Adrien pressed his forehead lightly against the window, letting the cold glass bleed a faint chill into his skin.
Outside, the night blurred into trailing streaks of gold and silver as the train sped through the outskirts of the city. Neon reflections scattered across the rain-streaked surface, making the passing world look like it was melting into itself.
It was almost hypnotic.
He exhaled slowly, fogging the glass for a brief moment before it vanished again under the cold breath of the pane. His eyes tracked the ghost of his own reflection—tired, slightly unshaven, hair tousled by the rushed morning routine he regretted not correcting. He looked older than thirty-seven. Not in his face, maybe, but in the weight behind his eyes.
The kind of weight that settled in people who kept running without ever reaching anything.
His phone buzzed again.
A small vibration at first, barely noticeable under the steady rumble of the carriage. But it persisted. Another buzz. Another. And another.
He sighed and pulled it out of his coat pocket.
Three messages.
Of course.
One from Clara.
"Dad, you're still coming Thursday right? Liam told everyone you'd be there."
Then one from Liam, the little guy who never used punctuation properly.
"DAD u commin thursdy rite???"
And one from Maya.
"Please don't disappoint them again."
Adrien closed his eyes.
The last message stung—but he wasn't angry. It wasn't even unfair. Maya never said things to hurt him; she only said things that were true.
He typed a reply.
I'll be there.
Then deleted it.
Typed again.
I promised them.
Deleted.
Typed a third time.
I'll make it work. I swear.
He hesitated, thumb hovering over "Send," wondering if the wording was too desperate. In the end he sent it anyway, because the alternative was silence, and silence was worse than sounding pathetic.
The train rocked gently as it curved along the tracks. A bag from the overhead rack slid a few centimeters before catching on a strap. A toddler two rows ahead let out a loud laugh for no discernible reason, startling his exhausted parents.
The mundane, living world.
Adrien tried to lose himself in it.
In the ordinary.
In the simple comfort of watching strangers exist around him.
An elderly couple sat across the aisle, sharing earbuds, listening to something soft and melodic. A group of students played a card game three seats down, loud and cheerful. A man in a business suit snored quietly under a newspaper.
Life. Normal, imperfect, noisy life.
Adrien felt a small ache in his chest—nostalgic, wistful, quietly painful. He wished he could freeze this moment, this world, just long enough to breathe.
He missed breathing freely—without guilt, without rushing, without feeling hunted by his own schedule.
He glanced down at his phone again. A picture filled the lock screen: Liam grinning with a missing tooth, and Clara hugging him from behind, both of them half-covered in flour after an ill-fated cookie-baking session.
They looked happy.
They deserved happy.
He hadn't always given them that.
Adrien leaned back in his seat and let the rhythmic clatter of the wheels lull him.
Maybe I can fix this, he thought.
Maybe there's still time.
Maybe—
His thoughts softened, drifting toward the fragile optimism he rarely allowed himself.
Outside, the storm intensified. Raindrops streaked across the window in frantic diagonal lines as if racing the train itself. The sky flashed with distant lightning—brief, silent bursts of white that illuminated the world in fragmented snapshots.
For a moment, Adrien imagined the storm washing everything clean. His mistakes. His regrets. His exhaustion.
A fresh start.
Maybe that was all he needed.
He took a slow, steady breath.
And then the train shuddered.
Barely at first—like a tremor, a hiccup in the rails. He lifted his head, frowning slightly. The lights flickered once, twice, casting the carriage into alternating states of brightness and dim shadow.
A child whimpered.
Someone muttered something about the weather.
The train steadied.
Then—
A metallic scream tore through the night.
Sharp.
Violent.
Utterly wrong.
The train jolted sideways so abruptly that passengers slammed into seats, walls, each other.
Adrien's phone flew from his hand.
The lights blinked out.
And before he could even gasp—
The world exploded into sound.
Screeching steel.
Shattering glass.
Gravity flipping, twisting, becoming something chaotic and hateful.
The carriage lifted—actually lifted—from the track, twisting like a toy kicked by a giant.
Bodies collided.
Luggage launched into the air.
Someone screamed a name.
Someone else shouted a prayer.
Adrien didn't have time to think.
He barely had time to feel.
His shoulder slammed into a metal pole.
His ribs cracked.
The breath was punched out of him in one brutal instant.
The train rotated.
