Victor supposed there had to be a first time for everything—even dying. He had no eyes to open, limbs to move, or senses to rely upon. Objectively, it was a terrifying experience.

Yet, the politician existed. Victor hadn’t realized how comforting the sound of his heartbeat or the steady inhale and exhale of his breath had been until he found himself bereft of those sensations. When those things were stripped from him, all that existed was an endless darkness.

Maybe I’m in heaven. The humorous thought crossed his mind as his consciousness returned.

Victor’s dad had raised him in a strict, conservative household, and the politician had always identified as a Christian. It wasn’t a conscious decision—God was just kind of something that he had always done.

The pandemic of ‘44 had cemented his perceived faith. Victor didn’t honestly believe, but as an infantry commander, he had burned enough bodies and delivered their eulogies to make the right noises for those listening.

It wasn’t until the nationalist party rose to power in the fallout of the Iranian War that Victor was free to be himself. The party heavily discouraged religious observance, and he was all too willing to throw off the shackles of faith.

The more Victor clawed for absolute power, the more evident religious piety was a useful political tool rather than actual belief. He didn’t need tenets or creeds delivered by a higher power. The politician would instead warp them to suit his particular ends or machinations at the time.

Instinctual devotion decayed into agnostic utilitarian control. A tactic the nationalist party employed themselves. There might not have been any atheists on the battlefield, but there were plenty in the hallowed halls of Congress.

So, maybe Victor wasn’t in heaven, but it certainly wasn’t hell. He had seen enough of that on Earth and would recognize its stench.

So, if this isn’t heaven, what is it? thought Victor.

He considered his thoughts—metacognition was typically a sign of life. Sure, it wasn’t the most exciting proof of his continued existence, but it was evidence.

Victor’s fellow elites would scoff at the idea of a soul, magic, or the supernatural. The politician wasn’t sure how he knew he was conscious, but he was. His soul persisted long after a bullet to the chest robbed him of life.

He was a materialist. Consciousness was simply electrical signals traveling across neurons in the brain, yet Victor’s existence directly opposed his assumptions. There were no neurons to carry a current—no brain to translate them.

Victor resided in a prison of his thoughts, a funhouse mirror of his life experience. The obsidian dream was as deep and unknowable as the question of life itself.

Eventually, a heavenly luminescence appeared. Victor found himself in the tenebrous vacuum of space—a galactic bounty of stars, planets, and celestial bodies rotating around an immense gravity well filled the emptiness.

Despite the politician’s natural arrogance, the grandiosity of the universe and the knowledge of his microscopic presence within it humbled him. In comparison to the vastness of heaven, being president of a nation on a tiny rock didn’t seem so exceptional.

Victor felt like an amoeba on Earth discovering the existence of Jupiter. His mind had no hope of comprehending the complete splendor of his surroundings. There was no anchor—no planet to connect himself to. He simply drifted into the endless complexity of the universe.

For someone like Victor, who constructed his entire life within the framework of his ego, the vastness of space held its own blend of fear and mortal anxiety. He had been used to having control over nearly all aspects of his life. The politician hated anything he couldn't understand and couldn't understand anything he did not control.

Consigned to the void and left adrift in the nothingness of space was the exact opposite of what Victor was comfortable with. He tried to console himself with the fact that experiencing anything was better than seeing nothing.

At least I’m not dead, Victor reflected.

Anything was better than death. He was unsure how long he spent in the place without time and substance, but he didn’t want to return to the inky darkness. At least here, he could watch the celestial forms of the cosmos dance in their circular orbits.

An indeterminable time passed before Victor began to feel the frigid claws clutching his soul. In his floating purgatory, the politician had forgotten the feeling of humanity’s most ancient enemy: the cold.

Chilling pain pressed upon Victor’s essence and burned it with wintry impunity. His spirit was ravaged, again and again, by arctic gusts of cosmic origin. The pain was exquisitely meticulous agony. Victor had no flesh to torment. Instead, he felt quintessential pillaged by the coldness as it ripped away pieces of himself. He felt a gnawing hunger develop in the core of his soul—a black hole of insidious proportion.

