Do you believe in alternate worlds?
In versions of yourself living different lives, making different choices, breathing different air?
Perhaps you do.
Perhaps you've entertained the thought during sleepless nights or idle daydreams. But here's what would truly shake you: what if your alternate self was living the life you deserved, while you suffered through the one they escaped?
What if somewhere, in some other reality, another you was happy, successful, loved—everything you're not?
Would you still believe then?
Or would the thought drive you mad with envy, with rage, with the crushing weight of cosmic injustice?
Would you curse them?
Would you curse yourself?
Or would you simply break under the weight of knowing that happiness exists for you, just not for this you?
---
Ding.
The bell above the convenience store door sang its hollow note as Ariel stepped out into the night. The sound felt mocking somehow, cheerful in a way that grated against the cold fury simmering in his chest.
Three hours. Three hours of his life, gone. Vanished into the ether like smoke, leaving nothing behind but aching muscles and empty pockets.
The manager's laugh still echoed in his ears. That wet, phlegmy sound. Ha ha ha. "Trial run didn't work out, kid. Better luck next time."
Next time. As if there would be a next time. As if any of them ever called back.
Ariel shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket, the fabric so worn the lining had torn through in places. The night air bit at his exposed skin, sharp and merciless. Above, the sky was a void, starless and black, the city lights drowning out any celestial company.
The street stretched before him like a wound, cracked pavement glistening with the residue of earlier rain. Streetlamps flickered overhead, their sodium glow casting everything in shades of sickly orange and deep shadow. Most of the shops had already shuttered for the night, their windows dark eyes watching him pass.
Seventeen years old. Seventeen years of breathing, eating, existing. And what did he have to show for it?
Nothing.
Less than nothing.
He'd aged out of the system a year ago, cast out from the orphanage the moment he turned sixteen. "You're old enough to take care of yourself now," they'd said, as if childhood ended the moment some arbitrary number was reached, as if the ability to survive materialized magically on one's birthday.
Before that, there had been the foster homes. Three of them. Each worse than the last. The first family had used him as free labor, a convenient extra set of hands for their business. The second had simply forgotten he existed most days, leaving him to scavenge for food like a stray dog. The third... well, the third had been creative in their cruelty. He still had the scars, thin white lines across his back that ached when the weather changed.
'Another day in paradise,' he thought, the internal voice dripping with venom. 'Another reminder that I'm worth less than the dirt on their shoes. Another lesson that no one gives a damn whether you live or die.'
His footsteps created a rhythm on the pavement. Tap, tap, tap. He counted them out of habit, something to focus on other than the emptiness gnawing at his insides. One, two, three, four. Numbers were reliable. Numbers didn't lie. Numbers didn't pretend to care and then kick you when you were down.
Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five.
The main street was nearly deserted at this hour. A car passed, its headlights cutting through the gloom before disappearing around a corner. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Woof, woof, woof. Then silence again.
Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine.
That's when he heard it.
"Waaaaaahhhhhhh!"
The sound pierced the night, high and desperate. A child's cry, raw with fear or pain or both. It came from somewhere ahead, down one of the side streets that branched off from the main road like crooked fingers.
Ariel stopped walking, his body going rigid.
'Not your problem. Keep moving. Nothing good comes from playing hero.'
"Waaaaaahhhhhhh! Heeelp!"
The cry came again, more urgent this time, the syllables breaking apart into ragged sobs.
He closed his eyes and let out a long breath that misted in the cold air. 'Why? Why do I always do this? Why can't I just walk away like a normal person?'
But even as the thought formed, his feet were already moving, carrying him toward the sound. Because he remembered being the one crying. He remembered screaming into pillows so the other kids wouldn't hear. He remembered begging silently for someone, anyone, to help, and being met with indifference.
Maybe he couldn't save himself. But maybe he could save someone else.
The side street yawned before him, narrow and dark. The streetlamp that should have illuminated it had burned out, leaving only deep shadows punctuated by the faint glow from apartment windows high above. Dumpsters lined one side, their contents overflowing, the stench of rotting food and decay thick in the air.
"Waaahhh! Waaahhhh!"
Closer now. Much closer. The crying echoed off the brick walls on either side, making it hard to pinpoint exactly where it originated. The acoustics turned the sound strange, distorted, bouncing it back and forth until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Ariel moved deeper into the alley, his eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness. Shapes resolved themselves from the gloom—a fire escape hanging askew, a pile of cardboard boxes, a shopping cart lying on its side.
