“The origin of a soul is still unknown even to a god. They are something many don't ever truly become capable of sensing, but for those few who become able to, death is just another part of the path of ascension.” The Librarian.

Death is supposed to be the end of everything for people. Our souls are sent either to our god's heaven or hell or to be reincarnated based on our actions in life. Some even think we just experience a great nothingness, no afterlife, just an ending.

Though personally, if what had happened to me at the start of my death occurred all over again. I think I would gladly have taken nothingness, as opposed to the insanity of what was my eternally long but short afterlife, especially with all the denial and earth-shattering truths that came from it.

Enough ranting time to let you know what happened to a man who, for good reason, is now untrusting of all the gods save maybe 1 or 2, though I don’t remember their names anymore.

And if I ever find that damn old fogey of a god hiding as a young man, you’re getting a good old damn beat down. As for me, I guess the best place to start is like all tales at the end of one man’s old life and the start of another life and its long and painful journey to power.

When I first became aware of my new location the day after my birthday party, drinking and eating with all my friends and family. It was not in my bed or the bed of a random stranger as was occasionally to happen far back in the old days of my younger times. No, it was not even in some field or ditch either, which could still occur even at my age.

No, when my body became aware and able to see where I was, it was in some damn epic lineup of infinite proportions. At first, it all seemed like one of my unusual but extremely vivid, almost life-like dreams. But as time passed and the dream never ended like they tend to do if you become aware of them, it started to sink in that this was not a dream but my new reality.

The lineup was different from your typical lineup of waiting in some government center or standing in line for a concert or even a game release from back in the good old days of physical games. This line was of a size and proportion that could never be believed or fathomed of, for it stretched ahead and behind me infinitely.

All around and ahead of me were people and things that only made sense in a way if you had ever read a book, heard a story, played a video game, or even watched a movie, making this feel even more like a dream. Yet, still, it did not look like a dream. For an insanely old man who loved anime, movies, books, games, and old tales like me, this seemed far too vivid and far too real to be a dream.

Even the lands and skies surrounding the line were surreal and ever-changing for when you watched the land itself changed before your very eyes at one point being a never-ending grass field to then shifting into a field of wheat or even other crops and plants, sometimes even to a field of endless flowers of the same make to different types all together.

Only then, as the line moved forward, to change to a land of mists and fog, even to mountains or a massive sea on which a path cut through it, sometimes it would be a forest of trees familiar or strange as well. Then, there were moments when it would all change to something the mind could not even comprehend, making all thought leave me for how incomprehensibly strange the land around me became around me.

Even the sky followed the changing of the land as well. Sometimes, it was just a plain blue sky with a sun. At other times, there was no sun. Then the sky or sun would change, becoming pink, purple, green, and various other colours, then changing to a night sky with ever-changing and moving stars and patterns.

Sometimes, it would be a regular night with familiar stars and the moon. Even the moon's colour seemed to be up for debate by whoever controlled this place, and it never stayed the same for more than a few moments at most.

At times, it seemed like everything was in some nebula or massive star, sometimes even a great void of nothingness. Then, there were moments when both the land and sky would change places or sync up, and then it was as if I was standing in the space of some weird and endless sphere.

The worst of it was that even with the constant and ever-changing shifting of it all, it felt like time itself, too, was never constant. Everything seemed to move fast or impossibly slow at times. Never pausing, making it feel like an eternity passed in a second or that one day was a thousand years. For here, even the flow of time never seemed to stay the same.

It was marvellous and beautiful but also horrifying and maddening all at once and at different times, giving nothing to center the mind around. The only thing I could do was focus on myself and my own body to try and stay sane from the insanity that was around me, as I constantly felt my mind freezing up from the scenery and the other things.

“This can not be real. It has to be some absurdly vivid dream I can’t get out of,” I thought as I continued to look around me, finally realizing the line wasn’t just other humans but also other things that hurt the mind to look at and other humanoid races, too. It was starting to feel like I was on the most epic of drug-induced visions.

“Well, there is only one way to tell if it is a dream.” Thinking this, he brought his hand up to his mouth and bit down on it hard.

“OW!! FUCK THAT HURTS! AND WHY THE FUCK AM I NAKED!!!” Suddenly only, then realizing when looking at himself after bringing his hand up to bite it. But at the moment my voice tried to come out to speak, there was no sound. It was only thought that came to me and the motions of my lips moving. The bareness of clothes on my body went into the background at that moment.

“Hello……HELLO……HELLO!!....HEEELLOOOOOOO!!”

Yet still, no sound came out. Only the body motions and internal sounds from my mind gave any substance to the action, feeling like words were coming out.

Realizing that for all the visual stimulus around me, there was no sound, no feeling of wind or air except for my own body, which even that felt dulled, and no scents or smells. It was a palace of pure quiet and stillness in which all that could be experienced was merely the site and the experience of the changing flow of time.

“Well, I guess I better add that to the list of things happening.” The thoughts came out again as I attempted to make the sounds of the words.

Slowly but still in the phase of being in denial and overwhelmed by everything as well. It was starting to sink in what might have been happening. Like putting 2+2 together, it clicked in my mind that the only simple explanation for it all was that I was very likely dead.

