()}--==\O/^\O/==--==(OIO)==--==\O/^\O/==--{()

For a minute, Jai wondered if the darkness around him was the place where people go after their death. It didn’t look like heaven, hell, or purgatory. It didn’t look like steppes where men would become one with nature and hunt game for eternity, and it didn’t look like a palace where enlightened monks would spend their time. No, the darkness around him looked just like it always did when he closed his eyes - formless, directionless and entirely empty except for brief whisps of light which he could only ever catch in his peripheral vision.

Except now, there were no wisps. The darkness was perfect, allowing no light to pass, nothing to exist. It hung over him, heavy and viscous while he could no longer will his eyes open to escape it.

First he tried screaming for help, but found himself unable to. Trying to move also failed, but after a while he realized he could see something. A sphere of dim light. It’s surface undulated ever so slightly, and a peculiar feeling wormed it’s way into Jai’s perception. It was as if he was looking at the sphere but also… was the sphere.

For all he didn’t know about where he was, he knew perfectly well that this was not how reality was supposed to work.

Jai felt change. It was as if his very being was slowly unraveling like a loose ball of string dropped into water, and his memories drifted away while only attached by thin strands of emotion. He had no idea why or how he knew, but he did.

It filled him with a sense of inevitability and instinctual dread. Was he transported into some sort of void, where he would slowly cease to exist?

Even though his instincts screamed for fight or flight, je surrendered himself to his situation for some time. There was no way to fight and nowhere to flee, he was dead already, and he made peace with that ever since he sat on that bench and closed his eyes.

Jai floated alone in the darkness, listless, while what might have been his soul slowly dispersed. Except… 'This is so damn boring. Why do I need to wait for myself to stop existing and not just die nice and quick like everyone else? Or does everyone go through this?'

He waited, but eventually gave up and tried pulling on the strings of emotion to get his memories back. Death was one thing, but waiting for what felt like an eternity to go through with it was unbearable. With no external stimulus, each second was spent in painful silence and darkness.

However, the strands turned to have the consistency of honey. As soon as he pulled on the first batch, it came apart, letting the memories at the end drift away. Slowly, without hindrance, they became so distant that he no longer felt what they were. They didn’t disappear, but at some point he couldn’t sense them anymore. That was the point when he realized that he just lost them forever.

Jai supposed that he should have been worried, afraid or even panicking about slowly losing parts of himself, but he remembered the emptiness that filled him for some time before he got there. He didn’t care at all.

Just as he processed the feeling, one of the strands suddenly hardened, contracted and flung the memory at the end back towards him. It’s formless blob gently nudged into his core, before the strand relaxed and began drifting away from him yet again.

He tried to blink out of surprise, before realizing that he couldn’t. His curiosity was reignited. Could he manipulate the memories by feeling in some specific way?

Cautiously, he tried contracting the strand again, but it was difficult to feel something on demand.

His attempts ended mostly in failure.

He wanted to sigh in disappointment. Later, to scream in frustration or cry his constantly resurfacing fears away, as his years-old apathy slowly cracked under the constant pressure of the darkness around him. Time passed by either hours, days, months or years, but he had no way to tell which. The perfect isolation was worse than any form of torture he could have imagined, and at one point Jai even tried calling the glowing sphere of his soul Wilson and talking to it, just to see if it perhaps really offered some solace.

Alas, he had no way in which to convey his emotion to the world, and noone around him who could see, feel or listen to anything he did. Perhaps he was actually in hell.

At times he started wondering if he existed at all, and only out of habit continued to try and influence the somehow visible manifestations of his soul.

Time passed.

It felt like forever, but at some point there was a change, and it became far easier to manipulate his feelings and hence the strands. He also found out that the ‘core’ he felt himself reside in were his thoughts, clumped together, and with each important one holding a strand of emotion connected to a memory. Or at least that was what he suspected. There were so many strands that he felt a little like covered in fur, and he could only thoroughly inspect so many of them. Perhaps from the outisde, his soul might have looked like a hedgehog.

The thoughts at his core pulsed every now and then like an unsteady heartbeat, slowly undulating as his mind wandered over different things.

Recognizing what feeling belonged to each memory and each connection was also something that he painstakingly learned by himself, before it suddenly got considerably easier with time.

The very fact that there was a change, that he could somehow affect something real, was like a breath of fresh air in the dark, stale cell which he grew used to.

He had no chance of contracting all his memories back one by one before they drifted away though, so he experimented until he came to a solution. Every time the strands were getting too long and thin to support his memories, he carefully remember everything about his life that he could. It was a slow and unpleasant process, as a lot of his memories were… less than desirable to relive. Especially the very last one.

