The smell of juniper smoke and grilling trout was the only rhythm Gio knew anymore.
He sat on a folding stool beside his battered SUV, watching the last sliver of the sun bleed out over the Arizona mountains. Eight years in the Marines—two tours, and one blast that led to a discharge that felt more like an eviction—had left him craving this: the absolute quiet of an evening fire, with no one to answer to but himself and the grizzled mutt at his feet.
His companion, Bear, was a loyal, perpetually grubby shepherd mix who'd been his shadow since the transition. Gio tossed a scrap of dried jerky to the dog, then settled back to watch the shifting flames and setting sun. Peace.
Bear, who normally maintained a solemn perimeter around the campsite, let out a confused, playful whuff. Gio's head snapped up.
Fifty feet away, near the treeline, Bear was nose-to-nose with a coal-colored bear cub. It was clumsy, curious, and utterly doomed.
Then, the quiet exploded.
A sound like a collapsing concrete wall tore through the woods. Grizzly sow. No time to think. The sow was a dark, impossibly fast avalanche of fur and muscle, barreling down a game trail toward her offspring and the dog.
Gio's hand shot to the nearest weapon—a long but sturdy knife he'd been using to fillet the fish. In two decades of owning it he'd only ever used the knife for utility, never fighting. That changed now.
"Bear, heel! Now!" he roared, but he didn't wait.
His mind went immediately to the vital areas. Behind the shoulder blade and the eyes, a frontal attack was suicide. He didn't sprint away from the chaos; he sprinted into it, angling a flank attack.
The sow paused only for a half-second snarl as Bear the dog finally noticed the threat and dodged away, trying to circle the bear which chased in hot pursuit. That was Gio's window. Driven by pure instinct, he launched himself onto the massive bear's back, wrapping his left arm around its thick, powerful neck.
The world became a dizzying, adrenaline filled whirlwind of rage. Gio's right arm drove the boning knife with disciplined savagery. Not wildly, but in measured, repetitive thrusts: behind the shoulder, under the ribs, into the flank. He was aiming for the organs: heart, lungs, throat, eyes, a bloody, panicked human trying to destroy a biological tank.
The sow bucked and roared, slamming Gio against a pine tree, jarring the air from his lungs. He held on, his knife hand working like a piston, fueled by adrenaline and the simple, final thought: Protect the dog. Protect my partner. Bear was in the fight now too, holding onto a hind leg and getting dragged around like he was made of paper mache until a swipe chased it back where it circled looking for an opening to help.
Then came the counter. The beast bucked again and managed a sudden, impossible twist, its jaw a snapping iron trap. Gio felt a crushing, wet impact against the back of his neck, a white-hot spike of agony as bone and nerve were pulverized. And his limp body was savaged until the black bear decided he was no longer a threat to her cub
The world went silent, then blindingly white. The knife fell uselessly, his arm falling limp.
The sow lumbered away, wounded, missing an eye and riddled full of holes and likely not long to live guiding its whimpering cub into the safety of the dark woods.
Gio lay still in the juniper smoke, the metallic scent of his own blood filling his nostrils. The pain was immense, but distant, as the nerves in his body began to shut down. His mind, however, was still terrifyingly lucid.
He saw the stars, felt the cold dirt, and heard the anxious whine of his dog, Bear, licking his face and pawing his soon to be corpse.
There was no terror. Just a solemn, final inventory of his life—his service, his quiet years, his one last companion. He'd lived his life with few regrets.
Then, with the last, fading beat of his heart, the massive, concentrated force of his will—his soul—was violently ripped from its dying vessel by a force as swift and brutal as the bear itself.
The pain, the fire of the bear's bite, vanished not with a fade, but with a brutal snatch.
One moment, Gio's blood was cooling on the dirt under the Arizona sky; the next, he was nowhere. There was no slow float, no gentle drifting through the black. This was a fall. A stomach-lurching, infinite descent through a non-place.
He felt the pure, kinetic horror of velocity without distance. His disciplined mind—the one that quantified explosive yield and calculated angles of trajectory—found itself utterly unmoored. Every instinct screamed G-force, but there was no wind resistance, no terminal velocity, just a sickening, downward rush toward a point that never grew closer.
He tried to open his eyes, but his soul—if that's what he was—had no eyes. Yet, he saw. He saw the space he was falling through, and that's when the terror truly began.
It wasn't darkness. It was a geometric nightmare—a chaos of color and shadow that should not exist. The walls of the void were not walls, but constantly shifting planes of impossible angles. They were edged with luminous, acidic green and painted with colors that were loud—colors that demanded a philosophical understanding he could not provide. They weren't just hues; they were concepts rendered visible.
He tried to employ the breathing techniques that had kept him steady high stress missions. Inhale. Exhale. But his non-body had no lungs, and the air here tasted of rusty iron and old, unspeakable thoughts.
Then, he heard the whispers.
They weren't voices, but complex streams of data flowing like water over rocks. He understood the meaning of every utterance, yet the meaning was pure contradiction: The cube is round. Duty is debt. Pain is the only real geometry.
This was death?
The whispers intensified, burrowing into the core of his mind. He caught glimpses—flashes of immense, multi-dimensional shapes rotating in spaces that couldn't contain them. One flash showed a creature—a colossal, silent mass of wet, staring eyes—that knew the answer to every question, and the answer was madness.
The pressure built, not physically, but cognitively. The walls of impossible color began to demand compliance. He felt his mind struggling to break free of his mind.
A panicked, desperate laugh tried to tear its way out of his ethereal throat. The urge to join the chorus of contradiction was overwhelming. He wanted to surrender to the beautiful, terrible freedom of un-logic.
No.
He forced his scattered thoughts back to the single, defining moment: The mutt was safe. He clung to that single, righteous, realistic outcome like a physical anchor.
But it was too late. The maddening torrent was winning. The whispers became a roar, and the angular void began to tear at his sense of self. He saw his military life, his tours, his friends—all of it unraveling into irrelevant, simplistic lines of code.
His final thought, before the scene was ripped away, was not of the bear, but of the sudden, catastrophic knowledge that everything was fake, and nothing mattered. He was ready to let go and become one of the screaming colors.