Pain.
That was the first thing he knew. It wasn't the sharp sting of a wound, but something deeper—like his very being was unraveling thread by thread.
"It hurts!"
"Does it hurt?"
The question didn't come from anywhere. It was inside him, coiling through his thoughts.
"Yes, it hurts!"
Everywhere he looked, he saw darkness.
Where am I? No… more importantly, who am I?
Shapes moved in the black, and a hand reached from the void and touched him. If he didn't know better, he would've thought it was tearing his flesh—it was that kind of pain every time they got close to him.
But the hands didn't truly touch him. They passed through his body, and each time they did, pain bloomed like fire through nerves that no longer existed. He blinked—if blinking was even possible here—and suddenly, he began to perceive the darkness. It wasn't empty. It was alive.
What the hell is happening?
If this was hell, it was far too quiet for it.
Every time a hand crossed him, the pain deepened.
Am I dead? What are these things?
The darkness swelled. Then the ground vanished.
He was falling.
The hands kept reaching, piercing him as he plunged through endless black.
"Stop!" he shouted, voice trembling from agony. "I can't take it anymore!"
But nothing stopped.
"I refuse!" he cried. "I won't die like this!"
Only then did he see it—a fracture of light in the distance, faint but real.
He stopped falling. The hands still reached, still burned through him, but the light held his focus. It was far away, yet it was something. Hope.
So he started running.
Days passed. Or years. Maybe centuries. The pain never faded, the hands never stopped. But he kept moving.
Somewhere in the dark, something clicked. A sound that wasn't his own, echoing once through the void. He didn't know what it was, but it told him time still moved.
Am I getting closer? He wondered after what felt like years.
The light looked the same—small, unreachable. Still, he continued.
"I think I'm getting closer," he said after decades. The light seemed bigger, but the pain also seemed greater.
"Am I really getting closer?" Doubt crept in.
Sometimes he almost stopped. The thought of surrendering whispered to him. How easy it would be to turn back, to fall into the numbness again. Even that dull ache had been better than this endless torment.
But no—he didn't give in.
He ran.
The light was getting bigger. It had to be. He felt it in the rhythm of his pain, in the strain of his will.
And after what felt like hundreds of years, the light finally reached him.
It didn't shine. It devoured.
And as it covered his body, everything ended—pain, darkness, and thought—leaving only motion.
---
Light.
Then sound—faint, distant, mechanical. A rhythm he couldn't place.
He opened his eyes. The black was gone. No, it was midnight, but even that was brighter than the sun compared to the darkness he was in.
In front of him stretched a street lined with yellow lamps, wet asphalt reflecting their glow like molten glass. The air smelled of rain and smoke.
He stood in the middle of the road, barefoot. The pavement was cold, yet he didn't feel the temperature—only the texture of it, as if memory itself described what cold should be.
He turned slowly, scanning the empty intersection. Buildings rose around him—shops with shuttered windows, a bus stop flickering in blue light, posters peeled by the wind.
Where… is this?
The question came out as breathless thought. Then another followed, sharper, heavier.Is this where I lived before I died?Or… where I died?
The words felt wrong. Before I died. As if he were stating a fact he couldn't remember proving.
He tried to recall a name. Nothing came.
A sound interrupted his thoughts—the low hum of an engine. Headlights turned the corner, spilling light across the street.
A car.
Relief flickered through him. Someone could see him. He raised a hand and stepped forward.
"Hey!"
But there was no response. The car kept coming.
He stepped aside. The engine's growl deepened, echoing through the wet air. The headlights grew, blinding. Panic set in. He moved to run—too slow.
He braced himself this time, but nothing hit
The car passed through him.
For a heartbeat, he saw everything inside it: the driver's tired face, the movement of hands on the wheel, the rain streaking across the windshield. Then it was gone, swallowed by distance, leaving only the smell of fuel and the hiss of tires fading away.
He stared down at his hands. They were trembling, translucent. Light bled through his fingers.
"What… am I?"
The words escaped as a whisper, barely audible even to himself.
He looked around again—the city, the lamps, the empty air. Everything was sharp, too sharp, like the world was overexposed.
He took a step. The sound didn't echo.
Another car passed a block away. He watched it move, saw its reflection cross right through his shadow, as if he weren't there at all.
He wasn't breathing. He hadn't been since the light.
That was when the fear came. Not like a rush of blood—there was no pulse, no heartbeat—but like a tightening spiral in his mind. Awareness expanding too quickly, tearing at the edges of reason.
