Hi Chapter One: The Silence Before
The first thing death promised was peace.
Not loudly, not like a sermon or a threat—but softly, the way night slips into a tired city.
Arjun learned this at 3:17 a.m., sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at a ceiling he no longer recognized as home. The fan hummed above him like an old thought that refused to die. Outside, the world was asleep, pretending everything made sense in the morning.
Peace, he thought, must feel like this silence—but deeper.
Life had become noise. Not the loud kind, but the constant kind: expectations, regrets, unanswered messages, the ache of becoming someone he never chose to be. People said time heals, but time had only taught him how to endure. And endurance was not living; it was surviving with better excuses.
He stood and walked to the window. The streetlight flickered—on, off, on—like it was unsure whether to stay. Below, a stray dog slept curled into itself, trusting the night more than humans ever trusted each other.
Arjun wondered when he had started envying such simple certainty.
He wasn't suicidal. At least, that's what he told himself. He didn't want to die—he just wanted everything to stop hurting. To stop asking. To stop demanding explanations for scars no one could see.
Death, in his mind, wasn't a monster.
It was a closed door.
A quiet room.
A place where no one expected him to be stronger tomorrow.
His phone buzzed suddenly, slicing through the stillness. A message from an unknown number.
"Peace is not found where you think it is."
Arjun frowned. Wrong number, probably. Or fate playing its cruel games again. He locked the screen, but the words stayed, glowing behind his eyes.
If death gave peace, why did the thought of it still feel so heavy?
He lay back down, staring into the dark, unaware that this night—the one that felt like the end—was actually the beginning. A beginning that would force him to confront a truth far more uncomfortable than pain itself:
Sometimes, the idea of death feels peaceful not because life is meaningless—but because life has been unheard for too long.
And somewhere, just beyond the silence, something was about to answer back.