Seattle, some four major intersections from the border of the University. A small silver truck refused to slow down despite the light ahead being firmly red, racing into the intersection at a velocity already against the law. Not everyone saw it coming in time, and the resulting crash spiraled out of control with almost comedic choreography if it hadn't been so full of anguish and the impending loss of life. There I was on the sidewalk, caught by surprise and, as always, unable to flee or dodge as a Japanese import swerved in a desperate attempt to avoid crashing into the developing pile-up. The look of horror on the driver's face was perhaps the last clear thing I saw, as she all but shattered her foot through the floorboard trying to stop before she hit my wheelchair. To no avail. The front of her car was totaled, crashing into an electric wheelchair and its' tetraplegic graduate student occupant; my sack of groceries scattering in the impact that drove me into a parked vehicle past the sidewalk. You know what they say, 'Russian Guy Suffers Most.' Being smashed between two automobiles was a ghastly way to die. But compared to what my future held, it was practically angelic mercy.
Consciousness faded, everything turning whiter than white rather than sliding into black like it ought to have. My awareness came back in the midst of blinding light. Nothing in either church - I was a mostly lapsed Russian Orthodox by the way - nor in all the reading I'd done in my 26 years had prepared me for this encounter with the afterlife. Light without limit, so bright that words fail to describe anything about it, and something in the distance waving vast tentacles. Around me were other dead and dying folks, many speaking yet the volume remained low and nothing was understandable when the voices reached my ears. And an utterly inhuman presence spoke to me, without words yet the meaning was strangely clear.
"What is evil?" "What is sin?" "What is darkness?" the tentacles wanted of me, somehow expressing that this was not a rhetorical set of questions. Inexplicably, I knew that whatever or whoever was asking me this truly did not know the answers, and hoped that I did. This, than, was what the dead were speaking of. All of us were being asked the same. Another flash of knowledge that made no sense whatsoever told me that the tentacles would grant eternal life to those who answered best, but that only nine of us could gain that prize.
How was I supposed to answer that? This... this thing was nothing like God nor like Satan, both of Whom would surely already know to a far more refined degree than any mortal possibly could. How could this gatekeeper of the afterlife, presumably the way to Heaven, not know? What answers could I, a mere layman without any fancy theological training or experience, give that others more knowledgeable had not already done?
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An unknown time, later. In a place I would eventually know far too well.
"With the authority of the Heavens I command the evildoer, Volodymyr-Ra the Ever-Wicked, to REVIVE!" The voice thundered through my mind, jolting me back to consciousness. With the sudden sensation of falling like I was rudely awakened from a deep sleep, my eyes sprang open to regard a curved stone wall in front of my nose. Or, rather, the curved interior of a sarcophagus lid, which grated as it started to slide to my left. I did not think to question why the inside of it was illuminated, though the light beyond proved intense enough to make my eyes water and squint.
The scene that the sliding stone revealed was hardly the kind of thing anyone would expect to wake up to. It seemed to me that I sat or stood in a narrow alcove, not yet recognizing the sides of the sarcophagus around me for what they were, facing a pentagonal pool of clear, violet liquid with a low rim raised around it. I could see that this rim was ornamented in an inlaid or engraved design, but not what it was. On one side of the pool loomed a blue-gray statue with a monstrous head atop a human-like body, in the fashion of an imitation of ancient Egyptian art, two more of them on the other. White shelves stood by the single statue, with a number of books visible upon them, as well as other things I could not make out immediately. Between the pool and the keystone-shaped opening full of swirling fog on the far side stood a slender man, of Han Chinese features and no clear age, dressed in flowing emerald robes delicately decorated with stylized waves in copper thread. His long hair and flowing beard appeared as burnished copper themselves, with a pair of pointed, excruciatingly overdone elvish ears extending past the top of his head. His upraised arms ended in radiance such that I could not look directly at them, swiftly dimmed as he lowered them, the radiance condensing into long-fingered hands with a jeweled ring on each finger. His gaze sank down, then raised up, looking me over with barely restrained disgust.
I returned his gaze, mostly confused by the situation and why he was looking at me that way. My thoughts churned, trying to figure out what was going on, where I was. But the immediate past was like a broken arm screaming in agony at the slightest touch. Even trying to recall was too much for me, my mind recoiling involuntarily from the attempt.
"Explain yourself, Volodymyr-Ra. What happened to The Lightvine, and where are the other eight evildoers it was to bring back?" Prim, proper, a voice full of authority and brimming with self-confidence. Also extremely annoyed at something These were my first impressions of him.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," I answered. That name he called me. So bizarre, yet... No. Oh, no! The room, that name. It clicked together. This was something out of an American cartoon?!? My heart should have been pounding in my chest, with the alarm racing along my nerves at that thought.
Hidden in the stone behind me, in the back of the sarcophagus, a heart-sized crystal throbbed to that alarm instead. A regular solid of 17 faces, it was an utter impossibility by the rules of mathematics and physics known on Earth. Rootlets of invisible, intangible 'light' connected it to everything in the chamber except for the person speaking to me, and a vine-like cord of the same forces connected it to the fleshly form that I perceived as being my body. A body which it had grown in response to his command that I revive.