Got it ✅
I'll now craft the full-length Chapter 1: Prologue (around 1300 words) —
• POV: First-person (Raven)
• Tone: Emotional, cinematic, introspective
• Pacing: Slow and immersive
• Emotional core:
Chapter 1: Prologue
I always wondered if life was supposed to feel like this—
like a game you've already played too many times, but you still log in every morning because… what else are you going to do?
The city around me pulsed with movement, alive in a way I never could be. Cars hissed over the wet asphalt, their tires slicing through puddles left by last night's half-hearted rain. People rushed past—heads down, eyes fixed on invisible deadlines. A woman in a gray suit whispered into her phone, her expression carved in stress. A group of students laughed too loudly, their uniforms wrinkled, their laughter genuine. Even that sound felt foreign to me now, like something from another lifetime.
I sat there at the bus stop, earbuds in, music playing low enough to drown the noise but not my thoughts. My reflection in the glass shelter stared back: same tired face, same lifeless eyes.
"Five stars for graphics," I muttered under my breath, "zero for gameplay."
A sigh escaped before I even realized it. This world was beautiful—I couldn't deny that. The sunlight scattered like liquid gold between skyscrapers, the clouds floated like slow-moving dreams, even the smell of coffee from the café across the street had that oddly cinematic quality. But beauty alone doesn't save you from boredom. Not when every day feels like a rerun.
I checked the time.
8:47 a.m.
Damn.
"Crap, I'm late again."
My heart jumped as I sprang up. The bus I usually took had just whooshed past, splattering muddy water across my pant leg like it was mocking me. Great. Just perfect.
I started running. My backpack bounced against my shoulder, the strap cutting into my skin, and I weaved through the human river flowing down the street. Everyone was in a hurry—same destination, different prisons. The smell of exhaust mixed with roasted peanuts from a street cart. Somewhere, a construction drill screamed. My lungs burned, but I kept running.
"This stupid job," I muttered, half out of breath. "One day I'm gonna die from overwork. They'll find me slumped over my desk, Excel sheet open, and my boss will probably just send a condolence email before assigning my projects to someone else."
I laughed, but it came out hollow. The world didn't care about my sarcasm. It kept moving.
The crowd thickened as I neared the main crossing. Hundreds of us waited for the pedestrian light, the hum of the city pressing in from all sides. I felt small—just another cell in this colossal organism called civilization.
I thought of my boss again, the man with a permanent frown and a coffee mug that said "No excuses." He'd probably lecture me for being three minutes late, again. He'd remind me how "consistency defines reliability," like he was some philosopher instead of a mid-level manager with a superiority complex.
"Consistency defines exhaustion," I muttered.
The light turned green. The crowd surged forward, and I let myself be carried by it, like driftwood on a current. A thousand footsteps echoed around me. Shoes clacked, horns blared, voices overlapped—a symphony of human monotony.
And yet, somewhere deep down, I felt detached from it all. Like I was watching a film I'd already seen a dozen times. The faces around me blurred. The sounds dulled. My heartbeat slowed. For a fleeting second, I thought—
Is this all there is?
Then the world stopped.
Literally.
The man walking beside me froze mid-step, his right foot hovering above the ground. A paper cup in someone's hand hung motionless in mid-air, coffee suspended like brown glass. The traffic lights still glowed, but the cars beneath them didn't move. The sound cut off—not faded, cut. It was as if someone had taken the entire city and pressed pause.
I blinked, expecting my eyes to adjust, but nothing changed. I tried to move, but my limbs refused to listen. My breath halted in my chest—not because I wanted it to, but because I couldn't breathe. Panic surged like electricity through my veins.
What's happening?
Only my mind seemed awake, trapped inside a frozen shell. I wanted to scream, but even that impulse felt distant, locked behind invisible glass. My body remained a statue among statues.
Then I saw it.
The air ahead shimmered—just faintly at first, like heat rising off asphalt. Then it fractured. A hairline crack formed in the empty space above the crosswalk, splitting the world open with a soundless ripple. I couldn't move, but I felt it—an instinctual dread that clawed at my soul.
The crack widened, fragments of reality breaking away like shards of glass floating in slow motion. Behind the fracture, there was… nothing. Not darkness, not emptiness—something worse. A void so complete it felt alive.
My heart—or whatever part of me still worked—pounded in terror. I could feel the pull now, a tug from that hole in the world, gentle at first, then stronger. It wasn't physical—it was deeper, something that reached inside me and grabbed hold of whatever made me me.
No…
The pull intensified. I wanted to resist, to fight, but I had no control. It felt like invisible threads connecting my soul to that black hole were tightening, dragging me closer. My consciousness trembled, stretched thin like a string about to snap.
A thousand thoughts flashed at once—memories, regrets, flashes of laughter, mundane mornings, late-night snacks, the glow of my computer screen, the smell of rain, my mother's smile. All of it slipping away like sand through fingers.
I wanted to hold onto something—anything. But the world itself was slipping.
And then—nothing.
---
When my eyes opened again, everything was bright. Too bright. My senses screamed in confusion. The pull stopped, and the crack in space sealed shut with a silent flicker, as if it had never existed.
The sound returned—honks, footsteps, chatter—but I wasn't part of it anymore.
Because my body lay on the ground.
I watched—or maybe felt—as it crumpled onto the pavement, eyes open, expression frozen mid-shock. People around me gasped, some stepping closer, some turning away. Someone shouted for help. Another person crouched, pressing their fingers to my neck.
"Call an ambulance!" a voice cried.
But I already knew.
They wouldn't find a pulse.
No one noticed the truth—that for a brief second, time itself had stopped, that reality had cracked like brittle glass, that something had taken me. To them, I was just another name in tomorrow's newsfeed: Office worker collapses suddenly in city center.
The crowd swelled. The traffic light changed. Life moved on.
And as the last thread of awareness slipped away from what was once me, I felt an odd calm.
Maybe… this was what I had been waiting for without knowing it.
An end to monotony.
A reset.
A chance—
—to be reborn.