‘It’s…dark…’

That made sense; after all, it was the middle of the night, and all the lights were off. Not even the moonlight could’ve gotten past the blackout curtains drawn over every window. The only other possibility beyond that was the gentle glow of the clock on the nightstand back in the bedroom, but it wasn’t there either.

But it didn’t feel like she was in bed, and even then, it shouldn’t have been that dark. ‘Shouldn’t my eyes have adjusted by now…?’ If nothing else, she should’ve been able to see the shapes of furniture in the surrounding room.

Her back was against something cold and hard. Wood? No, it felt sleeker, cooler; a synthetic surface. Vinyl, then. ‘This feels like the floor in the downstairs hallway…’ Which meant that the strange, pointed surface next to her must be the landing at the base of the stairs.

‘…why am I on the floor?’

She tried to move, but…couldn’t, not without a significant amount of pain. She could feel it pulsing all over her body, but she had a feeling that she was numb to the worst of the feeling.

‘It hurts to breathe… it hurts worse to swallow.’ And the taste when she finally did was like swallowing a copper coin. She gagged, and as she did, something oozed its way into her eye and stung like a needle.

‘My body feels so…heavy.’ Moving anything required her to summon almost twice as much energy as usual. Meanwhile, her head was light, almost like coming off of a merry-go-round.

‘I’m so…exhausted… Am I sick…?’

She thought she should get up, and try to get back to bed. At least there she would gain some measure of comfort to go along with her pain. Or maybe crawl to the bathroom, it was just around the corner.

‘So tired…’

The taste had seeped into her throat at that point. No use denying what it was now: blood. Her first thought was that she’d bitten her lip or her tongue, but she couldn’t recall doing it.

‘Maybe I should go to the hospital…’

Her cell phone was there somewhere. If she could just find it, maybe…

‘Nope…nothing…’ she thought, still trying to feel around but with little success. Every attempt to move her arm was met with a paralyzing pain like nothing she’d ever felt before.

‘...I guess I’ll just…lie here then…’

‘...at least…for now…’

‘Yeah…rest sounds…amazing…’

…

…

‘It's been so long since I’ve had some good…rest…’

And then…there was nothing. No cold feeling against her back. No pain reverberating through her body.

Instead, she could feel air moving about her, almost like someone had propped a fan next to her. But it was moving all over her body. ‘It kind of feels like floating in an ocean…of air…’

Then, the darkness began to fade, going from a deepening black to that of a navy blue, speckled with glittering white lights. She was looking into the sky, but the sky was all around her.

Yet, at the same time, this sky felt altogether foreign. ‘I can’t find Orion…or the Big Dipper… Where are all the constellations…?’ She’d spent countless hours looking up into the night, and was always able to find them, but none of them were there.

“Hi there!”

She couldn’t feel anything moving around her anymore. The invisible current that had carried her thus far had settled. But she still hadn’t come to rest on a surface. ‘What a weird…dream…’

She tried to stand, but couldn’t. Her body wasn’t responding at all anymore. Or rather, it was like her brain was sending the transmission, but there was nothing there to receive it.

“Hey, can you hear me in there?”

‘Huh…?’ Was that a voice? ‘It sounds like it's on the other side of a wall, though. Or trying to talk through a pillow…’

“Hellooooooo?”

It was a little clearer, and gradually, a bright glow began to take shape on the edge of her vision. She looked up towards it.

It was another light, shaped like a ball. ‘It's as big as my head…’

Unlike the other lights, however, this one was moving on its own, and it seemed…unstable. Its amorphous form sloshed about like glowing pudding.

“I can see you moving, you know. You’re not fooling anyone.”

She had the urge to blink, but of course, she couldn’t. With the way things were going, she’d doubted that she could, but still wanted to try. She also tried to open her mouth to speak, but nothing.

