The world did not end for Ian Shever in thunder, not in the crunch of breaking glass, but in the dull squeal of tires and the sharp crack of bone. An instant—then nothing.
Darkness.
Not the kind of darkness that is the domain of night, however. This was thicker, more oppressive, a silence instead of an absence. A silence that seemed to stretch out boundlessly, as though time itself had exhaled and forgotten to breathe again. Ian knew—knew agonizingly—that his body had been left behind. He couldn't feel his chest, his hands, or the frantic pulse of his heartbeat. And yet he was still here. Something of him was left, minus its fleshly casing.
"I am…?" he tried to say, but there was no voice to answer.
The question echoed inwards, echoing through corridors of mind that opened out apparently without limit. Without the anchor of the breath, words were pure thought. Without the weight of the body, existence was abstraction.
And then, in that disembodiment, the horizon ripped.
A dim radiance, a fluid mathematics, unfolded before him. It was not light as they knew it, but a matrix of meaning—lines, curves, and patterns that seemed to map existence itself. Equations spiralled off to infinity, symmetries cracked and reformed, and Ian had the distinct impression that he was hanging—if "hanging" was the word—between two interlocking dimensions.
The physical world still held him tenuously, a voice in the next room. He could sense the crash site, the paralysis of his body, the weight of earth and gravity. But superimposed upon it was the ghostly, the invisible: a second reality created from thought, symbol, and metaphysical principle. He knew, with a thrill, that death had given him access to both worlds.
Not life. Not yet. But not sheer annihilation, either.
A whisper invaded his awareness, though no sound of voice was present:
"To remain is to seek. To seek is to aim. And to aim is to pierce the veil."
The words etched themselves onto the shimmering grid, deconstructing into numerals which reconstructed into letters, letters into symbols, and finally into a single symbol of radiant white:
מֵיטָב
Meytav.
The name burned in silence, more real than any shape, more final than death itself. Ian did not hear it; he understood it. It was not merely a name—it was a axis of being, a meeting place of all meanings of good, perfection, and transcendence.
The word's glow lingered, radiating gently, until Ian felt its presence settle over him like the regard of something that could not be comprehended. His brain recoiled, then opened, straining for explanations. Philosophy, splinters of ill-remembered logic, equations from school lessons long forgotten—they all stirred in him, each striving and failing to contain the enormity of what was before him.
Here was no mythic deity. Not a beast of face or feature. Meytav was principle made flesh, the unreachable heights of existence.
Ian trembled in the silence. For the first time since death, he knew the nature of his quest:
If he wished to be restored to life, if he wished to reclaim the body that was reclaimed from him, he would have to grasp for the impossible, to bridge realities and slash through philosophies, through the very mathematics of being itself, until he could stand before Meytav—not as a question, but as an answer.
The lattice dissolved, and he suspended between breaths, between worlds.
And so commenced his quest.