Henry set out for a random direction in the pouring rain, looking for the first sign of life. Thoughts overwhelmed him and obscured the already poor visibility to a blinding extent. He wandered the grassy plains for hours in the direction of faint light radiating in the distance. It seemed like it could illuminate the sky for hundreds of miles around in good conditions, but even in the rain this source of light was still plainly visible to someone at all looking for it. Though Henry was not— instead absorbed in thought— his subconscious drove him there despite his complete obliviousness.
On the way he contemplated how to proceed. Guilt wracked his mind and despair had become something akin to his friend over the long years. It was all he really knew and he always thought abandoning it would require significantly more effort than the changing of scenery, and yet here he was, mind occupied in thoughts unrelated to those which had been inescapable for… far too long now. Hope had sprung to life within Henry’s deadened chest as though the Antarctic itself had thawed. He was unprepared for this reality; it wasn’t something he thought was possible, much less expected to become real, and yet here it was. Life stared him right in the face, inescapable. What this meant for the rest of life on earth would be quite irrelevant for those no longer covered in ice. It meant one thing: freedom.
And if not now then when could he live freely? All his reservations aside, this was the moment Henry had been waiting for. This was the moment in which his passivity was finally broken by something outside of himself entirely beyond expectation. Given this fact, further contemplation was rather unnecessary. Whatever gave him this sensation of lightness, this lifting of the cloud of eternal night over the world, was something he knew must be pursued.
It was a promising situation that demanded nothing more than his acceptance. He could succumb to his guilt and allow the miserable person he once was to continue existing— to throw his immortal body into fire again and again in eternal misery— or he could abandon it all and embrace this new identity as herald of something far greater than himself. Nothing need be abandoned other than the shell of a dead self; the only act necessary was to embrace this new life at last. No, not even this. It was forced, and to resist it meant continued Sisyphean struggle against life itself in pursuit of a seemingly impossible end.
And he deserved this after all the suffering; it was the least the world could offer him. No one living felt the way he did, and none alive had ever burned the way he had. He had been given this opportunity from on-high for some divine purpose, and he would make just use of it. He would not spread carnage as he knew others might, for he was deserving of this power. He would not destroy those who stood in his way, he would show them the light of truth in darkness. Henry accepted this fate, and acknowledged to himself that allowing it to take hold would supplant any doubts he still possessed. It was as though decades of isolation had fallen away, and in their place the warm embrace of something greater had arrived to fill him from within. The void in his core seemed to be sated at last, and all it required was for him to allow this presence from within to take root in him just enough to fill it. With a shudder and the full release of tension on his shoulders, Henry pressed on in the rain towards a faint light in the rainy mist of the distance.
As he crested the top of a small hill, the rain parted and Henry at last saw the source of the light. For miles surrounding the source there was no rain, nor even a single cloud to be seen. A low-hanging ball lit the sky in its deep-orange rays of fire. It was about twice as large as Henry had remembered the sun having ever been, and as he stepped into its light the warmth gently tingled on his skin.
Then he looked up and saw no star in the sky. It was dark, save for the light of this fireball painted over a dark shade of bluish-gray as though the sun had just set. It was like nothing Henry had ever seen before, and he wondered to himself how this was even possible. Though a fantasy world, yes, he didn’t expect attacks of such… scale to even be possible in theory, much less used in actual combat. Such a thing was absurd, to possess the power to scour the earth to such an extent as was clearly inevitable here. One doesn’t just summon balls of fire large enough to be mistaken for a star, it’s not reasonable, it’s just not balanced. For such a thing to be possible means the gods of this world are bad at design.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
And yet as the ball of fire descended from the sky to render the surface of the earth uninhabitable for generations to come, it was absorbed by something shiny and reflective— a crystalline dome many miles in diameter. Not so much as a single crack opened in its surface, and darkness began to fall on the world without so much as a single sound. The world was unnaturally dark for a moment as all fell silent, and then Henry saw it. There were small cracks on…? Above..? No, they were splinters of shadow emitting from the dome. All the light in the sky began to decay into something not resembling night so much as the absence of all light for all time.
A shudder ran up Henry’s spine as he felt the cold blow in from where the ball of fire had been reduced not even to ash. As though to answer the now-burning question of where all of this energy had gone, tears opened in the fabric of space where the fire had once been. It looked darker even than Henry imagined the void of his own non-existence to appear. It was less the absence of light, nor even empty space, and more that space itself was absent. Normally space is filled with cosmic radiation, floating particles at a low density, dust, debris, and many other items such that it almost never approaches a complete vacuum over a large enough region. In this case it seemed as though nothing had ever existed there, nor ever could. The cracks in space had no sense of perspective, only size. They seemed just in front of Henry’s face like he was wearing a vr headset whose pixels had failed.
It felt nauseating and yet Henry did not wretch. There was no pain to this sensation, only disorientation. He stumbled, unable to get his bearings, but ultimately remained standing upright, though did take on a somewhat wider stance to compensate for lost balance.
The tears in space did not fade but rather expanded to follow a small column of now fleeing mages who had been routed in this counterattack. Clearly they had not expected columns of pitch-black darkness as though the earth itself had opened to swallow them to follow at the pace of a horse’s gallop. They stood no chance of escape, and yet they tried anyway.
It was futile. One by one they disappeared into the cracks torn in space, fate unknown but surely not one ending in long and healthy life. For a moment Henry contemplated what it would mean to be immortal in the vacuum of space, and in the next brushed it aside. Such thoughts were… not the kind he should be having right now. He knew intrusions of this nature were inevitable with his brain trained so long in thoughts of a similar kind, but was likewise familiar with methods for attempting to stop them. Moments like these made it quite convenient to be in a fantasy world with so many unknowns.
Henry began to question why one would build a city made of crystal as his feet began to move forward once more. He had been stationary to watch the battle, or, well, mass-killing of mages unfold, but now with the pressing thoughts of what it meant to be in this world once again at the forefront of his mind he needed to press onward.
“Can I use magic?” was obviously the first thought in his head, quickly followed by
“How?”
“Is what I felt before related?”
“Clearly my immortality is magic, so can I use other powers like it? What is the mechanism for all this?”
“Is it a game world—? If so, why haven’t I leveled up yet!?”
His thoughts raced without any sense of order, but with no context was unable to find even the beginnings of answers. Perhaps it was thoughts like these that made him forget he was approaching a heavily-fortified position that had just been assaulted by large quantities of firepower, but the obvious result of such an act did not occur. It did not occur to him at the time, but most mages would understand that purposefully closing the distance onto a target capable of resisting such absurdly powerful magic would be a rather foolish endeavor, and most fighters would have no hope of penetrating such thick crystalline fortifications.
Instead Henry marched up to the ever-larger half-sphere of faint and shimmering light coming from within the wall capable of resistance to even a star. There was no exit from outside, and as he paced he found no signs of life besides. Hours passed as he fruitlessly circled the wall in search of an entrance.