“Am I dead? This can not be real, but it’s the only explanation unless I’m in some weird and cruel simulation.” The thought came to me again like an unwanted song in my head that just played on constant repeat again and again.

“I’m dead. I’m dead. Your dead, I cannot be dead, your dead, I’m dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead……” Once the thought came to me, it wouldn’t leave my mind. No matter how hard I tried to ignore it, it just kept cycling around and around, making me not care about anything for a good long while about what was happening around me.

It wasn’t that there was not any hope in me for another answer. It was just that, at my age, it would make sense. Being old sucked, but I knew the time was coming sooner for me than others. It was the whole reason for having the party with all my friends and family the day before.

I knew I wasn’t long left for the world, but I had wanted one more memory of them before I went on to the next great thing that all life experiences.

I just wanted one more happy memory of everyone together.

Yet, Every day over the last month up to the party, I had been feeling just a little weaker and a little more tired. I would feel less motivated and do a little less of my normal routine every day waking up later and sleeping sooner. And with less of an appetite for food or drink I could tell that it was very likely I was at the limit of what a human body could endure.

So, save for some super technology, that would not likely happen again in my lifetime. Unlike the technology and medicine that gave me such a blessed and long life, I could only reason it out to my life slowly reaching its limit. As I couldn’t think that I would get so lucky as to have gotten a third chance at life, one miracle for myself and humanity already seemed like a lot.

Since, after all, there is not much more help in the world that the life-extension treatments scientists and Doctors discovered in my eighties could do for a person so old.

When the technology and medical fields came together in my eighties and learned how to slow telomere and cell degradation, it was quickly realized that treatments worked much better on the younger newborns compared to the older generations. Most of us old fogeys knew it was only a small aid for us compared to them.

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I had already lived a blessed and surprisingly healthy life into my late hundred and eighties. So, a complaint about having even longer than that was not something I was truly going to argue about.

Though with the early application of the treatment in younger generations and newborns, the young were said likely to reach with life extension in the early years into the four or five hundreds with some potential to go into the thousands.

Still, though, for an average guy like me who in his younger years didn’t know such a thing was possible and seeing family and friends pass away just before this technology had come out. An extra hundred years of life, time with my wife, and the time to try different things and see many places.

It was a massive blessing I could not complain about, no matter how little extra time it gave me compared to others and who can complain about practically being able to live for three lifetimes.

“Heh, shit, I guess I am up a creek here now without a paddle, as they say. But still, this is one of those things I guess is still hard to accept when faced with the reality of possibly being dead and wherever here is. I mean, I was never truly one to believe in an afterlife or gods, but I would never have imagined something like this, not even if someone told me about it would I have believed it.”

“Though it is a lot easier to accept that is what is happening as opposed to other stuff when there is a giant humanoid bug in front of me and some weird, I guess I’ll call her an elf for now, behind me, at least these two don’t make my mind freeze up.”

For ahead and behind me, there were even more humans and other races of creatures and beings. Nakedness aside, this would take some getting used to, especially the changing lands and the realization that we were likely not alone in the universe after all.

As I once more gazed around and looked upon the land,, and the long lineup, What was starting to hit me again was that there weren’t just humans in this line. I could see there were many other beings too that would seem to be from either a sci-fi or fantasy land and others that could have just been from some slightly altered but differing world.

Then there were the strange or grotesque things and some that seemed almost made of energy. They looked straight out of a horror show or would give off weird auras that made my mind freeze up at times.

Some could be called elves, like the women behind me, while for others, I could see most would likely call them dwarfs, beastkin, fairies, dragons, or demons and some monsters. All the creatures that could be seen looked almost like they were from some fantasy-like place. Most were humanoid in shape.

They just had the typical long ears, beastly eyes, tails, horns or wings and were short or extraordinarily tall and thin. Some had fur or leathery skin on them in all different colours or patterns.

And yet others would have seemed to come from a sci-fi place as they looked almost like rumoured aliens. The gray’s a tall or short skinny gray hairless thing with big black eyes or even seemed to be an intelligent bug like the bug man in front of me who had four arms and walked on four legs with an exoskeleton.

Then there were even things I could not tell what they were. They made the mind freeze up just looking at them, as they were so strange or horrifying, along with the auras some gave off. They were so strange, it was almost like when the land changed to one of the weird places. I just couldn’t comprehend them at all; they would just make me freeze up upon seeing them.

Everything seemed to move on in this place both slowly and quickly in an endless ebb and flow of constant change. With my mind trying to make sense of it and accept that it was very likely I was dead, it all started to come to a point of breaking me.

It was too much for one mind to take in all at once.

But when it felt like all that made up my mind and spirit left me, bringing me to a point of no return both mentally, spiritually and in some ways physically to a point of almost frozen panic or insanity. An energy I had no idea what it was came up from my core and started to permeate me and bring me back from that dark and endless edge of nothingness and insanity.

The energy calmed my mind, soothed my spirit and aided my body all in some unknown way to hold back it all. The creature things and obscure landscapes that kept freezing me up every time they were seen became now present but unnoticeable to me.

