Darkness was the whole world.
Time had no edges.
Thoughts moved like distant weather—forming, thinning, dissolving—until only one kept circling, thin and terrified:
I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
The words weren't his.
They pressed from every direction, thousands of throats long gone still begging one more breath.
When sight relearned how to be sight, he saw them: gray sparks in the black, drifting as snow drifts.
Not falling, he realized—sinking—all of them sliding toward a light that did not grow so much as wait.
He tried to reach, to steady the nearest motes, to hush the sorrow scraping the dark.
No hands answered him. No legs.
He was a single bead of ash-light among a host, sinking through a cold like the belly of the sea—useless, no matter how fiercely he wanted the crying to stop.
Then the texture changed beneath him.
Deep below, something smoldered: an ember-glow under miles of shadow.
One by one the weeping sparks slipped through an unseen skin and fell farther on, like rain breaking a lake from above.
When his turn came, he passed through too—downward through night's surface—and the void became a current: a vast, slow conduit with pressure for walls and a tide in its gut, drawing all things toward a Gate so immense that distance could not make it small.
Steps spiraled inward there, and beyond them a glow breathed like a furnace behind rock.
On either side, giants of bone leaned from the carved stone—skulls canted, as if listening for names.
Around the stream the Wardens moved—ghost-pale, faces mended wrong—gliding in patient orbits around the drifting lights the way inspectors circle reliquaries.
One reached out and plucked a spark from the flow.
Bruce watched the light struggle in that grip and change—stretching, thickening—until it wore a human outline. A workman's helmet fused to its head; a length of pipe pierced jaw and brain. Its last heartbeat had been branded into shape.
Released, it sank back and joined the slow patrol.
Every soul here carried death as a sigil: burns, fractures, missing pieces, faint wounds that glowed with remembered pain.
They swam in silence, but their mouths formed words Bruce could not hear and somehow knew:
I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
Some brightened with panic and fled.
They streamed toward islands that loomed in the current—mountains of ribs and vertebrae, skulls from every catalog of life. He knew some—human, animal. Others had too many teeth, too few eyes, anchor-curved jaws: remains from no Earth he'd ever been promised.
The Wardens gave chase but never seemed to touch.
The little lights—souls, he understood now—bucked and veered without plan, driven by the oldest reflex: refusal, even here where ending was a completed fact.
But the islands betrayed them.
Bone-mountains sloughed to dust, dragging the souls down as the Wardens closed, clutching with hands that were not hands. Faces froze in the disbelief of the newly damned, and the water shook with the thin, relentless chorus:
I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
From above, still sinking, Bruce read the truth of the tide.
The Wardens wore the centuries like torn uniforms:
—A nurse's cap, brown with old blood.
—A soldier of the first great war, nine tags knocking at his throat, refusing to let his brothers go.
—A carpenter missing a hand, hauling the ghost of a saw.
—A schoolboy with one shoe.
—A woman in rags, mouth fixed around a prayer that never reached the air.
The chant threaded all of them—thin as rain, relentless as gravity.
And then he saw the pattern.
Those who kept moving—who did not clutch or turn back—were left untouched.
The Wardens slid aside for them as reeds part for a river, as if only stillness invited the second drowning.
But where, in all creation, were they going?
Bruce's eyes—if he still had eyes—followed the stream toward the Gate: a mountain of threshold, its light flickering behind pillars of bone and fire. He wanted to believe it was mercy—that beyond the arches waited rest, or a meadow, or some clean word like home.
The longer he gazed, the less it felt like safety.
The glow ceased to be hearth-light and became furnace, breathing behind stone, patient as a mouth that swallows everything it is offered.
Whatever this place was, he understood it.
Judgment knelt at the foot of those stairs. After that there would be no turning back. End of the road. No Frank. No Amber. No stairwell to sprint back up, no door to pound, no second try. He had done what he could and fallen short; now he drifted among the voices he had wanted to help and had been too slow, too weak, too human to save.
The current thickened. The Wardens felt him nearing and turned.
Arms opened like nets. Their faces were a museum of endings—miners and nurses, soldiers and students, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons—each bearing the last wound made permanent. They did not shape themselves like guides. They shaped themselves like a verdict. Their mouths formed the words before the sound reached him.
He looked up into the vaulted black and asked, not for the first time, whether this was all. No more blue air. No green world. No wondering about the country beyond the clouds he'd been teased for imagining. People had laughed when he'd said he wanted to be useful, like Neo or some comic-book paladin. Still—ridiculous or not—he had wanted to try. To do one thing that made the world unclench and smile.
If he could, he would take these sorrowing sparks with him.
He would carry their pain, their sacrifices, their shame and the long, bad weight of their days—whatever it cost. He only wanted to help them, somehow. To set one thing right.
