There was no explosion marking the end of his consciousness.
There was no white light.
There was no voice calling his name.
Artor Conan Davil did not die.
He was only detached.
A second earlier he was still inside his body, feeling the weight of bones, the heat of blood, and the habit of breathing without thinking. The next second, the body was still there, but he was no longer fully within it.
Time did not stop.
It merely lost its witness.
The accident happened like most accidents do, without meaning. There was no symbol. There was no justice. There was no final warning. Metal met flesh. Speed met negligence. The world did what it has always done, moving without caring who was left behind.
Artor's body was found alive.
His heart was still beating.
His lungs were still taking in air.
His skin was still warm.
Yet his consciousness answered no call.
The doctors called it a coma.
His family called it a trial.
Neither called it an end.
And indeed, it was not an end.
To the world, Artor Conan Davil was a body that had not yet departed.
To Artor Conan Davil, the world was something that had left him first.
He did not dream immediately.
There were no images.
There were no sounds.
There was no self.
There was only a nothingness that was not dark, and a stillness that was not silent. Like being in a space without walls, without direction, without demand. Like being stripped of the obligation to be anyone.
If everything had ended there, Artor would not have protested.
He had long lived without fear of endings.
Throughout his life, he knew about God.
He knew about sin.
He knew about the day of judgment.
And precisely because he knew, he chose not to care.
He had once said, to someone, or perhaps only to himself:
"If the world will end anyway, why be holy today?"
The sentence was not spoken with hatred.
Nor with defiance.
It was spoken with calm conviction, as if it were a rational conclusion that needed no rebuttal.
Artor Conan Davil was not a sinner because he did not know.
He was a sinner because he felt safe from consequence.
And now, between breaths that still continued and a consciousness that did not respond, that sense of safety began to lose its place, slowly and without sound.
The change did not come as terror.
Nor as punishment.
It came as a strange heaviness, like the awareness that something had begun without asking permission.
The nothingness cracked.
Not by light.
Not by sound.
But by pain.
Not a sharp pain, but a lingering one, like existence itself beginning to demand acknowledgment. Like a body that was no longer his, yet still calling him to return.
And when that pain became real enough to be named, Artor Conan Davil opened his eyes.
Or at least, he felt as if he did.
The sky was above him.
Not an unfamiliar sky.
Nor a new one.
The same sky, yet it felt lower, as if it had drawn nearer without intending to touch.
He breathed.
Air entered with an unfamiliar weight, as though every inhalation had to be accounted for. The ground beneath his back was cold, solid, and too aware of his presence.
He was alive.
And for some reason, this world felt far too present to be called a dream.
There was no voice saying this was the apocalypse.
There was no sign pointing toward the end.
Yet something within him, something that had never spoken throughout his life, slowly reached one conclusion:
Something had begun.
And this time, he could not pretend not to see it.