"Hello?" he called out, his voice sounding small and uncertain. "Are you okay? Where are you?"
"Heeeelp meee! Waaahhh! Waaahhh!"
The sound was directly ahead now, maybe twenty feet away. He could hear the desperation in it, the kind of crying that came from genuine terror. Whatever was happening, it was bad.
'Almost there. Just find them, make sure they're safe, call for help if needed.'
His heart hammered against his ribs in a rapid staccato. Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. The sound of his own pulse filled his ears, competing with the crying.
Ten feet away. Five feet.
"Waaahhh! Waaahh! Hel—"
Silence.
Absolute. Complete. Total silence.
The crying cut off mid-syllable as if someone had pressed a mute button on reality itself. The sudden absence of sound was deafening, more oppressive than the noise had been. Even the ambient sounds of the city—the distant traffic, the humming of electrical wires, the whisper of wind—seemed to have vanished.
Ariel froze, his body locked in place.
'No. No, no, no. That's wrong. That's very wrong.'
His breath came quick and shallow now, visible in small puffs of mist. The temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees in the span of seconds. His skin prickled with goosebumps that had nothing to do with the cold.
'Turn around. Leave. This isn't normal. This isn't right.'
His rational mind screamed at him to retreat, to get back to the main street, to find other people, light, safety. But his body felt sluggish, as if he were moving through water.
He took a step backward. Then another.
That's when he saw her.
At the far end of the alley, perhaps thirty feet away, stood a small figure. A child, no taller than four feet, draped in what looked like a white dress. The fabric hung limp and dirty, stained with dark patches that could have been mud or something worse.
The little light that penetrated this deep into the alley fell across her in broken fragments, illuminating her in pieces—a pale arm here, a shock of dark hair there—leaving the rest shrouded in shadow.
Ariel squinted, trying to make out more details. Something about her posture felt off. Too still. Too rigid. Like a mannequin placed there as some kind of sick joke.
And then he saw what she was holding.
A knife.
Long, gleaming, catching what little light existed and throwing it back in cold flashes. The blade looked too large for her small hand, but she gripped it with disturbing confidence, the tip pointing downward, drops of something dark falling from it.
Plink. Plink. Plink.
But worse than the weapon was her face.
She was grinning.
Wide. Impossibly wide. Her lips stretched across her face in a rictus of glee, showing teeth that seemed too numerous, too sharp. The smile didn't reach her eyes, which stared forward with flat, dead intensity.
'What in the actual hell?'
Ariel's thoughts fragmented, scattering like marbles across a floor. Nothing about this made sense. A child with a knife. A grin that belonged on something feral and wild. The crying that had led him here, now replaced by this suffocating silence.
'She's hurt. She must be hurt. She found the knife, doesn't understand. She's in shock. That's why she looks like that. Shock does strange things to people.'
Even as he tried to construct a rational explanation, his instincts howled in warning. Every nerve in his body screamed danger, threat, predator.
He swallowed hard, his throat suddenly dry. "Hey," he managed, his voice barely above a whisper. "Are you... are you okay?"
The girl didn't respond. Didn't blink. Didn't move.
Just stared with that terrible grin fixed in place.
Ariel took a tentative step forward. 'She's a kid. She's just a kid. What's she going to do?'
Another step. Then another.
The distance between them closed. Twenty-five feet. Twenty feet. Fifteen.
And then she moved.
Not her whole body. Just her head.
It tilted.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
To the left, further and further, the angle becoming more severe, past forty-five degrees, past what should have been comfortable, past what should have been possible for human anatomy. Her neck bent like rubber, like bone and sinew had been replaced with something malleable and wrong.
Creak.
The sound was faint but audible, like old wood groaning under pressure. It came from her, from that unnatural tilt, and it made Ariel's stomach lurch.
As her head tilted, her grin deepened. The corners of her mouth stretched further up her cheeks, climbing toward her ears, the skin pulling taut and bloodless. Her eyes never left his, tracking him with mechanical precision.
Terror crashed over Ariel like a physical force, driving the air from his lungs.
This wasn't a child.
This was something else.
Something wearing a child's shape but hollow inside, filled with malice and hunger and ancient cruelty.
'RUN!'
The thought exploded through his paralysis like a gunshot. His body finally obeyed, muscles uncoiling with desperate energy. He spun on his heel and bolted, his legs pumping frantically, arms swinging for momentum.
The sound of his footsteps thundered in the confined space.
THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!