An unknowable presence drew memories from his consciousness and put on a macabre display. Victor witnessed his first election, a tragic defeat followed by his wounded pride. He heard his mother call him a monster as his father looked on with icy derision. The military commander watched the past version of himself bury corpse after corpse, slain by the MERS-44 plague. Victor held his wife as she sobbed uncontrollably when the doctor told them their son died in labor.

As the tragedies of life flayed Victor’s spirit, he knew he was mistaken. Even the pastors of his youth had gotten it all wrong. Hell was not a place of warmth and fire. Hell was the cold and hungry shadows ever-present between the light.

Like a simple beast, Victor could not fathom why he was suffering. It had started with no warning, and it continued with no context. Like a beaten animal, he raged in the trap of his past and the chilling pain. He would’ve chewed his arm off to make it stop or murdered his own family to end the torment. He was beyond rationality, beyond mortal reasoning.

Yes, this is hell. I am being punished. The thought was a beacon of light in his consciousness.

The mere acknowledgment of the experience brought a measure of control. Through Victor’s agony and fear, there came a glimpse of something to fit his worldview: context.

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Pain without a frame of reference is madness. His current torment would surely drive any reasonable person mad. Victor could only track the sands of the hourglass by the way he was slowly acclimating to his burden.

The ice is not as chilling, and the knife-like pain does not seem so profound, Victor thought, perhaps insanity is finally claiming my soul. The realization was a pleasant one, considering the circumstances.

A part of him hoped that an actual death awaited him, while another clung to life with whitened knuckles.

The endlessness he had spent in this form had made him infinitely tired. Shaken from his maudlin thoughts, he noticed a void swallowing the universe from its center. Victor idly watched its progress as it consumed the stars. He mechanically wondered if it would eat him, too. He hoped it would.

It appeared closer than ever, blotting out the stars like a cosmic ink stain. Victor supposed that it could be a trick of perspective. It was hard to tell the size and position in a reality without objective measurement.

As the hungry maw grew closer, the darkness began to burn Victor. It was like the sensation of holding an ember with winter-chilled hands. What should have been a comforting balm instead became an unbearable burden.

His being had almost become used to the iciness of space, and now the gentle warmth began to slowly increase in intensity until he felt as if his very soul were alight. He screamed endlessly in the depths of his quintessence as the burning ripped through him.

If the ice were a parade of pain and cold, the warmth would become a bonfire of emotion. The presence that molded him filled him with its scalding essence. The flames scourged his heart, cleansed it of taint, and filled it with the desire for victory on the battlefield and conquest of hated foes. It bundled pride, tribalism, and righteous anger into an indomitable will. It was courage and belief in the individual as part of a collective.

It was the antithesis of the arctic chill that held him before, and his soul erupted from its seams. As the pool of shadow grew nearer, the oblivion passed over and through him until Victor’s world was only the empty blackness that endlessly scalded. It was a contradiction he had no words for.

Victor remained ignorant of the purpose behind this process. The ice and the fire had thoroughly broken the proud politician. At that moment, he would have done anything to stop the pain. He simply wanted to live again or maybe to die permanently. It was challenging to decide which option appealed the most.

This afterlife of ice and fire was nothing like the heaven and hell of human mythos. A lesser human would’ve died long ago and faded into the obscurity of death.

He was saved from the decision by a masculine voice in the darkness.

“Victor,” the name reverberated in the shadow, seemingly carrying all he was and may yet become. “I, your God, have delivered your consciousness from your flesh and brought you here to my realm of darkness and fire,” he said.

Victor had never read about this realm of chilling light and burning darkness in the Bible. Heaven was supposed to be filled with light, and hell was supposed to be burning with fire. What remained of Victor Slate now fell into a daze. His experiences beyond time shook the core of his existence.

