Alton was a regular guy.
He worked a forgettable office job in a mid-tier accounting firm, pushing spreadsheets and chasing deadlines that no one would remember by the end of the quarter. There was nothing remarkable about his life. Twenty six years old, single, renting a one-bedroom apartment that smelled faintly of instant ramen and old paper. He had no grand ambitions, no hidden talents, no dramatic backstory that would impress anyone at a bar.
Except for winter.
He was obsessed with it in a way that bordered on unhealthy. Every spare moment outside work went to games set in frozen wastelands—Frostbite Realms, Eternal Snowfall, anything where the world was buried under ice and silence. At night he'd fall asleep to documentaries about Siberian blizzards, Antarctic expeditions, or timelapses of snow drifting across empty cities. Winter felt honest. Clean. Merciless in a way that made sense to him. It didn't pretend to care. It simply was.
Everything else in his life had been quietly miserable.
His father had died of a heart attack years ago. Alton hadn't loved the man, and the feeling had been mutual. The loss still left an empty space he didn't know how to fill. His mother, the one person he still cared about, had pulled away after he failed to graduate with the grades she expected. Her messages now came months apart, usually praising a cousin's promotion or a neighbor's son who "made something of himself." She never said it outright anymore, but the disappointment lingered like frost on glass.
Yet Alton refused to let any of it break him. He still woke up each morning, made his coffee, and showed up to work. He still tried—quietly, stubbornly—to build something better. A decent life. A life that didn't end in regret.
But that quiet determination was about to shatter on an ordinary Thursday night of overtime.
It was a regular late night of overtime.
Alton stepped out of the office tower just after midnight, shoulders heavy with exhaustion. The cold air hit him like a slap—sharp, clean, and welcome. Snow had begun to fall while he was inside, turning the streets into a quiet, white hush. He pulled his coat tighter and started the familiar walk toward the subway, boots crunching softly on the fresh powder. For a moment, the city felt almost peaceful.
He reached the crosswalk and waited for the light. The moment he stepped off the curb, a blinding white glare stabbed into his eyes.
Headlights.
A truck was barreling toward him—far too fast, tires barely gripping the slick road. Time seemed to stretch and snap at once. Alton's heart lurched. He tried to run, legs scrambling on the icy pavement, but it was already too late.
"Is this it?" he thought, the words strangely calm in his head. After everything—after all the quiet, stubborn years of trying—death came as a careless truck on a snowy night?
He threw up one hand toward the searing light, the only thing he could still do, as if it might somehow push the inevitable away.
The impact never came.
Instead, the world dissolved into pure white.