Chapter One: The Quiet Before the Sirens
Dr. Elias Marek never believed in the soul. He believed in vital signs, clear CT scans, and post-operative reports. Souls didn't bleed out on the table. Patients did.
Tonight, the hospital's halls were quieter than usual, the fluorescent lights overhead flickering like hesitant thoughts. Elias walked briskly to the parking lot, his coat flapping behind him like a specter. He didn't look back at Room 317—the one that now held a cooling body and a family sobbing into each other's arms.
A dosage missed. A monitor silenced. A moment of distraction.
He told himself it was the nurse's fault. Told himself the patient had been old, failing anyway. But even as he slipped into his car and turned the ignition, something in the air changed. The silence deepened. The world exhaled.
And then—metal shrieked.
Headlights. Tires screaming. Glass like a thousand stars exploding around him. And then—
Nothing.
---
He awoke not to pain, but to stillness.
No sound. No air. No heartbeat. The world was ink-black—yet he could see.
He stood on a vast, grey shore stretching endlessly in both directions. Above him, a sky of unmoving storm clouds. Beneath his feet, ash instead of sand.
"Dr. Elias Marek," came a voice like dry leaves rustling over a grave.
He turned. A figure emerged from the mist—tall, cloaked, faceless, draped in strips of shadow that seemed to whisper secrets. A scythe hung lazily across its back—not ornate, but ancient and rusted. Its eyes were absent, yet Elias felt them reading every corner of his soul.
"I am the First Veiled. You stand at the threshold of The Weighing Grounds."
Elias blinked. "Is this a dream?"
The figure didn't answer. Instead, it raised a pale, skeletal hand. A doorway shimmered into existence—a gate made of mirrors that pulsed with a dull, sickly light.
"You have died," the Veiled intoned. "And for the life you lived, you must now face Seven Stages of Judgment. You will be seen. You will be known. And you will pay."
Before Elias could protest, the gates opened—and he was pulled in.
Stage One: The Mirror Hall
Elias stumbled forward as the mirrored gate closed behind him with a whispering groan.
He stood in a long corridor—walls, ceiling, and floor made entirely of cracked, distorted mirrors. They didn't reflect him as he was, but as he had been: younger, older, smiling, cruel, indifferent. Some showed moments he'd long buried—cutting corners during surgery, walking away from pleading patients, falsifying a chart to cover a mistake.
His breath caught.
The Veiled appeared beside him without sound. "This is the Mirror Hall," it said. "Here, truth will not hide behind memory. Here, you see what you truly are."
The mirrors began to move.
Each one became a window—flashing like fragments of film:
– The patient in Room 317, gasping for help, alarm muted.
– A crying mother begging him to recheck her child's chart—he waved her off.
– The intern he humiliated into silence.
– The first patient he lost and felt… nothing.
"No," Elias muttered, turning away. But every step forward brought new mirrors, harsher images. The faces of the dead. The lives he broke through indifference.
And then—the mirrors began to bleed.
Red rivulets traced down the glass, hissing where they touched the floor. The scent of iron and guilt filled the air.
From one mirror stepped a woman in a hospital gown. Her skin was grey. Her eyes were empty. She was the patient from Room 317.
"You didn't even remember my name," she said.
Elias backed away. "I—I didn't mean to—"
"You chose not to care," she said.
Her mouth split open, impossibly wide, letting out a scream that shattered the nearest mirror. Glass sliced across Elias's arms and face. He cried out—but there was no blood. Only light pouring from his wounds, as if his soul was leaking.
"You will face them all," said the Veiled. "Every choice. Every consequence."
The hall twisted. Now there were a hundred reflections—all of Elias. Not the man he imagined himself to be, but the one he became when no one was looking.
And they all stared back in silence.
As the figures reached for him, their hands passed through his chest. With each touch, Elias's spine arched in silent agony. Not physical pain—but shame, guilt, recognition.
The Mirror Hall faded behind him, yet its weight clung to him like frost.
"You have seen the first veil," said the Veiled, its voice now quieter. "Six remain."
A new door appeared, carved from black stone and covered in symbols that moved like ink.
Without waiting, it opened.
And darkness called again.