His breath came in ragged gasps, harsh and burning. His vision narrowed to a tunnel focused on the mouth of the alley, on the promise of the main street and safety beyond.
'Don't look back. Don't look back. Just run. Get to light. Get to people.'
Behind him, cutting through the sound of his own panicked flight, came a sound that turned his blood to ice.
"Hee hee hee."
A giggle. High-pitched, musical, childlike in its innocence yet twisted into something obscene. It bounced off the walls, seeming to come from everywhere at once, ahead and behind and beside him simultaneously.
"Hee hee hee hee hee!"
The laughter grew louder, more gleeful, feeding on his fear like a parasite.
'Almost there. Twenty more feet. Fifteen. Ten.'
But curiosity, that damned curse of human nature, made him glance over his shoulder even as he ran.
The alley behind him stretched empty.
The girl was gone.
Vanished as if she'd never existed at all.
Relief flooded through him for a fraction of a second before logic caught up and transformed it into pure terror.
If she wasn't behind him—
He snapped his head forward just in time to see her standing directly in his path.
Three feet away.
Less.
She was licking the knife.
Her small pink tongue ran along the flat of the blade in long, deliberate strokes. Slurp. Slurp. Slurp. The sound was wet and obscene. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, locked onto his with predatory focus. That grin never wavered, stretched to its impossible limits.
'HOW?! She was behind me! She was—'
Ariel tried to stop, his body attempting to reverse its momentum. His arms windmilled wildly. His feet scrambled for purchase on the slick pavement, sliding, skidding.
But he was moving too fast. The laws of physics demanded their due.
The girl moved.
Not walked. Not ran.
She became a blur.
One moment she stood three feet away. The next she was motion itself, pure speed, closing the distance in less than a blink. Her white dress fluttered. The knife sang through the air.
SSSHHHHINK!
The sound of metal cutting through flesh was surprisingly quiet. Delicate, almost. Like scissors through silk.
Ariel felt the coldness first. A line of ice across his throat, burning and freezing simultaneously. Then came the wetness, warm and sticky, cascading down his chest.
His hands flew to his neck on pure instinct, pressing against the wound. When he pulled them away, they were painted crimson.
So much red.
How could there be so much red from one person?
His legs gave out. He didn't fall so much as crumple, his knees hitting the pavement with a wet SMACK. The impact sent a jolt of pain up his spine but it barely registered compared to the agony blooming from his throat.
The girl stood before him, head tilted again, that inhuman grin fixed in place. The knife in her hand dripped steadily onto the ground.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Each drop seemed to echo like thunder.
'No. This can't... I can't... I'm dying. I'm actually dying.'
Thoughts cascaded through his fragmenting consciousness in a chaotic torrent. Seventeen. He was seventeen. Barely lived at all. No friends to mourn him. No family to miss him. No one who would even notice his absence except maybe his landlord, and only because of unpaid rent.
'This is it? This is how it ends? Killed by a demon child in a filthy alley? What a joke. What a cosmic joke.'
Anger flared hot in his chest, burning even as his body grew cold. Anger at the unfairness of it all. Anger at a life that had given him nothing but suffering and was now robbing him of even the chance to make something better. Anger at every person who'd hurt him, used him, thrown him away.
But beneath the anger was something else.
Relief.
Sweet, guilty relief.
'At least it's over. At least I don't have to wake up tomorrow wondering how I'll eat. At least I don't have to see the disgust in people's eyes when they realize I'm nobody. At least I don't have to keep pretending there's a point to any of this.'
The world tilted sideways. When had he fallen completely? The pavement was cold against his cheek, dirty water seeping into his clothes.
His vision darkened at the edges, the tunnel narrowing, light bleeding away like water down a drain.
The girl loomed above him, still grinning, always grinning. She crouched down, bringing her face close to his. Her breath smelled like rot and copper.
"Hee hee hee," she whispered, almost tender.
'Well,' Ariel thought, consciousness slipping away like sand through fingers, 'if there's an afterlife, at least it can't be worse than this. Nowhere to go but up, right? Right?'
The knife gleamed once more in his fading vision.
Then the light left his eyes.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
And for a moment—a second, an hour, an eternity—there was nothing.
---
Awareness returned not gradually but all at once, like being yanked from deep water into open air.
Ariel gasped, his chest heaving, hands flying to his throat to find—
Nothing.
No wound. No blood. Just smooth, unbroken skin.
'What...?'
His eyes snapped open and immediately wished they hadn't.