The voice answered his unasked question. “There are a great many things that your world has gotten wrong. However, there is only one thing that you need to be concerned about.”

The voice paused, then continued with a commanding calmness, “I require you, Victor, not in your world but in another. You have earned your place as the most powerful man in your world. You were a warrior and a leader. In pursuit of your goals, you have done terrible things. I require those terrible inclinations now. You will become my Scourge. You will be the tool I will use to remake a thriving universe and bring it back into my grasp.”

Still confused, Victor thought about what this ‘Lord’ had said after the infinite slowness of his torture⁠—events were moving too quickly for him to comprehend.

He asked the first question that came to mind. Had he been in control of his former faculties, he would've cursed himself for his lack of pride.

“God, why me? Why not use your own powers to bring about your will?”

The shadow thundered, and Victor sensed that he had angered the ubiquitous God. “My enemy and I fight across innumerable universes. Even now, I’m sacrificing more pawns to divide their attention and slip you like a knife into this galaxy’s heart.”

Victor could feel the overbearing pressure suffocate him. “You, alone, are unimportant—merely another vassal creature at my disposal. Your personality is useful to me—an adequate tool among many. You may become more if you can succeed in your new capacity.”

“What are you asking me to do?” Victor whimpered, hating himself for his weakness.

“You will dominate the galaxy in my image and burn it to ash. You’re a plague, a microcosm of entropic energy purpose-made to eat at the foundations of creation and cause it to collapse.”

“How will I do that?” Victor wasn’t sure what the voice asked him to accomplish, but he knew he couldn’t complete the mission in his current state.

“I am placing you in the perfect conditions to propagate throughout this universe. I shall not assist you further, or my enemies would notice. You must grow like a cancer until the stars are so riddled with sickness that my adversaries cannot remove you. You must use your cunning, strength, and even cruelty to succeed. If you succeed, I can promise a transcendence to a higher plane of reality. One where the petty concerns of time and space are made irrelevant.”

The voice continued—the stick following naturally after the carrot. “If you fail me, I will return you to this plane of existence, where you will wait in icy purgatory in perpetuity, cursed never to reach the peaceful retirement of death. You will be tortuously aware of your existence the entire time as a punishment for your failures. Salvation and life can only be found in your success.”

Victor stared back into the abyss that claimed itself as his Lord and found it wanting. A being that required threats and tools to enact its will was not the almighty God of human faith but a scorned parasite cast from its host.

“Are you really God?” He feared the impertinent question would cause the entity to send him back to Hell, but he couldn’t resist.

“I go by a different name, but I’m close enough in power to your mythos that the distinction is meaningless,” The voice was surprisingly calm.

Victor supposed it didn’t matter. He believed the force had the capacity to punish him. The politician had already experienced it and would do anything to avoid that fate. He had always lived as a practical person, and that wouldn’t change even in unfamiliar circumstances.

Contrary to what he had felt as he was tortured seemingly without end, he didn't want to be dead. If all it took to make something as absolute as death trivial was the razing of a galaxy, a place he held no attachment to, it was not much to ask to make the impossible possible.

He had already done far worse to his own kind back on Earth, and he hadn't hesitated to worsen the lives of people who could have easily been as successful as himself. If this entity, this supposed 'Lord,' would give him a chance at life, it was obvious Victor should seize it. Accepting the eternal suffering of death now, after knowing what awaited, was no longer an option.

The force rumbled in approval. “You’re learning. Good. You’ll need to evolve in this new world, or you will die. Those are your only options.”

The shadows quickly evaporated, returning Victor to the celestial realm. Not even the stars could break the pregnant silence. Around him, the cosmic bodies began to glow brighter like bulbs with too many volts flowing through them. The illumination grew until all Victor saw was an endless field of white.

With one last thunderous declaration, Victor could sense his newfound God leaving him.

“Welcome to the planet Somna,” the being chuckled darkly as he—no, it—vanished.