Adam’s vision was splashed with liquid light. The light that drowned him diminished little by little until it was completely dispersed.

Where am I?

He observed with curiosity.

In front of him was a long and narrow corridor stretched to infinity, delimited only by a mass of opaque darkness.

He inspected himself, a naked body without hairs or even digital prints. He didn’t even have man or woman characteristics. Human yes, but not his body, a completely generic body, looking more like a human doll than a real human.

I’m truly dead, he noticed placidly. It didn’t surprise him. He had woken up to a murloc cutting his throat with his claws. There were rarely good conclusions to this kind of things.

Adam could have been outraged to die like this, like a dog in a small, dirty, fishy-smelling room but after twelve years on the sea, after he had killed dozens and dozens of murloc and even some men, little still burdened him. It was to kill or to be killed.

In the end, dying at twenty-five isn't so bad. I’m already so exhausted, I can’t even imagine how I would have been in twenty years.

The krach had blown up their fragile economy, worsening their misery already well nurtured by the previous crisis.

And because of smartphones, keeping secret a village of murloc had become much more difficult.

An instant, the face nearly mummified of his captain flashed back to him, as well as the ones of senior members of the fleet. Their wrinkles were etched with the exhaustion and weariness that could be found in those who had plied the seas for decades.

They witnessed the transformations of Earth and fought the horrors which appeared sporadically for over thirty years.

Yes, it's better like that, he thought. His body began to move of its own volition. One step after another. The white ground was hot and gelatinous.

Slowly, he moved towards the call. An ardent desire that burned through his entire body.

He thought again at the orphanage, all the hunts he participated, the dead that he abandoned beside him, of his friends, of the captain and the other members of the Blue Wrath.

Straight to hell if that where if that where this passage leads. He mocked, at least I won’t be cold.

The hallway whispered in his ear. He had to head toward the exit. The ground was white, hot and lightly gelatinous.

Driven by some impulse, after a few steps, he turned around a complex and unpleasant manoeuvre

with this strange, marionette-like body. Behind him, thick darkness revealed a dead-end that concealed the path already covered.

Out of curiosity, he stretched out his arm penetrated obscurity and a profound feeling of dread, an awful sensation that something touched his arm forced him to lower it instantly.

He recoiled, the troubling inkling of his uncontrollable body took him away from the pain until an echo ran through his spine, a succinct sense of horror that anchored in his bones, it was as if he had been dissected by something lurking in the dark.

His body continued to advance and he abandoned all resistance while the light faded behind him, swallowed up by the voracious shadows.

In this empty corridor, he continued to walk, continuously, outside of time, lost in an in-between place.

Is this purgatory?

A straight line of infinite introspection, inviting him to review in an endless loop of bitterness his failures, resentments and remorse, his life in short.

Just before his beginnings as a murloc hunter, after arriving in Los Angeles, he saw a movie called “Jacob’s Ladder”. Was he like the soldier in his own purgatory, not yet dead but having already crossed the line of the living?

He arrived just after the “Fracture”, the earthquake of L.A. that revealed murlocs to all. From the opened earth appeared more than one dozen nests of those creatures. It was a true Eldorado, the beginning of the murloc rush.

A lot of blood sank those days.

For him, a little orphan freshly landed from Switzerland it was the most attractive offer. He started three days after his arrival. At fourteen and a half, seven days after his debut, he killed his first man.

The corridor gradually became smaller, and while it was still shrouded in light, a descending triangular ceiling appeared.

He began to lower himself, then knelt and continued crawling on all fours when the roof above him dropped too low.

Suddenly, in front of him, a door appeared, projecting flashes of light. Very small, it looked more like a kind of trapdoor or a cat flap, carved with gold reliefs featuring strange writings, for a brief moment he stopped fascinated by these rune-like writings. He pushed the trapdoor.

The world shattered, blasted by a mauve color that came crashing down on him, followed by countless sparkling colors that rushed at him as he drowned under their fiery bubbling.

Red, blue, yellow, green, purple and so many others, including some colors he'd never seen before, all flooded into his vision as if he were now submerged in a multicolored sea.

The world around him was changing, transforming and deforming into the strangest shapes. Finally, mauve imposed itself once again, chasing away all the other colors.

As he gagged and faded away, everything stopped.

“Fuck,” he articulated with difficulty.

He felt his body lighten and dissolve into a silhouette of dazzling specks of light.

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The next moment, the light diminished as an eerie ceiling towered over him. It was almost as if it had been carefully covered in dull gold leaf. He looked around and realized that it wasn't a ceiling, but the sky.

There were also clouds of twelve colors from yellow and purple to red and green.

His gaze drifted downwards and remained glued to the tallest building he had ever seen. In the foreground stood a gigantic scarlet lighthouse, crushing the horizon with its majesty, monopolizing all eyes.

No, when he saw the immense structure, his instincts told him that it was the Lighthouse and not a lighthouse. It projected a light as blinding as the one he'd recently bathed in. It flowed in a torrent of liquid light that churned, bubbled and squeezed into a great waterfall as it fell, thick, into a wide riverbed.

When the water, or light, or whatever this matter was, melted into the main body of the river, all its force disappeared, it stopped, came to a halt, and, bathed in the stagnant state of the river, it seemed to freeze.

This river wasn't flowing. Without any movement, the unknown liquid stagnated. In any case, from his point of view, he would have been incapable of giving this river any sense of flow.

