The hover car was never supposed to fail.
Tony barely had time to register the warning alarms before the world lurched violently to the left. Artificial gravity—so precise, so carefully calibrated—slammed him into the restraints with a force that made his teeth rattle. Outside the windshield, the city dissolved into a dizzying smear of neon and steel, towers twisting, bending, and elongating as if the world itself had lost its mind. Systems screamed in protest: warning lights flickered, circuits sparking, alarms blaring in a cacophony he could barely distinguish from his own panicked heartbeat. Then the controls died in his hands.
"Shit—"
The word never finished.
The building rose to meet him before he could comprehend the motion. There was a sound like the sky tearing apart, a sudden shattering that seemed to unweave reality itself. The impact was absolute, a violence so total it erased all orientation; there was no up, no down, no left or right, only the unrelenting certainty of destruction. The hover car crumpled, glass and alloy folding inward like paper in a child's careless hands, as if the city had decided, for a moment, to clench a fist around him.
Fire came next. It surged and consumed. The mix of hydrogen and volatile oils that powered the craft became an unholy pyre, igniting in a roaring inferno that tore through the crumpled metal, clawing at everything it touched. Flames licked the building's surface and tore across the vehicle, reaching upward in a chaotic crown that seemed to touch the very atmosphere itself. For a heartbeat, the fireball stretched a hundred feet into the sky before the rushing air intruded, scattering the flames into smoky wisps and sparks that fell like dying stars.
Then came the thunder. Not the distant rumble of storm clouds, but something elemental, a sound so profound it reverberated through his chest, through his very bones. Tony's mind, flailing for anchors, lost all sense of spatial reality. Time itself seemed to fracture, moments stretching and folding into each other. And then—something new, impossible, unfolded.
Light.
Not the artificial glow of streetlamps or the sterile gleam of neon, but a bloom of incandescent brilliance that erupted from nowhere, searing and omnivorous. It poured into the cabin, hungry, relentless, flooding every corner with heat that wasn't merely thermal but existential. It crawled across his skin, stole the air from his lungs, made the restraints themselves writhe with burning intensity. The console erupted in sparks and molten fragments, the fire mixing with the brightness in a violent dance. Pain flared, so sharp and total that it transcended itself, leaving only raw, overwhelming sensation.
His last thought was not of regret. Not of unfinished ambitions. Not of lost opportunities or the faces he would never see again.
It was confusion.
And then even that faded.
Silence. Not the stillness that follows sound, but the absence of all—absence of weight, of heat, of being. Tony became aware slowly, as though surfacing from a dream he hadn't known he was dreaming. There was no sight, no sound, no measure of existence except an infinite darkness stretching in every direction. He tried to breathe—and realised with a strange detachment that he did not need to. Tried to move—and found there was nothing to move, nothing to resist, nothing to push against.
Am I dead?
The thought drifted without fear. It simply existed, a lone flicker in the void.
And then he saw it.
A faint glow, impossibly distant, like a lone star glimpsed through a haze of mist. It pulsed with a gentle warmth against the cold void, a heartbeat in the dark, and deep within Tony, something answered. A pull, a need, a trembling recognition of something he had forgotten before the fire, before the impact, before everything.
He moved—or tried to. Movement here was not walking, not crawling, not anything the body he had once known could comprehend. And yet, the darkness seemed to part as he pressed forward. As he drew nearer to the light, resistance began to manifest. It was subtle at first, then overwhelming. A weight settled over him, thick and suffocating, pressing from all sides, as if the void itself sought to reclaim him, to deny him passage.
The light grew brighter.
And louder.
Not sound, not exactly, but a pressure, a presence that pressed in from every direction, coaxing, compelling, even punishing. Panic surged, primal and instinctive. I don't want to go back. I don't want to burn. I don't want to…
And yet, the light surged anyway.
Tony reached toward it, with every atom of himself, every fragment of memory and instinct that had survived the inferno. The void resisted, but he pressed forward. The pull became undeniable.
Air slammed into his lungs like fire and ice at once.
He screamed.
The sound was raw, unrestrained, keening, tearing itself from deep within him. It startled even him, a note of existence he hadn't known could still emerge. His chest convulsed as breath filled him for the first time in what felt like eons—burning, cold, real. And with it came the world, crashing in. Pressure, warmth, movement, sound—overlapping, intrusive, exhilarating—all at once.
His body, when he felt it, was wrong. Too small, too weak, too alien in its perfection. He screamed again, because it was the only expression he had for the flood of sensation, for the dissonance of air against skin, of light against flesh, of being reborn. Shapes loomed above him—blurred, massive, alive with colour and vibration. Voices rumbled, melodic and alien, forming words and phrases he could not parse, yet somehow understood.
Strong hands lifted him, holding him, steadying him. The darkness was gone, replaced by a world that pulsed with life and breath.
Tony's vision swam as colours unfurled—glowing blues, deep greens, iridescent purples—that seemed to breathe themselves into his consciousness. The air smelled alive: rich, heavy, scented with soil, water, and the unfamiliar tang of vegetation he could not name. His scream faltered, breaking into a whimper as exhaustion washed over him, as the weight of existing—of being born again—pressed in on every sense.
And yet, amidst the confusion, amidst the pain and awe, one thought flickered, fragile and disbelieving: somewhere, far away, on a world he could no longer touch, the echoes of Tony's former life faded into silence. Birth, it seemed, was never gentle. It tore, it seared, it destroyed the old to make way for the new. And Tony—he, or what he had become—was alive.
Alive, and utterly alone, yet inexplicably whole.
He let himself drift, for a moment, in the green-and-blue light that wrapped him, and understood something unspoken: the world he had known was gone. And yet, perhaps, it had been merely a prelude. The fire, the crash, the void—it had been a passage. A journey. A crossing from one existence into another.
Somewhere in the distance, faint and yet insistent, the glow pulsed again, a rhythm he now recognised as belonging to him, or he to it. He could not speak, could not name it, could not yet understand it—but he felt it. A tether, a promise, a lifeline across the infinite dark.
And with that, he rose—or at least, attempted to rise—not as Tony the human, not as a man bound to metal and fire, but as something else. Something new.
A child reborn in the light, in the pulse of a world that was not yet his own, but would, eventually, recognise him.
Somewhere, far away, the last whispers of Tony Sullivan, of the life he had once known, fell into the void and were absorbed by it, leaving nothing but possibility.
And Tony, whoever—or whatever-he was now, opened his eyes to the strange, living light of a new world.
(Hope you enjoyed :) )