Please, he thought, and the thought went upward like a flare with no flame.
If anything listens here, give me a sign. Let me mend what I failed. Let me change more lives. If this place is real, then a second chance could be real too. Let me take the wrong and the pain and the shame into myself. Give them another turn at morning. Give me the burden. Please. I want to believe in miracles—just once more. I have not earned it. Show me one anyway.
The crack raced across the ceiling of the underworld like a fault in night—and broke.
Down poured a pillar of white—sun-bright, infant-soft—splashing radiance through the corridor. The Wardens recoiled with a hiss like torn silk. From the silted floor a mountain of white flowers heaved itself upward, petals flaring like paper flames—so many, so fast, the bloom made a sound like rain. When Bruce touched them without hands they rose to meet him—an island of softness lifting against the pull. The air—if air belonged to this place—filled with the first scents of a kind world: new snow, cut apple, clean linen in warm light.
Something hovered inside the brilliance—small, haloed.
Wings like down.
Eyes like summer water.
A voice arrived that wanted badly to be thunder and landed nearer to a nap-time whisper:
"B-behold," it breathed, then, after a tiny, valiant cough, "The… the d-d… descents of time are running out."
It paused, glanced as if to someone offstage only it could see, and tried again—braver:
"The hour dr-draws near. H-humanity is… fractured. Not one people. The stars are not empty—others are there, and others beyond them. If you do not grow fast—together—one day they will come and take what is yours. S-so you must become one people, and strong, and… and kind about it—but also fast." The small chest puffed. "Yes. F-fast."
Bruce blinked—if blinking was still a thing he could do. Is this God? It felt like God—and also like God had borrowed someone's cape and tripped on it.
"Okay," Bruce said in his head, carefully. You want world peace… tech… a united human nation? That's… a lot. I'm just— He glanced at his non-hands. —light?
The glow deepened—less theater now, more true.
"I… I c-can't do all the talking," the being admitted, shy. "Not all-knowing. Not all-powerful. I get tired when I make big things, and then I need a nap." (The flowers shivered as though agreeing.) "But I can give you… this."
He reached. The touch wasn't touch; it was warmth deciding.
My child, the small voice said, steadier now, you know the shape of what comes. Change it before the hour runs out. Unite them. Hurry. Please.
A spark crossed from the Godling into Bruce—white as noon, soft as milk. It sank and found his center. His gray brightened—ash to milk, milk to snow, snow to living white—until what beat in him was a heart made of light. Around it, a slim ring drew tight, a shield not separate so much as self. When fear pressed, the ring hummed. When sorrow rose, the heart steadied it. (It would be small at first—a starter flame that grows with use, kindness, and discipline. Yet it was of the same family as suns: a condensed gift of making—healing, mending, life.)
Bruce tried to salute, or bow, or something respectful, and managed only a bright, bewildered yes. Time running out… got it. Move fast. Help people. Don't leave anyone. His mind snapped to stairs and knocking and low-and-go. If time is short, we start now. We move, we—
"Um, not now-now," the Godling squeaked, as if overhearing the plan sprout. "First you have to, uh… become again. S-sorry. It's a process." His voice sank to mystery. "You will go up by going in."
Reborn? Me? The part of Bruce that loved physics raised a doubtful hand; the part older than doubt only wanted to carry.
Below, the current burned like a slow galaxy; the Gate held its breath; the Wardens trembled at the edge of the light—suddenly shy, as if remembering they had once been gentle.
Bruce turned his not-face toward the stream of tiny embers and sent three thoughts like knuckles on a burning door: Keep moving. Don't stop. You're almost there.
The Godling fluttered, pleased. "Good. Good! I, um, have to rest now." A little yawn escaped, too honest to hide. "Be brave. Be kind. And… w-work on your hurrying."
The flowers lifted him higher; the pillar opened like a white throat into day.
Up through the white, through the last thin skin of the old night—
—and darkness again, but a different dark: warm, close, patient. The cold of judgment was gone; this hush had the feel of held breath. Time loosened into long tides. Hands that were not hands turned and tucked him the way a blanket is tucked around a sleeping child.
He became a spark, then a single cell with a white ember at its core. Division. Measure. The quiet mathematics of making. The outline of limbs, the curl of spine, a tiny engine learning its pace beside the light-heart that kept the beat—small, unshowy, waiting to be practiced, lifted, grown.
Somewhere far above—or within—the very small God whispered, already drowsy, "Go f-fix them, okay?"
Bruce reached for a heroic line and managed the mental equivalent of a thumbs-up.
Help them. Move fast. Don't leave anyone.
The light-heart answered—one pulse, two—like a promise.