After the light, darkness became Bruce's whole world.
Not the gentle dark behind closed eyes. Not the dark of a room at night. This was a dark that had weight—an ocean without water, pressing on him from every direction. Time had no edges here. No before. No after. Just… drift.
Thoughts moved like distant weather—forming, thinning, dissolving—until only one remained. Thin. Terrified. Relentless.
I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
It wasn't his voice.
At first he thought it was. He thought he was the one begging. But the longer he floated in it, the clearer it became: the words were everywhere. Thousands of mouths long gone still trying to argue with the final breath they'd already spent.
When sight relearned how to be sight, he saw them.
Gray sparks in the black, scattered like snow caught in a night wind.
They weren't falling, he realized.
They were sinking.
All of them sliding toward a light that didn't grow so much as wait.
Bruce didn't know what was going on, but he tried to reach the nearest gray spark. Tried to steady it. To hush the sorrow scraping through the dark like sand under a door.
However he has no hands.
No legs.
No body at all—he was just a bead of ash-light among a host, sinking through a cold that felt like the belly of the sea. Useless, no matter how fiercely he wanted the crying to stop.
Then the texture changed.
Deep below, something smoldered—an ember-glow under miles of shadow. One by one the weeping sparks slipped through an unseen skin and fell farther, like rain breaking the surface of a lake from above.
When his turn came, he passed through too—
—and the void became a current.
A vast, slow conduit with pressure for walls and a tide in its gut, drawing everything toward something so huge distance couldn't make it small.
A Gate.
Not a doorway. A threshold. A mountain of it.
Steps spiraled inward beneath it, carved in a slow helix, descending toward a glow that breathed behind stone—furnace-bright, patient, hungry in the way a mouth is hungry.
On either side, giants of bone leaned from the carved walls—skulls the size of cars, empty-eyed, canted as if listening for names.
Around the stream, the Wardens moved.
Ghost-pale shapes with faces that looked mended wrong, gliding in slow orbits around the sinking lights the way inspectors circle an artifact. Not rushing. Never urgent. Patient as paperwork. Patient as gravity.
One reached out and plucked a spark from the flow.
Bruce watched it struggle in that grip and change—stretching, thickening—until it wore a human outline. A hardhat fused to its head. A length of pipe driven through jaw and skull. Its last heartbeat branded into shape like a stamp.
Released, it sank back and joined the patrol.
Every soul carried death as a sigil: burns that glowed faintly, fractures like pale lightning, missing pieces outlined by remembered pain. They swam without sound, yet their mouths formed words Bruce could not hear and somehow understood perfectly.
I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
Some brightened with panic and tried to flee.
They streamed toward islands drifting in the current—mountains of ribs and vertebrae, skulls stacked in obscene catalogs. Some were human. Some animal. Some… wrong. Too many teeth. Too few eyes. Anchor-curved jaws. Shapes from no Earth Bruce had ever been promised.
The Wardens gave chase but never seemed to hurry. They didn't need to.
The islands betrayed the souls that clung to them. Bone-mountains sloughed into dust under the weight of fear, dragging the lights down like quicksand made of remains. Faces froze in disbelief—newly dead, newly certain the universe had made a mistake—and the corridor filled with the thin, relentless chorus:
I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
Bruce sank and watched.
Watched as Wardens slid through the current wearing centuries like torn uniforms:
A nurse's cap browned with old blood.
A soldier from the first great war, dog tags knocking at his throat like tiny bells, refusing to let his brothers go.
A carpenter missing a hand, hauling the ghost of a saw.
A schoolboy with one shoe.
A woman in rags, mouth fixed around a prayer that never reached the air.
They were not monsters in the childish sense.
They were worse.
They were inevitability dressed in familiar skin.
And then Bruce saw the pattern.
Those who kept moving—who did not clutch, who did not turn back—were left untouched. The Wardens parted for them like reeds part for a river.
Only stillness invited the second drowning.
But where, in all creation, were they going?
Bruce's attention—if he still had eyes—followed the stream toward the Gate. He wanted to believe the light behind it was mercy. A meadow. A warm room. A clean word like home.
The longer he stared, the less it felt like safety.
The glow ceased to be hearth-light and became furnace—breathing behind rock, patient as a mouth that swallowed everything offered to it.
Judgment knelt at the foot of those stairs. After that there would be no turning back. No Frank. No second try. No door to pound on. He had done what he could and still fallen short; now he drifted among voices he'd wanted to help and had been too slow, too weak, too human to save.
The current thickened.
The Wardens felt him nearing and turned.
Their arms opened like nets. Faces assembled from endings—miners and nurses, soldiers and students, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters—each wearing the last wound like a signature.
They did not move like guides.
They moved like a verdict.
Bruce looked up into the vaulted black and asked—without words—if this was all. No more blue air. No green world. No wondering about the country beyond the clouds people teased him for imagining. People had laughed when he'd said he wanted to be useful. Like Neo. Like a comic-book paladin.
