die.
This was not something he could simply forget or pass off as someone else's memory. It was the experience of death.
Death itself wasn't exactly painful. It was like a state of sleep. One would not know what happened around them while asleep; death was like that as well.
The pain stemmed from the physical torture that robbed your body of its normal functions—your own
consciousness watching yourself drift into the abyss, the psychological horror of seeing life slowly escape your body and knowing that, in a few moments, you would no longer exist.
If hell existed, that would probably be it.
It was this hell Edward Sebastian, now reborn as Lucius Callisto, had experienced.
That was how he knew. Six years ago, in some other world, he had lost his life and had somehow been reincarnated.