Our story starts with a young man walking down the street thinking about what he would have for dinner. It was down to steak and rice or chicken and pasta with red sauce. While it was not some critical decision in the grand scheme of things, it would decide how his day went. The wrong choice could lead to him being unhappy with the major meal of the day thus it would turn the day into a bad one. A normal choice in a normal day in a normal life for a normal man.

He would have continued to lead a normal uninteresting life if not for an uncommon occurrence in the omniverse. You see the thing is that occasionally people just fall between the seams of reality. This has a one in six hundred twenty quintillion chance of happening which sounds like a rarity but when you factor the infinite moments in the lives of infinite people occupying the infinite worlds that make up the omniverse, it does tend to happen.

Traveling through what is known to some as unreality was like putting yourself inside a giant running blender then throwing that into a riptide off the coast of Alaska and hoping to end up in Hawaii. Most die quick, but the unlucky ones were the ones who could adapt enough to survive but not enough to do anything with that life.

The space quite ironically had no concept of space, or time for that matter. As a result, if one did not learn how to move through the chaos, they would be trapped in the unreality forever. This was due to the fact that one could not die as they would need to progress to the next moment in time to be allowed to do so. Which as previously mentioned did not exist in unreality.

To live an eternity in nothingness teaches all those who suffer it one of the hardest lessons to learn in life, that there are some fates worse than death.

***

One second, I’m walking down the street, the next one I’m surrounded by what I can only describe as space turned to water. It looked like black water with glowing stars of all colors floating around in it. Now I know with certainty, somehow, that my surroundings were not that. My senses were just interpreting my surroundings in a way that I could interpret.

I tried unsuccessfully to shut my eyes as some sort of instinct told me that my surroundings were not meant to be seen by sane mortal eyes and they would try to correct that. As the first adjective was easier to fix than the second, they would go with that. My surroundings were driving me mad, distorting my view of the limited portion of reality I was previously familiar with, shattering my perceptions and reforged them skewed and corrupted, but that was not my major problem.

Which is troubling.

My body was being torn apart, burned by both fire and acid, frozen, and bashed around. And yet none of those things were happening as those were all reality-based concepts. My surroundings were just making my body come undone and yet even that was still not my major problem.

Which is even more troubling.

It started with threads suddenly coming out of my chest. Now I know they were not actually threads as my senses were yet again coming up with a way to process what was happening to me. I could now feel my soul in its entirety. Unfortunately, the first sensation my new nerves felt was literal soul agonizing pain as the aforementioned threads snapped one by one.

Each time I lost a connection to some aspect of my being.

The first of the threads to snap was my connection to time. Don’t ask how I know what it was or why it was first, I just know in the same way you know that you have two hands, and the left was just cut off. With its severance I would forever be a foreigner in the river of time.

The first effect of this disconnect, immortality, was both a blessing and a curse as all immortality tends to be. While I could still be injured and killed inside reality as those events would force the world that I was in to remember to impose the concept of time upon me, I was immune to aging as no world could penetrate deep enough into my being to reimpose time upon my very existence. I was forever twenty-five, so at least I was lucky enough to be paused young.

Being a foreigner in time was weird in a way that’s hard to describe as while time was fairly subjective to humans, it was ultimately objective. A second is a second no matter how mortals choose to view it, but to me that old quote from Einstein rang true. Kissing a girl could truly feel like a single instant me no matter how long it occurred and burning myself on the stove could truly feel like a lifetime.

This also made me immune to paradoxes and time alterations. You could kill my grandfather and it would have no effect on me, hell I could kill him. Which was nice, niche but nice.

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The next thread to go was space. With its severance I was adrift in the sea of space, which came with both benefits and demerits.

On the plus side, I could now walk through space like few others. One step could take me anywhere in the world, and I could enter and leave almost any space at will.

The downside to this is that I could be banished from or pulled to different realities against my will with startling ease.

Both severed threads fundamentally changed how I interacted with their related concepts. Some forms of manipulating time and space would come naturally as a fish swimming while others would forever be outside my grasp.