Still… ridiculous or not… he'd wanted to try.
And if he could, he would take these sorrowing sparks with him. He would carry their pain, their shame, the long bad weight of their days—whatever it cost. He only wanted to help. To set one thing right.
Please, he thought, and the thought went upward like a flare with no flame.
If anything listens here, give me a sign. Let me mend what I failed. Let me change more lives. Let me take the wrong and the pain and the shame into myself. Give them another turn at morning. Give me the burden. Please. I want to believe in miracles—just once more.
Something answered.
A crack raced across the ceiling of the underworld like a fault in night—
—and broke.
Down poured a pillar of white, sun-bright and infant-soft. Radiance splashed through the corridor. The Wardens recoiled with a hiss like torn silk. From the silted floor, a mountain of white flowers surged upward—petals flaring like paper flames. So many, so fast, the bloom made a sound like rain.
When Bruce touched them—without hands—they rose to meet him.
An island of softness lifting against the pull.
The air—if air belonged here—filled with the first scents of a kind world: new snow, cut apple, clean linen warmed by sunlight.
Something hovered inside the brilliance.
Small. Haloed.
Wings like down.
Eyes like summer water.
A voice arrived that wanted badly to be thunder and landed nearer to a nap-time whisper:
"B-behold," it said, then cleared its throat with tiny valiance, "the… the d-d… descents of time are running out."
It paused, glanced as if to someone offstage only it could see, then tried again—braver this time.
"The hour dr-draws near. H-humanity is… fractured. Not one people. The stars are not empty—others are there, and others beyond them. If you do not grow fast—together—one day they will come and take what is yours."
The small chest puffed up as if puffing made it more official.
"S-so you must become one people. And strong. And… and kind about it—but also fast." A nod. "Yes. F-fast."
Bruce… processed that.
Is this God? he wondered, careful even in thought.
It felt like God—
—and also like God had borrowed someone's cape and tripped over it.
"Okay," Bruce said inside himself, cautiously. World peace. Technology. A united human nation. That's… a lot. I'm just…
He tried to look down at himself.
There was no body.
Just light.
The glow deepened—not bigger, but truer. Less theater. More weight.
"I… I c-can't do all the talking," the being admitted, shy. "Not all-knowing. Not all-powerful. I get tired when I make big things, and then I need a nap."
The flowers shivered as if agreeing.
"But I can give you… this."
It reached.
The touch wasn't touch. It was warmth deciding.
My child, the small voice said—steadier now—you know the shape of what comes. Change it before the hour runs out. Unite them. Hurry. Please.
A spark crossed from the Godling into Bruce—white as noon, soft as milk.
It sank into him and found his center.
His gray brightened—ash to milk, milk to snow, snow to living white—until what beat in him was a heart made of light. Around it, a slim ring drew tight: not armor, not a shield, but a boundary of self. When fear pressed, the ring hummed. When sorrow rose, the heart steadied it.
Small at first.
A starter flame.
But of the same family as suns.
A condensed gift of making—mending, healing, life.
Bruce tried to salute. To bow. To do something respectful.
He managed only a bright, bewildered yes.
Time running out. Got it. Move fast. Help people. Don't leave anyone—
"Um," the Godling squeaked, suddenly anxious, as if it could hear the plan forming, "not now-now. First you have to, uh… become again. S-sorry. It's a process."
Its voice dropped into something older.
"You will go up by going in."
Below, the current burned like a slow galaxy. The Gate held its breath. The Wardens hovered at the edge of the light, suddenly… shy, as if remembering they had once been gentle.
Bruce turned his not-face toward the drifting sparks and sent three thoughts like knuckles on a burning door:
Keep moving.
Don't stop.
You're almost there.
The Godling fluttered, pleased. "Good. Good!" Then a yawn escaped—too honest to hide. "I, um… have to rest now. Be brave. Be kind. And… w-work on becoming better, so you can help others."
The flowers lifted Bruce higher. The pillar opened like a white throat into day.
Up through the white—through the last thin skin of the old night—
—and darkness again.
But not the cold, judging darkness of before.
This dark was warm. Close. Patient. The hush of held breath. Time loosened into long tides. Hands that were not hands turned and tucked him the way a blanket is tucked around a sleeping child.
He became a spark.
Then a single cell with a white ember at its core.
Division. Measure. Quiet mathematics of making. The outline of limbs. The curl of spine. A tiny engine learning its pace beside the light-heart that kept the beat—small, unshowy, waiting to be practiced, lifted, grown.
Somewhere far above—or within—the very small God whispered, already drowsy:
"Go f-fix them, okay?"
Bruce reached for a heroic line and managed the mental equivalent of a thumbs-up.
Help them. Move fast. Don't leave anyone.
The light-heart answered—one pulse, two—
like a promise.