The voice, on the other hand, was clear as day now, and it let out a recognizably incensed sigh. “Just my luck, another dud. Why do I always get stuck with the inept souls? I say, you there! It's quite rude of you to just stare at me without answer, you know.”

“M-me…?” Oh! So she could speak. Even without being able to feel her lips or tongue moving, she could at least hear her voice, and it echoed wondrously as if she were speaking inside an auditorium.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Yes! You,” the little glowing ball bounced impatiently, “I’ll have you know that I’ve been trying to get your attention for several minutes now. Or, wait, has it been that long? Apologies, I’m afraid time is sort of a transient concept for me.”

“Oh… I…” she stammered a little, not knowing how to respond. Talking to others wasn’t exactly her strong suit to begin with, but what do you say to a glowing space ball?

“Sorry… I’m just a little confused,” she finally managed out, “Where…am I…?”

The ball gave a thoughtful hum, then answered, “Of course, you’d choose the most complicated question to answer, wouldn’t you? Well, I suppose it can’t be helped. It’s less of a where and more of a…when? Or perhaps, in some strange and tangled way, it's both. In simple terms, this is what you might call the ‘Edge of Creation’. Or to put it even more simply: this is where it all begins and ends.”

“Where…what begins and ends?” she asked.

“It. All of It. You know, like…everything. Birth of stars, seeds of life, big bangs and what have you. You and I both exist, here, now, but at the same time, we have already existed here before and will exist here again later. Does that make sense?

‘That most certainly does not make sense!’ she railed mentally. It made so little sense that she felt like she understood less now than when the conversation started.

At the same time, however, she had the sneaking suspicion that admitting her bewilderment to talking disco ball would only exasperate it—as well as just lead to a somehow even more confusing conversation, so she opted to pretend otherwise.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” the ball’s voice seemed questionable at first, but then sounded relieved, “Okay! Good, I’m glad we got that sorted.”

“So then…does that make you, like… God or something?”

“Oh! Um…well…” the sphere faltered, then paused a little while before collecting itself. “Sure! God, yeah, why not? Let’s go with that.”

There was a moment of silence, during which the ball seemed to read her skepticism. It sighed.

“I suppose you could equate me to something God-like, at least in terms of my abilities. If you’re asking if I ‘made’ you, though, no. I am merely an Admin, I have no power over creation.”

“Admin?” she asked quizzically, “As in like an ‘administrator’? Like in tech support or something like that?”

“Yes! Exactly!” the ball seemed quite excited by her understanding. “That is to say that I manage, well, everything. Kind of. Not just me, of course, there are quite a few of us. My current task is client-to-client onboarding—why are you looking at me like that? Look, just think of me as your ‘guide’ or ‘guardian’. The point is, I’m here for you, and speaking of which, do you remember your name?”

“...Lauren,” she said after a moment, curious about the phrasing. Why wouldn’t she remember her name? “Lauren Dreyd.”

“Good, it seems your memory is still intact, then. I had concerns that it may have sustained damage during the fall.”

“The…fall…?”

The ball of light stopped, and there was a long moment of silence. Inevitably, it started back up again, but this time its tone was careful, “I see, so you don’t quite remember that bit. Understandable. Well then, let me explain in the simplest terms that I can. You see, Miss Dreyd—”

“Lauren,” she interrupted.

“Ah, I’m…sorry?”

“Just…Lauren is fine.”

The voice paused again, but this time only momentarily. “As you wish. Well then, Lauren: you’re, well…kind of dead.”

Now it was Lauren’s turn to go silent, after which a few uneasy words dripped from her lips, “I’m…sorry, what?”

“Yep!” the voice was quick to respond. “You are dead. As in, deceased. You have expired. You kicked the bucket. Your clock has run out. You—”

“I know what dead means!” Lauren rasped, “But what do you mean I’m ‘dead’!? How can I be dead?!”

The sphere must have sensed that Lauren wasn’t going to accept a simple answer to these questions and opted to try something else instead. “Perhaps it would be best to simply show you.”

