Chapter 1 - Thunder

Mark had a rule about storms: watch them from inside with a hot cup of coffee in his hands, preferably while someone else was getting wet.
He’d broken it three minutes earlier.
The rain hit immediately. It was cold, but no worse than he had expected. Running would have meant admitting he hadn’t known this was coming, and he had. The alternative was another thirty minutes pretending to care about work he had hated for a long time.
Behind him, through the glass doors, Andrew was organizing the Friday pilgrimage to The White Hart. The usual crowd was already gathering, coats on and voices louder than they’d been all week.
Mark kept walking. Six months into the job, lunches with them had quietly become a thing of the past, and nobody seemed to notice. That wasn’t entirely fair. Andrew still asked sometimes. Mark usually said no.
His old university group chat was still muted on his phone. Sometimes he opened it, saw who had married, moved abroad, changed careers, or simply seemed to have continued living, then closed it again without writing anything. Back at university, he’d had real friends and actual plans for what came next. Somewhere along the way, both had disappeared.
What had happened to him?
He hadn’t exactly chosen this quiet, shrinking existence. Most of the time, he’d simply failed to choose anything at all until the shape of his days settled around him like sediment.
By the second block, Mark was shivering. Cold always brought back some of the old aches. Mark knew them well enough by now to ignore them. This was just weather.
By the third block, he was soaked through and no longer cared about getting wetter.
Monday.
He’d hand in his resignation then.
Admitting it to himself brought an unexpected sense of relief. He’d survived worse than losing a job. He would deal with whatever came after.
The metro station came into view.
Lightning struck without warning.
He never heard the thunder.

 
Where was he? Why couldn’t he see or feel anything?

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Panic crept into his thoughts.
Then a voice spoke.
“So, what do we have here? Oh? You aren’t drifting.”
Mark wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from. He wasn’t even sure he was hearing it. He tried to speak and found he couldn’t. All that remained were thoughts.
Was he dead? Was this what death looked like?
“Oh, no, no, no. Merely a stop. Beyond it lies peace… wonderfully quiet, I might add.”
Silence stretched.
“Yes. There is no need to suffer. In the Void, there is no pain, no sorrow, no despair.”
The Void…
The offer was more tempting than he wanted to admit. He knew what pain could do to a person.
Maybe death isn’t so terrible. Life can be so very painful.
Being alone wasn’t new. It had begun years earlier, when two police officers soaked by the rain had appeared at his door. By the time he ended up in the hospital, loneliness had already become familiar.
In the hospital, he had seen people stop caring whether morning came and others cling to every extra day they were given. He remembered the smell of disinfectant that never quite left the corridors, the endless hum of fluorescent lights, and nights spent staring at the IV line taped to his own arm while sleep refused to come.
Those nights had taught him that surviving something did not automatically tell you what to do afterward. Then, he’d promised himself that if he ever got the chance to live a normal life, he wouldn’t waste it.
He had done a poor job of keeping that promise, but he still remembered making it.
He had fought too hard to stay alive once already. If the choice was really his, he wasn’t ready to stop now.
“Oh, what stubbornness… what resolve.” A quiet sigh followed. “Well. That does make things rather more complicated. Hmm… Very well, very well. You have the right to choose. By Fate’s reckoning, you still had quite some time before death, had it not been for my tiny little mistake.”
Mistake?
Somehow, that offended him more than dying.
“I will grant your wish, though I cannot say you won’t come to regret it. Nor will I grant you the mercy of forgetting. You should remember that this time, you chose your own fate. But where to put you? Your own world? Or perhaps…?”
The Voice chuckled.
“Now that could be interesting. Erador… with those insufferable clowns and their grand opinions of themselves. Perhaps I’ll throw in a little gift. We shall see whether you make use of it. Farewell, little soul.”
Before he could respond, something pulled him away. His thoughts began to blur, and through the haze he became aware of another presence watching him. It wasn’t the Voice. He had no idea what it was, only the sudden certainty that something else had noticed him.
As though his existence had been noticed.
The Voice reached him again, faint and distant.
“Oh, and one more thing. They tend to react rather poorly to people like you. Do try not to die too quickly. It would be such a waste of my gift. It should pair nicely with that ridiculous little System of theirs.”
Then silence. Then cold. Then pain.
Good, he thought through the haze. Pain means being alive.
Somewhere in the distance, at long last, thunder rolled.