Afterlife
Then there was nothing.
No pain. No throne. No blood on marble. No sound of Bahamut calling me father with his voice broken open around the word.
Just dark.
Not empty dark. Not sleep. The Astral Sea is too vast, too awake, too full of what should have been forgotten to ever be mistaken for emptiness. It was an endless sky without up or down, a frozen expanse of stars and dead divinity, and I was scattered through it—conscious in ways no soul should be, stretched far past any boundary that should have held.
I do not know how long Null left me there.
I could not count in any way that still meant something. Time in the Astral does not move like it does in mortal lands, and whatever remained of me had been broken too thoroughly to hold measure. There was only floating. Drifting. The long, terrible awareness of myself pulled apart and left in the cold.
I could feel the dead gods around me.
Not living presences. Not voices. Just remnants. Vast, motionless corpses suspended in the silver-black, each one wrapped in the fading residue of whatever they had once ruled. Their memories bled from them in clouds of color and light, nebula-bright and impossible to ignore. I watched fragments of their endings replay over and over again—betrayals, wars, failures, final prayers unanswered. A punishment without a jailer. A theater of ruin performed for no audience but the ruined.
It felt fitting.
There was a part of me that thought I deserved nothing less.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
And yet for all that, I never found my own memories there.
No clouds of my fall. No echo of Tamara’s face. No replay of Bahamut’s grief. Just endless drifting, as if even the Astral had refused to hold my story in a shape I could look at.
Sentence. Penance. Punishment.
I tried different words for it, turning them over in whatever passed for thought while my soul floated in pieces.
Sentence sounded cleaner.
Penance sounded nobler.
Neither changed the cold.
Then, at some point—if “point” still means anything in a place where time rots into stillness—I saw light.
Not starlight. Not the distant, indifferent glitter of the Astral.
Warm light.
At first it was only a thread of it, bleeding through the dark like a wound opening somewhere beyond sight. Then more. Gold and white, bright enough to make the void around it look suddenly thin. I felt it before I understood it. Felt it taking hold of me piece by piece, drawing fragments of myself out of the dark.
I do not know how long that took either.
Maybe years. Maybe centuries. Maybe one breath stretched across an age.
But slowly, impossibly, I began to come back together.
Thought sharpened. Memory returned in shards. I felt the edges of myself knitting into something whole enough to hurt. I felt identity re-form, then pride, then fury, then the cold, quiet knowledge that I was not dead after all.
And then I blinked.