There was no sensation of falling. No tunnel of light. No chorus of angels. Only the sharp metallic smell of blood and a silence so pure it roared.
Cain Lethe opened his eyes.
Or rather, he thought he did. There was no visual confirmation—no ceiling, no walls, no floor—only the faint impression that something vast and ancient was watching him. A cold intelligence, not malevolent, not kind, but... measuring.
Where am I?
Memory snapped into place like a vice: Cain, former crisis negotiator, part-time philosophy lecturer, and full-time cynic, had died.
He remembered the flash of headlights. The smell of burnt rubber. The sound of a child's scream—and then, nothing.
And now? This.
His body was weightless. He could not speak. He could not move. But thought flowed freely. In the void, a single thread of awareness hovered in front of him: a floating glyph—circular, like a crown formed of intertwined runes. Twelve segments. One of them shimmered faintly.
[CROWN OF SILENCE – FIRST RITE AVAILABLE]
Words, without voice. Symbols, without meaning. Yet Cain understood. The Crown was offering a pact.
And instinctively, he knew the cost would be real.
He analyzed.
He was dead. Therefore, this was either an afterlife or a foreign metaphysical system.
The glyph had structure, which meant rules. And rules could be exploited.
The word "Rite" implied ritual. Perhaps initiation.
Cain focused on the shimmering segment.
Do you accept the Rite of Silence?
Yes
No
There was no cursor. Only will.
He chose Yes.
Pain exploded through his consciousness.
It was not the pain of flesh—it was the shattering of cognition. Languages he had never spoken crashed through his mind. The idea of speech—what it meant to shape sound into symbols—was stripped and reassembled.
When it was over, he stood in a room.
For the first time, there were walls. A single wooden chair. A table. A cracked mirror. And in the mirror: a face. Not his.
A boy. Maybe twenty. Pale, gaunt, with storm-grey eyes and a spiral-shaped scar over the right temple. A stranger's body. His new vessel.
Cain blinked.
And then he spoke.
"Where does truth go when no one remembers it?"
The room shook.
A fragment of the Crown materialized above the table—glasslike, etched in memory.
The Rite was complete.