Windows imploded.
Cold rain and shards of night stabbed through the air like knives.
Adrien's head snapped sideways—his vision blurring, his hearing collapsing into white noise.
He tried to call out—Maya, Clara, Liam—
but his voice drowned in the storm of destruction.
The final impact came like a hammer.
The world twisted.
A burst of searing pain.
A flash of light brighter than lightning.
And then—
Nothing.
Not unconsciousness.
Not sleep.
Not drifting.
Just—
Nothing.
There was no pain.
No body left to feel it.
One moment Adrien existed as a man, crushed within steel and momentum—
and the next, he was unmoored.
Suspended.
Weightless.
A single thread of consciousness drifting in an ocean of nothing.
At first he tried to breathe—
a reflex older than thought—
but the effort dissolved into emptiness.
There was no chest to rise,
no air to pull,
no heartbeat to steady.
He reached instinctively for sensation.
For warmth.
For cold.
For anything that might anchor him to a world he understood.
But there was nothing.
Not silence—because silence implied sound's absence.
Not darkness—because darkness required space for light to be missing.
This was more absolute.
A void without dimension.
A space without space.
Adrien tried to open his eyes.
He couldn't.
He didn't have any.
He tried to move his arm.
There was no arm.
His mind scrambled, panicked, reached wildly for memories—
Clara's laugh.
Liam losing his first tooth.
Maya's weary smile the day they signed the divorce papers.
He reached for them—
and felt them slip.
Not all at once.
Not erased.
More like wet ink smearing under a careless thumb.
Still there, but distorted.
Blurry.
He tried to say "No,"
but the word died in the throats he no longer had.
A cold pressure formed around him.
Not touching—
not physically—
but present.
As though the void itself leaned closer.
Adrien's awareness tightened reflexively.
Something was here.
Something impossible.
A vibration rolled through the nothingness, shifting the world—if it could be called a world—around him. It wasn't a sound. Not exactly. It was too low, too slow, too deep for that.
It felt like the idea of a sound.
And then another pulse followed.
Stronger.
Closer.
Measured.
Precise.
Adrien strained to identify it, clinging to whatever mental reflex still remained.
A heartbeat?
No.
Not human.
Not even biological.
But rhythmic.
Intentional.
Like something existing far beyond him was… powering up.
Powering up?
Where had that thought come from?
Adrien tried to orient himself—but orientation required directions, and directions didn't exist here. He tried to find his own outline, some sense of where he ended and the void began.
He found nothing.
He was dissolving.
Slowly.
Softly.
Unraveling into the emptiness like a thread being pulled from thick fabric.
A whisper brushed against him—not with words, not even with intent, but with sensation.
Notice.
Observe.
Persist.
Adrien recoiled from it—or tried to.
But recoil required motion.
And motion was gone.
He reached again for memories—
for something, anything, to hold on to—
His daughter's hand in his.
Soft, warm.
Her voice: "Daddy, are you coming tomorrow?"
He focused on that.
Held it.
Clung to it with everything he had.
The void pushed back.
The memory flickered—
then tore away into static.
"No—"
His voice didn't echo.
His voice didn't exist.
Another pulse traveled through him, so powerful it felt like the universe had blinked.
This one was sharper, more defined.
Not a beat this time.
A signal.
Adrien didn't understand how he knew that.
It wasn't knowledge.
It wasn't explanation.
It was imposed recognition.
Force-fed understanding.
A pulse.
A signal.
A call.
Something was trying to reach him.
He felt drawn—
no, pulled—
toward a direction he couldn't name.
Toward something faint and distant, like the glow of a candle seen through miles of fog.
He resisted.
He had to.
Instinct screamed that this direction wasn't life, wasn't salvation.
But he was powerless.
The void contracted.
His awareness tightened into a single point, compressed as if a fist of pressure closed around him. The smearing edges of his identity were squeezed, refined, forced inward.
Adrien cried out without sound.
The pressure increased.
Something cracked—
but not bone.
Something deeper.
Something foundational.
A final pulse came, so bright, so enormous, so fundamental that it tore through the void like a blade of pure intent.
Adrien felt everything—
every memory, every doubt, every regret—
flare once, like embers in violent wind—
—and then extinguish.
All that remained was a single, fragile, flickering spark.
He clung to it desperately.
The void answered with a whisper of light.
A crack.