I'm dead.
The thought dropped into him like a stone into water, rippling through everything he understood about existence. He hadn't known it in the darkness. Back there, he'd only felt pain, disorientation, fragments of thought forming out of nothing. No self. No memory.
But now, in this place of wet streets and flickering light, his consciousness was complete—and that made it worse.
He pressed his palms to his face. His fingers passed through.
This can't be real.
He staggered backward, staring at the faint outlines of his translucent hands. Panic rose again, silent and untraceable. No racing breath, no pounding chest—only the growing noise in his head.
He began to run.
Street after street blurred past—empty crosswalks, vending machines glowing behind glass, a stray plastic bag caught in the wind. He looked for something familiar, anything that would tell him who he had been. The names of the stores, the shapes of buildings, none of it sparked recognition.
Nothing. I don't remember anything.
He stopped under a flickering streetlight. Rain began to fall—light, hesitant drops at first, then steadier. Out of habit, he raised an arm to shield himself, searching for shelter. He moved toward an awning, but the moment he stepped beneath it, the water passed through his skin and through the ground below him.
He stared at the droplets slipping through his arms like light through glass. They made no sound. No feeling. Just absence.
I don't even get wet.
His vision blurred. He couldn't tell if it was emotion or disorientation. The more he realized what he had become, the more fractured his thoughts felt—like his mind was trying to fit itself into a shape that no longer existed.
He started moving again without direction, turning corners until he reached a narrow alleyway. Trash bins leaned against the walls, cardboard boxes stacked beside them for shelter.
A man was there.
He was hunched beneath the boxes, wrapped in a stained coat, trying to hide from the rain that no longer touched the ghost watching him. Steam curled from his breath. A plastic bottle rolled beside him, half-empty.
The sight rooted him in place. The first person he'd seen up close since awakening.
Something shifted inside him. His anger, confusion, every scattered thought seemed to fade away, replaced by an unfamiliar calm. His mind felt both fogged and sharpened—his awareness drawn entirely to the man.
What is this?
He took a step forward.
The homeless man didn't react. Didn't even look up.
He took another step. Closer now, close enough to see the man's face—pale, unshaven, eyes half-closed beneath the cardboard roof.
And then he felt it: something beneath his skin, coiling and pulling him forward. Hunger. Not the hollow in the stomach kind—this was deeper, pressing into the center of his being, demanding.
His fingers trembled. His thoughts blurred.
He reached out—then stopped.
"No," he muttered. "No."
The pull intensified, but he forced his body back, stumbling away from the man. The alley twisted behind him as he ran, his own movements leaving faint trails of light in the rain-soaked air.
He didn't know how far he had gone before collapsing against another wall.
"I was going to kill him," he said. His voice sounded distant, echoing from nowhere. "What the hell is happening to me?"
Silence answered him.
He pressed a hand against his stomach out of reflex. Nothing there. No heartbeat, no warmth. Only emptiness.
Then came the realization.
Hunger.
He tried to remember food—bread, meat, anything. He could picture them, faintly, but they meant nothing. No smell, no taste, just colors and shapes that carried no promise of relief.
Instead, the image that came to his mind was the homeless man—the warmth of his body under the boxes, the faint sound of his breath. Then, unbidden, the memory of the car, the two people inside.
He flinched.
"I don't want this," he said, but the words felt weak. The hunger didn't listen. It pulsed quietly, spreading like heat beneath frozen skin.
He lowered his head, trying to steady his thoughts, but the world refused to stay still. The rain blurred the edges of everything, streetlights bending like they were seen through water.
Then he heard voices.
From the mouth of the alley came hurried footsteps. Two men stumbled into the narrow space, their shadows breaking the faint yellow glow from the street. One was panting, stumbling backward. The other followed with a gun raised, its metal slick with rain.
"Give me the money," the armed man hissed. "Now."
The other shook his head, pleading, hands trembling. "I don't have any, I swear—"
"Don't lie to me."
The sound of the gun's hammer clicking echoed down the walls.
And with it, the hunger came back—sharper this time, alive. It pulsed through him like a heartbeat he no longer had.
He froze. His eyes locked on the man with the gun, the warmth radiating from his body like light in the cold.
No. Not again.
But the craving didn't stop. It grew, whispering through his mind with the same voice that had spoken to him in the dark.
Does it hurt?
His fingers dug into the pavement that couldn't feel him.
He could taste it now—not food, not blood, but something deeper.
Life.
And for the first time since awakening, he wasn't sure he could resist.