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Darkness.
That was the first thing. Not the gentle darkness of sleep, but a suffocating kind—thick, pressing, endless. It felt like I was sinking in tar, swallowed whole by a silence too deep to be real.
Then—something cracked.
A sound like glass splintering underwater. A sliver of light pierced the black, cutting across my vision, and I sucked in a sharp breath as if I hadn't drawn air in centuries. My chest heaved, my fingers clawed at nothing.
I'm alive?
Slowly, I opened my eyes.
Above me stretched a ceiling that wasn't a ceiling at all. It looked like space—vast, infinite—yet closer, more intimate. Galaxies swirled above me as though painted by a mad artist: patches of crimson nebulae, golden rivers of starlight, and islands of worlds spinning lazily, drifting like lanterns in a cosmic sea. Each world looked… real. Living. I could almost hear voices if I listened too closely, whispers from cities I'd never visited, forests I'd never touched.
