The transition from Hell to Heaven was always abrupt, a violent shift that never gave the mind enough time to prepare.
One moment there was cold—absolute and invasive, a suffocating presence that pressed into bone, into thought, into identity itself—and the next there was light.
Not warmth, not comfort, but light in its purest, most deliberate form. It was structured, ordered, controlled, as if every particle had been assigned a purpose and placed exactly where it belonged.
Atlas stepped through the gate first, his movement steady, unaffected by the transition. The platform beneath his boots was smooth white stone, its surface veined with faint threads of gold that pulsed softly, like a system quietly alive beneath the surface.
Above, the sky stretched endlessly, a pale and constant brilliance that never dimmed and never shifted, as though time itself had been denied permission to touch it.