A pearly mist began to emanate from the globe’s center, eventually covering a small area before her. Amid this haze, Lauren slowly began to perceive things: at first undefined shapes that vaguely resembled rooms, but which soon became more and more detailed.

The first thing she recognized was the layout of her house—or rather, the first floor, including the hallway with the laminated floor. After that, objects within the hallway began to take shape as well, until something else came into view: the outline of something sprawled out over the floor where the hallway met the stairwell.

It took some time for the image to settle, and when it did, Lauren found herself staring down at her likeness, right down to the polka-dot pajama pants and the oversized band t-shirt she always wore to bed. But the version she saw was also pallid and motionless, with a streak of red down the side of her face.

Lauren felt her stomach churning—or at the very least, something similar to that feeling—as she stared, horrified, at her birds-eye view of what she could only surmise was her very own corpse!

“I…fell down the stairs…?” she spoke in something just above a whisper, unable to take her gaze off of the image.

“Correct!” the answer was entirely too chipper for the situation, Lauren thought, but the little floating sphere didn’t seem particularly sensitive to her plight. “You lost your footing and took a tumble down the stairwell of your own home, suffering several severe injuries, including a broken arm, a snapped calf, and a cracked shoulder blade, not to mention several bruised ribs. However, the cause of your death was largely attributed to when you struck your head on the banister near the landing, which resulted in significant trauma and bleeding. This, along with your poor health due to lack of care and consistent illness, was what sealed your doom. That brief moment of consciousness that occurred a while later was over an hour after the incident, and by then, it was far too late. And since you live alone, it will be a few days before anyone finds your body!”

“...oh,” Lauren was too stunned to say anything more than that. It was the perfect explanation for her earlier situation. All the locations of the pain made sense, too. If this was a dream, it was scarily accurate, and she had already tried pinching herself.

The Admin was silent for a long time as if giving Lauren a moment to process what was happening, but that courtesy didn’t last long.

“So, look…” it said, seemingly hesitating, “I realize that this is a lot for you to take in—the whole ‘being dead’ bit, I mean. So here’s an idea: why don’t we go inside and sit down? I brought refreshments!”

“In…side?” Lauren struggled to sound out the word as if it was somehow foreign to her. Inside what? Where?

“Yep! To my sanctum, of course. We can get you better acquainted with your situation now, as well as what comes next for you.”

Lauren was silent, but her mind was racing. ‘My situation? What comes next…? What is it…talking about?’ Rather than continue to fight the dream by barraging it with questions, though, she simply nodded. And the moment that she did, something happened.

There, in the middle of space, a seam appeared. It traced through the cosmic blackness as if it were being ‘shopped into being. It started as nothing more than a tiny, blueish dot, which then became a line, then two connected lines, until eventually it formed a tall box.

A door! And then, just like in a movie, the door ‘opened’ inward, and everything was bathed in its glow.

Lauren wanted to gasp. To cry out at something so strange and fantastic. To blink her eyes over and over to dispel the mirage. ‘A place called the Edge of Creation, someone claiming to be a god-like administrator, a birds-eye view of my own corpse, and now, a strange magical space door. Not a single rational thing to be found here…’

And yet, something about this situation felt undeniably…real. So unbelievably believable. Everything fit, and in some weird, twisted way that was surely brought about by her overactive imagination, it made some sort of sense. She was dead, and this was the ‘fantasy’ afterlife that so many video games and books had instilled in her.

But at the same time, there was a sort of…solace in this situation. Everything that was happening right now was out of her control, and for whatever reason, that fact was a comfort.

‘If I’m on some sort of afterlife conveyor belt, I guess there’s only one thing to do…’ she reasoned, watching the Admin disappear beyond the light.

Lauren still couldn’t feel her body, but despite that, she somehow knew that she could move, just by willing herself to. And as she did, a line from one of her favorite books came to mind. ‘Let’s see what’s on the other side of this rabbit hole.’