()}--==\O/^\O/==--==\O/^\O/==--{()

On a cold evening with air smelling crisp and light, Jaine Meriann got a call.

His mother died of a stroke.

He held the phone next to his ear, motionless, silent. It was like waking up after a long dream.

Yet, a very obvious sense of emptiness filled his newly regained awareness. There were supposed to be many things in that void, but the most obvious one missing was sorrow.

His mother just died, but for some reason there was not an ounce of it inside his mind.

Why?

One of his closest relatives passed away. One of his family…

Was he a bad person? A son who didn’t love his parents? A psychopath maybe?

Several explanations came to mind, but they all felt wrong, like excuses. In the spur of the moment, Jai took his coat and rode an elevator down.

In the mirror set into the old mechanical apparatus of their prefab block, a tired man stared back at him. His long hair fastened into a pony tail for convenience, his glasses barely hiding deep violet circles under his eyes. A stubble peeked out of his scrawny facial features, looking almost skeletal.

Something in Jai’s mind stirred as he stared at his own reflection up until the elevator came to a stop. It was too early to arrive at the ground floor though.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“Good evening!” a voice chirped behind him as the doors slid open. He recognized the tone, it was Karl, one of the neighbours from two floors below.

“Evening…” he said and turned around, but Karl’s expression was no longer matching his previous tone. After just a moment, the man looked worried.

“Hey Jaine... are you okay? Did something happen?”

“Not really” he replied with a shrug. “Why do you ask?”

Karl stepped into the elevator and seeing the ground floor button already pressed, simply waited for the doors to close. “Well, first, you look awful today. No offense” he quickly added as he looked Jai over. “But you’re also going out in pajamas, crocs… and a coat. In winter. Do you realize that it’s freezing outside?”

Jai did a double take and checked his clothes. Truly, he had simply taken a coat alongside what he normally wore at home. An unfortunate combination.

He couldn’t help but chuckle dryly. “Yea… my mom died today.”

His neighbor was about to offer his condolences just as he raised a hand to stop him. At Karl’s questioning gaze, he just shook his head, but it was enough for the man to take the hint and drop it. They spent the rest of their ride in silence, and parted the same way.

It took Jai only half a dozen minutes to arrive at a park nearby. It was a rather decent splash of greenery, often visited to offer some solace and calm of nature to the city’s inhabitants around it. The winter was ending and the lake in it’s middle was no longer frozen, but trees had yet to sprout their first leaves of the season.

He sat on a familiar bench, looking over the calm surface of water as the sun was setting. It was his place for skipping stones, picked thanks to a nice view, solid footing, and an abundance of smoothened pebbles from the decorative pathways of the park.

It was slowly getting darker, the horizon transforming into shades of orange and maroon. The park was deserted just as it was usual on a late winter evening, and strong winds barely moved the naked branches of nearby trees.

He was supposed to be calm on that bench, as always. He hoped the feelings boiling deep down inside his chest would settle and he could get back to his usual self again.

Sitting there used to be a brief and pleasant stop in his daily life, but something inside him had already woken up from it’s sturpor. A part of his consciousness that he tried to forget about for a very long time.

The air was only chilly under the coat, but ice cold to his bare feet in a flimsy pair of old crocs. He could no longer feel them.

It was weirdly amusing, in a self-deprecating sort of way.

There he was! A grown man who never amounted to anything real, escaping from himself an the whole of reality to made-up fantasies. And now, ending up old, tired and freezing without a care in the world.

And wearing crocs of all things…

The realization hit him like a truck, but without an impact.

He just didn’t give a damn. That was the answer he was looking for. It was never an issue with love for his parents, but with his whole life. The sense of hopelessness and lack of meaning poisoned him so much that he didnt even feel sad about his mother’s death anymore.

From behind the trees, the ugly prefab apartment buildings peeked out at him. Hundreds of people lived there. Thousands, even, and far more in the other parts of the city. All of them lived normal lives with little issue. Even those with no homes continued their toil, begging people for scraps and occasionally freezing to death on a bench much like the one Jai was sitting on.

It wasn’t the fault of his surroundings or situation, but rather his own doing that he couldn’t fit in, that he struggled. It was the fault of who he was.

He was a defective human.

The water in front of him laid calm, unblemished by even the smallest gust of wind.

He tried skipping stones over the water with an old medal from elementary scool, once. The shape looked great for it, but he messed up the throw and it only skipped once before sinking to the shallow depths of the lake.

It was funny how meaningless the relics of his meager success turned out to be.

Funny, just like the time when he jumped after what he presumed to be a drowning child calling for help, only to discover her standing safely on one of the larger rocks under the surface, making a mess just like all kids do.

