Date: October 12th, 2023 (Earth Calendar)
My room typically breathed in rhythm with the glow of my monitor. Tonight, like most nights, it cast the primary light, making the heaps of books and scattered graphic novels look like the forgotten ruins of some minor deity's personal library. Outside, the usual late-night city soundtrack played on – a distant siren's wail cutting through the low, ceaseless rumble of Chicago, a bass line from a passing car thumping a temporary beat against my window. It was all background noise to the world I'd truly inhabited for the past few hours: a realm of crackling energy, mythical beasts, and the satisfying crunch of a well-aimed spell in Pantheon Ascendant.
My fingers, practically an extension of the keyboard by now, flew. On screen, my custom-built sorcerer – a character I'd poured weeks into perfecting – unleashed a torrent of arcane missiles at a particularly stubborn Gorgon. The game wasn't just a time sink; it was a sandbox for my imagination, a place where the myths I'd loved since I was a kid came alive, albeit with more loot drops.
"Just… a little… more… mana…" I found myself whispering, leaning closer to the screen as if my proximity could somehow influence the digital dice rolls. My name, for this lifetime anyway, was Alex. I was twenty-three, armed with a history degree that my parents still occasionally sighed about, and employed at a downtown library. The pay wasn't going to buy me a penthouse anytime soon, but the employee discount on books and the quiet hum of the archives were perks I genuinely appreciated. My apartment was less a home and more a dragon's hoard, if the dragon was obsessed with speculative fiction and ancient history. Bookshelves groaned under the weight, threatening to spill their guts onto the floor where, in many cases, they already had. A battered copy of Homer's Odyssey, the Fagles translation, was currently propping up a teetering stack of webnovel printouts next to my desk.
Tonight's particular obsession, however, was fueled by a hefty academic work, Deconstructing Divinity: Power and Persona in Ancient Pantheons, which lay open beside my mousepad. I was trying to get the theological framework right for a new character concept, one who actually understood the mechanics of divine power, not just waved a glowing sword around. It always set my teeth on edge, the way storytellers, old and new, handled figures like Zeus. The supposed King of Olympus, beacon of order, often just read like a poorly written antagonist in a celestial drama – all thunderbolts and divine right, but with a moral compass that spun wildly whenever something in a skirt caught his eye. It was lazy characterization, frankly. Honestly, if reincarnation was real and I ended up in that mythos, I'd probably take one look at Olympus and head for the Underworld by choice. Less drama. Yeah, like that would ever happen. My theological musings were interrupted by a ping from my second monitor. A message from Kai, my raiding buddy.
"Alex, my dude. It's 2 AM. That Gorgon turn you to stone yet or what? Some of us have actual jobs that don't involve shushing people."
A small smile touched my lips. I typed back, "Patience, young Padawan. True mastery requires sacrifice. Besides, uncovering ancient secrets is a noble pursuit, even if those secrets are guarded by poorly rendered snake-hair."
My gaze snapped back to the game. The Gorgon shrieked, its form fracturing into a cascade of shimmering light and code fragments – a digital ghost giving up its essence. An icon popped: 'Serpent-Scale of Ancient Binding.' Finally! I'd been farming this particular digital beast for that scale, rumored to unlock a hidden lore codex within the game's labyrinthine data files. It wasn't just the win, though that was nice; it was the find, that distinct click in my brain as another piece of a hidden puzzle slotted neatly into place. That little burst of 'aha!' when a mystery, any mystery, yielded its secrets – that was the current I rode, the thrill I chased, whether it was buried deep in a dusty historical manuscript or tucked away on a remote game server.
Stretching, I felt a series of satisfying cracks run up my spine. Time to hydrate, maybe even contemplate the foreign concept of sleep. I pushed my chair back, the wheels catching on a stray ethernet cable I'd been meaning to tape down for weeks. My domain, my glorious mess, was not without its hazards.
As I rose, my ankle snagged the cable properly this time. There was that horrible, stomach-lurching sensation of momentum betraying you. A half-empty mug of yesterday's coffee, perched precariously on a stack of Berserk deluxe editions, began its slow-motion topple. My hand shot out, a clumsy, desperate lunge. Bad move. Overcorrection.
The world went sideways.
My head connected with the sharp, unforgiving corner of my sturdiest bookshelf – the one housing my collection of signed first editions and dense historical treatises – with a sickening, hollow thud. Pain, immediate and blinding, exploded behind my eyes like a flashbang, white-hot and absolute. The city's drone, the hum of my PC, even the frantic beeping from my smoke detector whose battery I'd forgotten to change, all vanished beneath a deafening, high-pitched whine that filled my skull.
I was on the floor. Books, dislodged by the impact, rained down around me like oversized, rectangular hail. The smell of stale coffee, now seeping into the carpet, mingled with a new, coppery scent that my rapidly fogging brain identified with a detached sort of clinical interest as blood. My own. Vision blurred, the familiar posters on my wall – a meticulously detailed map of the Forgotten Realms, a stylized print of an Archangel from Diablo, a faded photograph of the Acropolis I'd taken on a college trip – swam and pulsed like images underwater.
Well, this is suboptimal, a distant, almost amused part of my brain noted, as if commenting on a poorly executed game strategy. My limbs felt like lead, heavy and unresponsive. The vibrant world on my monitor, where my sorcerer stood triumphant over his fallen foe, seemed a galaxy away. My own grand quest for knowledge, for the next page, the next level, felt like it was hitting a very abrupt, very final game over screen.
No epic montage of my life's greatest hits. No angelic choir. Just a creeping cold, a sense of myself becoming… diffuse. Like ink dropped in water. My last semi-coherent thought was less about impending doom and more about the irony. All those stories of heroes and gods, and I was being taken out by a poorly managed cable and a coffee mug. If there was a psychopomp waiting, I hoped they had a sense of humor. And seriously, if Zeus was involved in the processing of souls, I was going to be that guy in the customer service line.
The edges of what I could see, or sense, began to constrict, darkness pressing in. The ringing in my ears peaked, then, surprisingly, started to fade, not into silence, but into… something else.
A vibration.
It wasn't sound as I knew it, not something carried on airwaves to eardrums I no longer felt. It was a resonance, impossibly deep, that thrummed through the very essence of whatever I was becoming. It was ancient, unimaginably vast, and pulsed with a power that dwarfed stars.
And with it, a flood. Not of water, but of… awareness. Raw, unfiltered. Images, emotions, concepts I had no words for, poured into me. I saw nebulae coalesce from cosmic dust, felt the slow, tectonic grind of continents adrift, heard whispers in languages that made my former understanding of linguistics seem like a child's primer. It was terrifying, awe-inspiring, and utterly overwhelming.
A singular, stark realization cut through the chaos, a piece of information so profound it felt less like a new discovery and more like a memory unearthed: This is not an ending.
No, this felt different. The construct I called 'Alex,' the accumulation of twenty-three years of myth-devouring and library-dwelling, felt like it was being systematically de-rezzed, bit by bit. Familiar comforts, cherished grudges, even the muscle memory of my favorite keyboard shortcuts – they were all loosening, detaching like poorly glued components from a model kit. Yet, as these pieces drifted away into a growing internal void, an irreducible point of sheer wanting-to-know pulsed erratically, a stubborn knot of focus in the unraveling mess. It wasn't some noble, intellectual flame; it felt more like a tenacious, almost feral spark refusing to be smothered by the immense, crushing darkness that was otherwise consuming me. It just… was.
Over? No, this was hardly an ending. It felt more like being violently shoved through a doorway I hadn't known existed, into a place where the rules of reality were about to be seriously rewritten.