Chương 27: Memoirs of Another Life

There was only darkness. Was he asleep? No… this was not the darkness of sleep. It was deeper, endless like a void without form or substance, a place unlike anything he had ever known. Hello? Nothing responded, like the inside of a jar. Yet after a while, something moved. A flicker, almost as if a heart was pulsing distantly somewhere in this infinity. There was a small light shining behind some… voices? Anadis A voice rang out, pressing into his mind, distant yet overwhelmingly powerful. Huh… Anadis?

Who was that again? My name is Leander. The sound of his voice echoed in his mind. And then more voices came, all with the same powerful cadence. Leander! Don't leave me. Wake up, please! Brother… you're not ready yet. Will you protect them this time? A history buried and rewritten time and again… Faces he didn't recognize flashed in his head. Eyes filled with sorrow and grief. Laughter not his own. A radiant woman, beaten in a rainy forest. A man falling from a tower, engulfed in green flame.

A violet moon, two suns, one white and smaller, the other amber and larger. A land filled with strange creatures. Then that name was whispered by too many tongues all at once. Anadis... Anadis... Anadis... What are all these memories? They aren't mine… Who were those people? His head felt like it was bursting. Pain surged through him, and everything was dark, so dark. After a while, an image materialized in his mind; it looked as though he were inside a corridor filled with blinding light.

A faint human silhouette stood deep at the end of the corridor, the way one might see a figure through frosted glass. It had no face, but he could sense how ancient and weary it was.

"I need you." A woman's voice emerged, soft yet commanding.

"Please… accept her for what she is, for what she carries." She paused, and her tone turned softer still, almost apologetic.

"The cycle cannot repeat itself. I'm sorry I cannot tell you more than this." Despite her apologetic tone, she felt calm and immensely powerful, like an ascended being. A goddess.

"Once you get there, try to remember." Leander, barely conscious of himself, thought back: Who are you? No answer came. The light around the figure dimmed slightly, as if she were stepping back into whatever distant space she had come from. The first died in vain. The second submitted in fear. Her voice rang out again, but this time it didn't feel like she was speaking to him. What will the third do? Suddenly, the light vanished, and Leander was in the darkness again. But it didn't last.

The darkness lifted, and he could see. Panic gripped his whole being. He gasped and clawed for air, but none came. That was when it hit him. There was no air because he was in space. Huh?! Where am I? What am I doing here?! He tried to shout the words, but he had no voice. They echoed only in the silence of his own head. He looked in every direction—above, below, all around. Nothing. Well… that wasn't entirely true. There were stars, more than he could count, scattered across his vision.

The void stretched endlessly, dark as a midnight sea, and the stars themselves looked almost painted, bright specks of color dotting a black canvas. What is this? Is this real? There was no ground. No sky. No sense of direction. It was all the same. He looked down, if there was even a down. His body was gone. Not like it had been amputated, but as if there had never been a body to begin with. He was something else entirely…

a shape of blue light resembling a human body, but the proportions weren't quite there; he was more like a soul wrapped in forward motion, leaving behind a soft, glowing trail of sapphire blue as he soared through the cosmos. What… have I become? How fast was he moving? Too fast, impossibly so. Faster than any car or any plane, perhaps even faster than sound? Maybe even at the speed of light? He didn't know, didn't have a reference point anymore. No body to feel the g-force.

All he knew was that the immediate stars blazed past like streaks of light, and that there was a force pulling him forward. Where am I going? Then he remembered. Oh… I died. The gun, the blood, the cold, and Rosie. The tears streaming down her face, the way she screamed his name. He'd promised to visit her after graduation. They'd just started dating. She was his first kiss. First confession. First everything. And now… she was gone. Marie was gone. The kids were gone. All of them. And he was whatever this was.

He'd never see them again. At seventeen, he had died so young. His life had been as ephemeral as morning mist. The realization hollowed him. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Okay, okay, this is fine. This is… probably fine. Maybe this is just a really vivid dream. Yeah. Any second now I'll wake up in a hospital bed with Rosie holding my hand, telling me I'm an idiot for getting shot. … Any second now. He waited, but nothing changed. Well, shit. So, this is it, then?