As if he could have actually saved anybody.

When he was walking back to his flat that day, soaked to the bone, Karl asked about his wellbeing with the same genuine and warm concern that he’d shown earlier.

He was a nice person. Jai no longer felt any motivation to avoid freezing to death on his favourite bench just like many people did around the city alongside him, but he hoped that Karl wouldn’t be too sad.

He deserved to be happy.

The last thing registering in his fading memory was the sound of an ambulance and rushed footsteps.

()}--==\O/^\O/==--==\O/^\O/==--{()

A sense of calm settled over his usually churning thoughts. Remembering his life was exhausting, but the last part of it always left Jai weirdly indifferent about his fate.

Yet, the process proved successful, an ever since his first blunder, he only lost a sparse couple of memories. He imagined that it looked something like a whole stadium of football fans doing a wave after a goal, as the strands tugged on his memories in quick succession according to some unknown order in which they were attached.

Time passed.

Did the parts that he previously lost simply forever travel in the infinite void around him, or would they would collide with other unfortunate souls that were bound to be there? Perhaps it was just a delusion, but it was far more comforting to think that other people were just too far away to see or feel, rather than accepting the possibility that he was entirely alone.

If there was noone else, nothing else, then there was no point in trying.

Time passed.

He played with what he now firmly believed was his soul. Jai wasn’t religious, the question never really came up in his whole life, and there were sparse few things on Earth that could make him fully believe in the spiritual. He never had a reason to think that souls existed, and even now doubted if this whole ordeal was not simply something his brain conjured up while comatose and most likely damaged, lying with it’s body barely functioning in some hospital. Yet, he could not deny that the current experience was as close to a supernatural phenomenon as he could have gotten...

In the middle of the thought however, Jai panicked as a sound suddenly reverberated through his consciousness. It was a sound unbelievably loud compared to the constant silence of the omnipresent darkness, and if he was honest, it might have taken him longer than he would’ve liked to admit to just calm down and get used to the forgotten sensation.

It felt familiar, similar to an alarm ringing on his phone, set to wake him up in the morning. But no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t place it.

So, he simply listened, and soon started to bask in the new development of things. It was refreshing to hear something new, much more than his previous attempts to affect the world by working with his soul.

Only at the last moment did he realize that he forgot to control the spinning nebula of thoughts and strands around himself. His last endeavor had been to rotate the various parts of his mind around in several patterns. There was no reason to what he did, he simply thought of it as learning to juggle to alleviate boredom, but now the distraction caused several of the strands to almost snap with the centrifugal force, or it’s spiritual equivalent.

Hurriedly, he stopped their momentum while straining to his limits to keep everything together. Just to be sure, Jai repeated the routine of restoring integrity to the ball of thoughts that he now was, before setting out to inspect the new sound that has been grinding away at his consciousness for some time.

The longer he listened, the clearer the tone became. The repeating waves of sensory information felt crisp and bright when he finally adjusted, and a surprising couple of words appeared in front of his non-existent eyes.

-Your first seedling has stabilized.-

-Stat bonuses are now active.-

-Limited translation system of first rank is now active.-

-Due to lacking bloodline, your seedling has failed to acquire an affinity. Unless remedied, your seedling will destabilize and disperse in estimated <12:14:21:56>.-

-<12:14:21:55>-

-<12:14:21:54>-

...

If Jai could, he would blink a few times just to make sure that he was seeing right. He did not deny that the change from his monotone existence was welcome, any change at that point was welcome, but it did not detract from his confusion in the slightest.

As he read further, the omnipresent sound changed ever so slightly. It grew less familiar and more synthetic, but kept itself somehow easy to understand on some subconscious level. At least that was what Jai suspected, because translating unknown, incomprehensible tones into words in English was surely not something that he was doing on purpose.

-Aavare. You have earned the title {Revenant}. You have persisted throughout a prolonged existence in a domain of a Word of death and returned. Revenant Shard awarded.-

-Aavare. You have earned the title {Soul Manipulator}. You have learned to control the fabric of consciousness on a basic level. Chore skills of soul manipulation school unlocked. Soul Manipulator Shard awarded.-

There were more words following, but Jai had to tear his gaze away.

In front of him, a brilliant white egg was suddenly formed. It was almost as if it simply phased through the darkness right into place, and as it’s glow intensified and settled around him, physical feelings that he barely even remembered slowly, gently returned. A faint awareness of his body lodged itself back into his mind.

Yet as his sense of touch reawakened fully, a wave searing pain spread through his whole being.

The last thing he saw before passing out was how the mysterious egg neared him.

()}--==\O/^\O/==--==(OIO)==--==\O/^\O/==--{()