Nothing, a static, debasing, sempiternal immutability. It exuded as much nobility, solemn and grandiosity as it did a slight sense of alienation. How else, with such an enormous waterfall and incredible quantities of liquid flowing into it, could it not have overflowed its banks?

One part of the petrified river could be seen far below where it was floating, while another part extended behind the waterfall and split into two trunks, each winding around one of the emerald hills and disappearing behind the mounds.

With a jolt, his body moved towards the Lighthouse as if caught on an invisible leash. The golden sky reflected by the light water was soon forgotten as he saw the vast gardens surrounding the river.

Indeed, impossible to detect at first, as he was drawn closer to the Lighthouse incessant colors speckled the sublime scene.

Giants fields of sunflowers laid on the edges of the valley on which the Lighthouse rested, mixed with other colorful flowers and plants of all shapes and sizes.

The scent of garlic wafted through the air and perfumed the place and even when he was so high in the air, he could smell the invasive odor. But most astonishing of all were the countless creatures lining the banks of the river and the surrounding forests.

Among these creatures were little four-eyed white fairies, with long golden hairs flew and laughed in the air. A little further on, paddling into the river, were female angels with delicate bodies but big muscular arms like bodybuilders with golden halos floating above their blond heads.

There were unicorns with bodies made of rainbows and white unicorns chasing each other merrily between the tall plants, there were also pegasus and large doves flying. Immaculate cranes and giant albino cats slept on big golden and white slimes.

Flamboyant bird-men read thick novels resting lazily on checkered picnic blankets or chatted while nearby sphinxes, all victims of severe stinginess in terms of facial hair revealing bald, protruding mountain-like skulls, gathered around a crossword in what appeared to be a Newspaper.

Cherubim played all sorts of instruments in long white togas, conjuring fireballs and fiery serpents into the air as the music thundered.

And before he could observe the other mysterious creatures his body projected at high speed, penetrated the Lighthouse.

He arrived in a white space. The whole space seemed empty and boundless. White. Only white.

A boundless sea of white.

A small noise called to him, a sort of cat purr, and he looked up and froze.

Above him, a gigantic golden cocoon in the shape of a crescent moon swayed gently, suspended by two black chains emerging from the void.

The front of the cocoon was covered with thousands of enormous golden eyeballs with pale pink pupils inside, so many that they seemed to cover each other like some kind of horrible acne. His back was covered with hundreds of grotesques, misshapen white wings, some no bigger than a finger while others seemed to lose themselves in the boundless room.

He saw the eyes stop, and all began to stare at him as the pupils fell to the bottom of the eye, resembling those flickering eyes used in child DIY.

A wave of golden light swept across the white room.

Adam felt his head open as masses of white square tiles, inscribed with letters of the Latin alphabet, spilled out in front of him.

In a furious whirl, they rose into the heavens and converged, letter after letter forming words.

The first word to emerge was “time”, then countless others were transformed. Saffron, blue, Swiss, boat and so many other words appeared.

Other tiles represented all sorts of positions and gestures he knew, including a handshake and a wink.

Glancing around, he saw that most of the tiles then separated into different groups, gathered around one or more core words and floating around.

The tiles corresponding to words merged and then scattered around him, forming groups of these words.

Mostly French words, with a few English and German here and there. As time went by, more and more words were formed from these strange tiles. Sometimes the same word would split into several copies.

Some were the victims of surprising events.

He saw the word "death" emerge from him, and the tile broke, then quickly turned to dust, as did all the webs of gestures, expressions and musical notes he barely knew.

The tiles of languages, countries, art forms and various insults, created great clouds of dust as they gradually disappeared.

Not to mention all the first names and surnames on his mind, he saw a mass of these tiles spouting out, simply creating the thickest cloud of dust he'd ever seen, almost equivalent to that of a great wave.

Apart from these tiles turning to dust, others were also changing. He saw the word “necromancer” blur as if erased by a rubber.

He looked on, immersed in observing the various sights before him. Strange word clusters were forming. The words life, ghost and others floated around the Transformation tile.

Inspecting the groups, Adam saw all sorts of gatherings whose logic was hard to fathom. The "insect" group included spiders and even crustaceans. However, the word "butterfly" was also the central tile in another group, containing many of the same words as the insect tile.

In these other unlikely groupings, he saw the Life group, which included the words zombies, specters, vampires and many others.

These groups were huge, with hundreds or more words floating around in each pack.

Finally, when no more tiles appeared, they began to shake and whirr and then the white space shook completely as a gigantic wave similar to the river water flowing from the lighthouse. It submerged the space and crashed over the words, which changed as all manner of strange symbols emerged from the water and merged with the tiles.

Adam simply stood in front of the countless words inscribed on the tiles, eyes wide open as the eyes of the cocoon above him watched with amusement.

A curtain of light froze the scene for a moment, showering it with a golden whiteness, and then all the tiles changed completely.

During that time he was left completely unable to think.

Then the tiles where all the words he knew had disappeared, replaced by tiles with mysterious runic symbols, identical to those of the trapdoor. They whirled around and floated before him, merging into a strange symbol that quickly changed from an inert gray to a brilliant white and sank into his head.

What was it?

Spica had no time to integrate what had just happened before he heard a crystalline laugh freeze his thoughts and his silhouette became increasingly colorless until it disappeared completely.

The laughter distressed the cocoon, whose eyes quickly made great exaggerated movements before dropping to the bottom of their eyes, pretending to be dead, while the white room itself trembled.