The constant changing and shifting of skies, lands, races, and time also started to become bearable. It still did not make sense to me, but somehow, it was now bearable and sort of understandable.

The energy brought me to an almost trance-like state in which everything was in balance, my mind, body and spirit all working as one to hold each other together and hold who I was at the core of my being in place. I do not know or remember how long I was in that state of being fully aware of my surroundings yet enduring it all.

But for certain, there is one answer that I do know: if whatever energy I had at that time had not acted and continued to act every time after, I most likely would not have been able to endure.

What it helped me to realize, however, after calming the insanity welling inside myself though. Is that every time the lands and skies changed, some of the people, human or otherwise, would take a step forward and then disappear, at which time everyone, even myself, took one step forward, taking their place.

The lands and skies would stay the same for a while or an eternity and then it would repeat. People would disappear, and everyone else would take a step forward. Again and again, this happened and repeated. It was the only case of something that was a constant that seemed to be an almost law of this place.

It was, to me a cycle of change and motion that could not be broken even by myself who seemed to be the only one aware and conscious in this place. When I tried to not step forward a few timesI would inevitably do so no matter what.

As the time moved on from each repetition of this cycle, my mind started to drift and remember my life and everyone in it, how I met my wife and the sadness the day I lost her the year’s before, the times my kids were born, old pets, friends, my parents, brother, sister and other family. It let me replay it all, both good times and bad.

It also let me replay my life and look at my mistakes and triumphs, the joy I had of writing my first book, the pain of lost money to failed investments or trusting the wrong people, my various jobs, and schooling or trips, founding my company, raising a family in a world I always felt was outpacing me every day the sacrifices made to buy that first place of my own in my thirties and the joy of realizing in my forties I’m financially free.

“Shit, now that I think about it, I hope none of the little ones tried sleeping in my bed with me. I hope …….. Can get to me first. He will be able to handle it better than the others ……….. will just freak out and scream and …….. Would be scarred from it. Perhaps when this ends, and I get to wherever this place is taking me, I'll be able to meet ………. though if this is the afterlife.” I thought to myself as I floated in the nostalgia of it all.

But at one key moment, when I was remembering everything and came to the point of naming my first child when they were born, a shocking retaliation hit me, almost causing the soothing and Zen-like state I was in to come crashing down.

I realized that while it was all my own life and what I lived, I could not remember a single person’s name and only vaguely remember their faces. I knew them in a sense, but the names and faces would never come to the surface of my mind.

They were there but just out of reach by some mental barrier; I could almost break but never could, for when I truly tried, the energy in my body that I knew was keeping me sane and blocking the things that I couldn't comprehend would begin to fade at an alarming rate.

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“I can’t say the names. What the hell! I remember it all vividly. I know them, but why can’t I say them?” The thought ran through me, hitting me harder at that moment than anything else had throughout this whole experience here so far. I couldn’t do it.

The only way I was able to get any form of them to come to the surface in a way was by just replaying my memories of my life to myself.

For some reason, it was the only moment I could see their faces and grasp at the name for the barest of moments before they were taken away again. But nothing I did, no trick or stray thought, could bring out even one of the names and faces from the replaying of my life to the surface of my mind.

I knew on some instinctive level that even if I could or did not only would this weird energy leave my body, but I would lose not just the core being of myself but even the faint glimmer of memory of everyone I loved or cared for. To lose what little I had left of them scared me far more than anything else in this place could.

As I realized and found that nothing could be done and slowly regained the peace inside of myself again to some degree in myself, a deep pain or rage, I could not tell which started to well up from my core. It was the angriest and most pissed off I had ever been in my life, at the same time, the most painful thing I had ever felt.

Not being able to even remember them except in some weird form of memory that was splotchy even then at best. It was the most maddening and painful thing at the same time. Weirder still was I was thankful I was not like the others here.

For somehow, I knew on some weird mental or spiritual level they were unable to even have memories or a sense of self. They were there, but everyone else was just a husk in some way of what made them up. I knew, somehow, they had no thoughts and no memories. They were just blank.

“This afterlife shit sucks. It takes away something so precious to me. I mean, what the hell, why not take the rest? At least let me remember, my loved ones, for fucks sake. Do not take something so important from me fucking whatever the hell this place is!!!”

Yet even then, for all my rage and pain as I screamed to the heavens, I could still make no sound, and all that happened was the cycle of this place just continued, never stopping, yet still it felt like everything was gone in some way. Some spark that was me, some precious thing I didn't know I cared deeply for even with the drifting back of the mind memories it felt like this place had taken it from.

This was how I met my first God and stood before its realm in this long chain of insanity. Pissed off, I couldn’t even remember my family's or friend’s names and faces. Angry and in pain, I couldn’t even say them. Not truly knowing where this place was or why it happened at the peak of my rage and pain was the moment everything around me changed before I noticed.

There was no longer some eternal line or changing fields around me but a grand and highly ornate gate before me with a man standing before it looking sad and, for some reason, scared, too.

So, when I approached the man and the gate and spoke with no expectation of words coming out, they did, sharply and angrily. Those first words of a short and quick meeting with a god were,

“And what might this be now, and who are you?”