When people die, most commonly held beliefs suggest they either ascend to heaven or descend into hell.
Heaven is reserved for those who have lived virtuous lives, while hell is the fate of those who have committed evil deeds.
This dichotomy forms the foundation of many earthly philosophies: live righteously and enjoy eternal bliss, or embrace darkness and suffer alongside the devil.
Damien had always accepted this notion. After his death, he anticipated one of these two outcomes.
Yet, deep down, he felt indifferent about his destination; his life had been dull and filled with misery. He acknowledged that he wasn't a saint,he had made mistakes but he convinced himself that his good deeds outweighed the bad.
After all, in his mundane existence on Earth, committing serious crimes was never an option.
"So am I in heaven or on my way to dinner with Lucifer?" Damien wondered aloud as he rubbed his translucent hands together, bewildered by his surroundings.
The last thing he remembered before dying was a flower pot smashing onto his head and the echoing words of a young mother: "Well, I didn't ask him to save my child!"
Those words cut deeper than any blade,more painful even than discovering Elira's betrayal.
"So much for doing good!" he grimaced, shaking his head in frustration.
Turning on his heels to survey the area around him revealed nothing but an endless expanse of chaotic void,a thick blanket of darkness enveloping everything.
Strangely enough, despite the overwhelming blackness, Damien could see through it; there he stood alone, glowing faintly like a firefly without a physical form.
"This is weird and creepy as hell," he muttered under his breath. Confusion mingled with fear as uncertainty gripped him tightly.
"Come on! Can't I even die in peace after such a pathetic life?" Damien exclaimed in exasperation.
Just as he opened his mouth to curse fate further, an invisible force suddenly yanked him upward.
At first slow-moving but quickly gaining speed, it whisked him away until everything around him turned white and blanked out completely.
When consciousness returned, dizziness washed over him like a tidal wave; nausea threatened to overwhelm him,but how does one even vomit in soul form?
Shaking off disorientation took some time before Damien dared to look around at his new surroundings.
As soon as he looked around, shock froze him in place; wide-eyed and trembling lips finally managed five simple words:
"Where the heck am I?"
Chaos reigned everywhere,this wasn't just any ruin but cosmic ruins on an unimaginable scale!
From where he stood, a colossal dark river snaked through the void like an immense serpent,it stretched endlessly wide for hundreds of thousands of miles.
Floating asteroids larger than Earth drifted aimlessly nearby alongside dead stars and shattered planets,some split cleanly in two!
Damien stood at the edge of a dark, chaotic river, and what he saw took his breath away. Floating in the murky waters were not ordinary human corpses; these were titanic remains,giants among giants. Creatures so vast,their single,closed eyes are dead stars,pupils, a collapsed nebula of infinitely black.
Every so often, massive white bones would break the surface, only to sink back into the depths as if teasing his sanity.
A corpse with thousands of insectoid legs, each one a shattered plantoid...a being of crystalline flesh that had fractured into a galaxy of sharp glittering shards.
But what truly shattered his understanding was the revelation that this dark river wasn't just water,it was a river of blood. A dark, purple river of blood,so vast that it had its own tides,it's currents congealed gore. The metallic, coppery scent of a universe's worth of slaughter filled the void, a smell that etched itself directly into his soul. The giants hadn't just fallen into a river. They had bled until they became the river.
"T…this…this is too insane!" Damien's mind went blank; he couldn't think straight. If he told anyone about this nightmarish vision, they might whisk him off to a mental asylum in an instant!
Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he suddenly felt an unsettling sensation beneath his feet.
Looking down sent chills racing through him, he was standing on a gigantic finger! If Damien had been in a physical body, his face would have gone pale as a ghost.
Turning to his right revealed another horror: an undulating mountain range stretching endlessly into the void.
But these weren't mountains made of rock; they were mountains of corpses piled high into an unending labyrinthine expanse! Thousands upon thousands of these grotesque formations twisted together like some macabre puzzle.
"This is simply unscientific!" Damien thought frantically as panic surged within him. His soul trembled with confusion,what kind of catastrophic war had taken place here? The sight before him defied all logic: dead stars, shattered asteroids, and destroyed planets littered this eerie landscape.
The concepts of 'up' and 'down' disintegrated into his mind. The memory of his own name—Damien—felt like a distant dream from another, simpler universe. His consciousness, meant for taxes and traffic jams,began to fray at the edges.
Just then, everything changed. A massive fissure opened up in the distance,a tear in space itself that resembled the gaping maw of a cosmic beast! The surrounding void began to tremble as cracks appeared like shattered glass.
Chaos erupted; those giant corpses flew across the void while the dark river quaked violently. In mere moments, countless dead stars and planets disintegrated into fine dust.
Before Damien could process it all further, something immense stepped out of that fissure,a colossal foot followed by another until finally revealing a towering figure that seemed to pierce through the very dome of heaven itself!
Cracks appeared in the void like broken mirror. The very concept of silence was annihilated. Pressure began to build on his soul, threatening to compress him into a single point of non-existence.
In comparison to this abomination, Damien felt like nothing more than a speck of dust.
"KNEEL, MORTAL. YOU STAND IN THE PRESENCE OF CHAOS AND BREATHE IN THE DOMAIN OF DESTRUCTION!"
An ancient voice boomed from above,a sound so powerful it evaporated half of the dark river and turned mountains of corpses to ashes.
At that moment, Damien's mind spiraled into oblivion.