The next thread severed was fate. I would never again be restricted nor protected by fate; never again would I have my actions foretold. This had the small disadvantage of never being able to view or change it, but seeing as I believe that fighting against fate is possible for the determined and/or powerful it is not all that impactful to me. It came with a huge upside though, I would never be squashed by fate or used as a footstool for another as so often happens to the unchosen ones in stories.

The last of the outbound threads was the one that connected me to my home reality and reality itself. Now, while I could live in any world without ever feeling rejection, no plane of existence would ever feel like home again and unless I got lucky, I would never again see my home, family, or friends except in my dreams. I was also now resistant to reality-altering effects and the constraints that reality inflicts upon its residents.

Now all these abilities and demerits would only come into effect if I could get myself out of this rather tricky situation as I ran out of external things to be taken.

Next came my soul. If I thought everything that came before was painful, I did not truly know the word until now. However, this space seemed an adequate teacher.

I started to lose what made me who I am: talents, interests, loves, hates, and attachments.

It turns out I had quite a talent for the violin.

There goes my high school crush that I still semi carried a torch for.

Where did my feelings for my childhood bully go? Oh, wait I lost it to unreality, how could I forget that?

My only idea to get me out of this situation is to weave the unraveling threads of my existence back together. I don’t know how to go about that or if that would even work, but not with that attitude it won’t.

The other problem with my plan was that I had already lost critical parts of my soul and body. My mind was also a distorted pretzel at this point.

I reached with my mind, body, and soul towards the threads that made them up. Which was a trippy experience, let me tell you.

The threads wiggled.

I lost my understanding of Indian history. Which as far as knowledge goes is probably one of the best to lose as all I know of the country’s history would fill half a page at most.

I reached with the determination that came from not knowing what I would lose next. I could feel the threads with the new sense that this area forcibly gave me during my corruption. This allowed me to manipulate them. That was the wiggle backed hope at least.

The first step was to build a barrier around myself made of the things I don’t mind losing: my vitality, all talents unrelated to my current endeavor, and my feelings for all those expect the closest friends and family. While those things were a lot to lose, they all would do me no good if I was dead.

The second step of my admittedly uninformed plan was to unravel the remaining threads and weave them together with unreality energy in the hopes that I built up an immunity to it. This led to the next step, weave the trio together in hopes that they filled in each other’s gaps and support each other. The resulting structure resembled a trio of three dimensional spider webs tangled together comprised of the “pink” threads emanating from my mind, the “red” threads of my heart, the “blue” threads of my soul.

This connected the three energy circulatory systems together and caused the circulating vital energies to mix. This should have been extremely lethal, but I had two advantages. The first is that unreality had already gotten rid of all my weak points, and I had covered for the missing parts by leaning the three against each other. The second was that all three were already dead by most standards. So as long as I kept the proverbial balance, I still had a chance at revival.

The next period of timeless time was spent on a mix of letting the energies mix and fixing the damage caused by incorrect combinations. Eventually I did get an energy that could provide energy to all three centers. The result was a composite thread that glowed a “blackish purple”. The rest was simply propagating this change throughout my body.

Due to accumulated damage and degradation, I was now child-sized and crippled in a myriad of ways.

The big disadvantage of my new state of interconnected being was that my three bodies, physical, mental, and spiritual, would share defenses. Physical, mental, and spiritual attacks would be distributed amongst all three defenses. While this would turn into more and more of an advantage as the three defenses increased. Currently this dragged me down as the majority of attacks would be physical and affect the other two bodies that were more susceptible to damage.

I was done not a moment too soon as the moment I was done black water breached my sacrificial defenses. Luckily, when the water washed over me, I was already a proverbial fish. With my newfound status came instincts that contained how to leave this space and a sorta map of nearby exit points. I opened a portal to a mildly safe world containing the needed supplies to fix my precarious situation. That was the hope at least, I was working on a deadline after all. I had lost the majority of my vital energies after all. Every action, every thought, every emotion brought me closer to the deadline.

A tear opened in front of me, and I willed myself through into the unknown.