The afterlife? No angels, no heavenly gate, just the stars and silence. At least there's no hell, no demons. Just eternal space travel in this incorporeal body. Could be worse, right? Could be stuck in math class. Okay, that joke didn't even make me feel better. Still, I didn't think it would feel like this. I thought death would be more… final. But this was not final. He was heading somewhere, pulled by a gravity beyond gravity toward… what? He didn't know.

He tried everything—to stop, to shift, to resist—but nothing worked. He gave up after a while and accepted the fact that whatever was pulling him wouldn't let go until it got him where it wanted. Was he going somewhere? Or was he just floating forever? Rosie… had she made it? Marie? The kids? Was everyone all right? Sadly, he'd never know. He was, after all, dead. He felt small and insignificant, a single grain of sand in the universe, maybe even smaller than that. When Rosie dies, will I see her here?

Traveling through space like me? It made sense, didn't it? Everyone died eventually. Maybe this was what happened to everyone after death. But… he had yet to see another soul. It'll be a long time before that, anyway. Rosie was only seventeen. She still had decades left. Decades he wouldn't be part of. That settled heavily in his ethereal chest… Is this it, then? A forever journey through the stars? Just me, alone… Days passed, maybe weeks. There was no sun to mark the time, let alone a clock.

To keep himself occupied, he started planet-gazing as he drifted past them. Some were enormous, their size almost incomprehensible. If Earth were a marble, these would have been beach balls, or perhaps entire houses. Humans could never explore something of that scale. It would take millennia just to walk across such vast worlds. Others were tiny. Asteroids, really, so small he could probably circle one in a couple of days… if he still had legs, that was.

If I were to jump too high on that one, I'd probably float right off and get sucked into the void. If he had lungs, he would have let out a long, bitter laugh. The planets were beautiful, sure. Didn't change the fact that he was still dead. Planets weren't doing it for him anymore, so Leander started making a list of what he missed, anything to keep his mind occupied. Number one was women; they were the best, not even joking. The truth was that he would never see one again.

There was a small ripple in the light as he tried to shake his incorporeal head and chuckled. Rosie was his real number one, the way she'd traced his palm when she gave him that bracelet, and the heat of her kiss. How could anything be better than her? What wouldn't he give to see her again? I'd give my life for it… not that I have one to give. He couldn't believe he'd died right after she said yes. Right after his first kiss. How unfair was that? If he had a mouth, he'd be grunting right now. Back to the list.

Number two was food. God, food. So many to choose from, like pizza, burgers, spaghetti, sodas, and energy drinks. He'd miss them all. Number three was a bit harder to identify, but it shall be his bed. Yeah, it was old, stinky, and lumpy, but it was his, and it was comfortable. What about number four… oh, smartphones. Oh, how great it was to scroll on his phone for hours for no reason. He'd even miss that. And for number five, it had to be his favorite hobby: reading.

Reading anything entertaining enough, even if he knew it wasn't the best quality. It could be trashy web novels, tropey manga, or any other kind of mid literary media out there. He'd never get to read or watch anything again, or know how One Piece ended. Wait. WAIT! One Piece was supposed to end the day I died. Of all the cosmic injustices… that was the most unfair one. He would have laughed if he could. Or cried. At this point, both felt the same.

Days blurred into weeks, weeks into months, months into years, and years into… decades? Oh God, I hope not. Time lost all meaning. Existence and purpose slipped away from him as he was running out of ways to keep himself sane. It was all so pointless anyway, the visions, the voices, and the nightmares were making sure of that. Nevertheless, what was up with them? Why was he receiving so many of them? And what about that woman engulfed in light? He recited what she'd said in his mind. The first died in vain.

The first of what? Who was it, and how had the first died? The second submitted in fear. Was the second a coward, and what had made the second succumb to fear? And lastly, what will the third do? The question haunted him. Was he the third? Was the person with that ominous name, Anadis, the third? That name stirred something in him, like something on the tip of his tongue, a persistent déjà vu that wouldn't quite go away. What did he have to do with any of it? He couldn't understand.