Hair-thin.
Distant.
Impossible.
But real.
Light seeped through it, faint and cold, illuminating nothing and everything at once.
Adrien reached for it, helpless to do anything else.
He had no arms, no fingers—
but his consciousness stretched like a frayed tether longing for connection.
The light widened.
The void trembled around him.
Something opened.
Not like salvation.
Not like heaven.
Not like anything human minds were meant to comprehend.
It opened the way a tomb opens—
ancient, grinding, forced by something greater than time.
Adrien felt the spark of himself pulled toward it—
inevitable, irresistible.
His last coherent thought drifted into the collapsing darkness:
Clara… Liam… I'm sorry—je te
The light swallowed him.
And then—
Nothing.
Not unconsciousness.
Not sleep.
Not that soft veil one associates with losing awareness.
No.
It was an erasure.
A sudden, total disconnection — but without pain.
As if something had unplugged his existence, pulling the core of his mind out of reality.
A perfect void.
How long did that state last?
He had no idea.
A second?
An hour?
A century?
The very concept of time seemed to have dissolved inside that silent abyss.
Then, slowly — almost imperceptibly — something began to exist again.
A thought.
A faint mental vibration, fragile, rising like a bubble from the depths of black water.
… Where… ?
Not a complete word.
Not even a true question.
Just a confused impulse.
He tried to breathe.
But there was nothing to breathe.
He tried to open his eyes.
But he had no eyes.
It took a moment for the realization to settle. One second, maybe two.
Normally, he would have panicked.
The very idea of sensing nothing — no sight, no touch, no breath — should have triggered raw terror.
But it didn't.
Panic rose… and hit a wall.
A smooth, cold, unbreakable wall.
He simply observed: I'm not panicking.
Without worry.
Without emotion.
Strange.
He tried again, as if testing himself:
imagine fear, a racing heartbeat, shallow breathing.
But he had no heartbeat.
No lungs.
No body at all.
Just this floating presence, compact, centered on itself.
He tried to move.
Nothing.
Or rather… not "nothing."
There was a resistance, something enclosing him, as if his consciousness were housed inside a precise form — confined, compressed within a limited space.
He focused.
The form became clearer:
A circular outline.
Smooth.
Cold.
Solid.
A sphere.
Was he… a sphere?
No.
It wasn't that he himself was spherical — more that his awareness seemed anchored to something round.
Or lodged inside it.
Fixed.
Contained.
The notion should have unsettled him. Should have sparked fear, confusion, denial.
Instead, he simply acknowledged it, clinical and detached.
I am inside something.
He tried to extend his awareness beyond that contour.
At first, nothing.
A black wall, opaque, textureless.
Then, slowly — like a fragile membrane stretching — faint echoes responded.
Vibrations.
Reverberations.
Silent, muffled signals.
The world around him wasn't visible or tangible.
But it existed, somewhere beyond the veil.
He had the impression of touching stone.
Or at least sensing its density, its coldness, its irregular surface.
Further away, something heavier — metal, maybe.
He pushed harder.
The veil parted just a little.
An outline of space appeared in his perception:
a circular chamber carved into rock.
The floor uneven, covered in dust and debris.
Broken metal plates scattered across the ground.
A collapsed wall letting in a faint, almost imperceptible draft.
It was vague, blurry — more like a half-remembered memory than true sight — but still real.
And then a cascade of fragmented memories hit him.
The train.
Rain streaking down the window.
The child laughing two rows ahead.
Clara.
Liam.
The crash.
They surfaced like shards of glass rising through dark water — sharp, isolated, disconnected.
Then they dissolved.
No pain followed them.
No horror.
Not even sorrow.
Just that same flattened calm.
I must have died.
No shock accompanied the thought.
No grief.
Only a quiet, emotionless certainty.
He might have lingered on the idea, but something else tugged at his attention.
In that vague chamber he sensed without seeing, he felt the concept forming:
A sphere, perfect and still.
Embedded in stone.
Him.
He concentrated. The form grew clearer: smooth, dense, almost crystalline. Not warm. Not organic.
An object.
An orb.
The idea reminded him faintly of certain fantasy novels he used to read — those stories about spirits bound inside "dungeon cores."
The comparison should have stirred unease or irony.
Nothing.
Just that same, imperturbable quiet.
Pure logic where emotion should have been.
What am I?