Light. Pure, brilliant, overwhelming light surrounded him on all sides. Not the harsh fluorescent glare of the convenience store or the sickly orange of streetlamps. This was something else entirely. This was illumination given form, radiance made tangible.
He was standing. When had he started standing?
Slowly, afraid of what he might find, Ariel looked down at himself. His clothes were gone—the threadbare jacket, the stained shirt, the worn jeans—replaced by simple white garments that seemed to be made of light itself, soft and flowing.
His hands were clean. No blood. No dirt. No scars.
'Am I... dead? Is this... heaven?'
But if this was heaven, it was unlike anything described in any religion he'd half-heartedly studied during his years bouncing between institutions.
He stood in what could only be described as a hall, though that word felt laughably inadequate. Calling this a hall was like calling an ocean a puddle.
The space stretched in every direction, impossibly vast, so enormous that he felt like an ant, a speck of dust, less than nothing in comparison. The scale was vertiginous, stomach-churning, making his mind rebel against what his eyes reported.
The walls—if they could be called walls—were made of stars.
Actual stars.
Thousands upon thousands of them, twinkling and pulsing with their own inner light, embedded in a surface that seemed to be made of the cosmos itself. Galaxies swirled in lazy spirals, nebulae bloomed in shades of purple and blue and gold, constellations he'd never seen mapped out patterns that hurt to look at directly.
The floor beneath his feet was translucent, like walking on glass, but beneath it roiled more stars, more galaxies, an infinite depth that made him fear he might fall through at any moment. When he looked up, the ceiling rose so high it disappeared into its own light, supported by pillars that seemed to be carved from crystallized starlight.
Everything hummed. A low, pervasive vibration that he felt in his bones more than heard, as if the entire structure was alive and singing.
'This is impossible. This can't be real. I'm hallucinating. Dying brain, final firing of neurons, making sense of random signals.'
But it felt real. More real than anything had ever felt. The air tasted different here—clean, sweet, electric with potential.
Ariel took a tentative step forward. His bare feet made no sound on the crystalline floor. Another step. Then another.
He walked, slowly at first, then with growing confidence, through the impossible hall. Time felt strange here, elastic, meaningless. He might have walked for minutes or hours or days. There was no way to tell.
The hall eventually opened into a chamber even more vast than the corridor. Here, the walls rose in sweeping arcs, meeting far overhead in a dome that captured entire galaxies within its curve. At the center of the chamber, the floor dropped away into a circular depression, steps leading down to a platform at its heart.
And on that platform stood two figures.
No.
Not figures.
Statues.
Ariel's breath caught in his throat as he descended the steps, drawn forward by a force he couldn't name. Compulsion. Destiny. Inevitability.
The statues towered above him, easily forty feet tall, carved from material that looked like ivory but glowed from within with soft, pulsing light. Every detail was perfect, hyperreal, capturing not just the form but the essence of divinity itself.
The first statue was feminine.
She stood with one arm raised toward the heavens, fingers spread as if grasping at stars. Her other arm hung at her side, palm open, offering. Her face was serene but powerful, eyes closed in meditation or contemplation. Long hair flowed down her back and shoulders, each strand individually carved with impossible precision, seeming to move despite being stone. Her robes draped around her body in elegant folds, and where the fabric would have ended, it instead transformed into waves and clouds and dancing flames.
Power radiated from her even in stillness. The power of creation, of life, of endless possibility. She was the breath of existence, the first word spoken into void, the spark that ignited everything.
The second statue was masculine.
He stood in a mirror pose to his counterpart, but where she reached upward, he reached downward, toward the ground, toward the depths. His other hand was closed in a fist, holding something invisible. His face was equally serene but carried a weight to it, a gravitas that spoke of endings and judgments and absolute law. His features were sharp, angular, perfect. His hair was shorter, swept back, carved with the same impossible detail. His robes were more severe, more structured, and where they ended they transformed into geometric patterns, into fractals, into mathematical perfection.
Power radiated from him as well. The power of order, of conclusion, of inevitable cessation. He was the final breath, the last note of a symphony, the silence after everything ends.
Together they stood, eternal opposites, perfect complements. Creation and destruction. Beginning and ending. Chaos and cosmos.
Gods.
There was no other word for them.
Ariel stood before the statues, craning his neck to take in their full majesty, feeling smaller than he'd ever felt in his life.
And as he stared up at those divine faces, a sound broke the cathedral silence of the chamber.
DING!