Had he been Anadis before Leander? Had Anadis died? Been reborn? Died again? Leander sighed. Well, he couldn't sigh, but the light around his ethereal body did ripple. Eventually, even the visions and voices left him. When? He didn't know. He'd stopped counting after the first couple of years, but not in a million years did he think he'd mourn the day they stopped, but he did. He was empty. Alone. Those visions had been the last remnants of what people looked like. Words and sensations looped through his memories.

Rosie's angelic face, that… was her name, right? Never mind, he still remembered something tender, sweet, and warm touched his lips, then pain—cold and sharp. But before that… wait, who was he again? Leander! My name is Leander. He repeated it like a mantra. I'm seventeen. I was seventeen. I died on Christmas Eve. Or was I Anadis? The voices kept saying that name. Anadis—Anadis—Anadis. Maybe they were trying to keep him sane, keep him from forgetting his own name. But after enough time, even that started to slip.

He tried to hold on to himself, really hard, to remember who he loved and the people who loved him. Maybe he'd always been Anadis, and Leander was the dream, and those people hadn't existed. He couldn't care anymore. What was the point of remembering, anyway, if his destiny was to drift for eternity as cosmic debris? He gave up trying to understand. He even gave up trying to stay human. He just… existed, drifting like a lone bacterium through a cosmos far bigger than himself. At least bacteria traveled in colonies.

He didn't. He was utterly alone. This was forever— fine —he had already accepted that. At least the stars were beautiful, but for how long? If this is death, why doesn't it feel like anything? I want to feel something, even if it's pain. Decades passed, perhaps even centuries; he didn't know, but something tingled at the edge of his senses. Something small, yet monumental. Change. A sensation he hadn't felt in an eternity. At first, it was subtle, but even then he noticed the shift.

Gravity was still pulling, but not in a straight line. He veered like a car losing control, then began to slow. The endless motion was weakening, easing toward a stop. Wait… What's happening? The blue light around his incorporeal form shifted from sapphire into a vivid amber, as if forming a shield. The distant stars, which once stretched like streaks of light in a tunnel as he traveled, began to stabilize, stilling and painting an ethereal space for the first time in decades. And then. He saw it.

A huge, beautiful planet, both serene and mighty at the same time, full of greenery and turquoise waters. Not too large, but it was definitely bigger than… than… What was the name of the planet he came from again? The simple question lingered for long, terrifyingly long. Earth, Earth! The word surfaced, as if from deep water. This planet has to be at least five times bigger than Earth, perhaps even more. His sense of scale of anything, really, had deteriorated. The planet's features were terrifying yet clear.

Vast mountain ranges wrapped around the equator like a stone belt, dividing whole continents, as if some mighty God had split the planet and stitched it back together. Am I… going there? Is this it? The final destination? Is this where all dead people go? He didn't know. He still had no control, but whatever force had been dragging him through the cosmos all this time was clearly taking him there. For the first time in decades, his heart, or whatever he had left, stirred.

Not from fear or pain, but from something long buried within: hope. Suddenly, he sped up again. He felt it in every fiber of whatever he was. He was descending toward the planet. He pierced the atmosphere like a comet, plummeting across the sky. Then, without warning, his trajectory snapped to the side, a clean 90-degree pivot. It was as if the pulling force were guiding him to a specific part of the planet. He passed through the clouds, violently parting them, wind and heat colliding around him.

He could see the landscape below, endless forests with trees as tall as buildings. Massive rivers that looked like oceans, their waves unnatural and violent. Fields. Villages. Roads. And most importantly— people. There was civilization. Towns. Life. Are these people angels? Is this heaven? Doesn't look like it. He felt his ghostly stomach curl. Am I… reincarnating? The pulling force rushed him toward a small town on an island.

He was heading toward a small, isolated house tucked between mountain ridges, peaceful and serene. I'm going to crash straight through the roof. He braced instinctively, but then he remembered he was incorporeal and didn't have a body anymore. But he braced anyway for the crash that never came. At the moment of impact, everything froze as if the world had stopped, and before he could react or say anything. He vanished. The light faded. The soul was gone.

He was gone, and for a long time—or a short one—he couldn't tell. There was only darkness, then a heartbeat. Then a blinding light and a baby's cry.