There are worse ways to die than a heart attack at thirty-two.
Probably.
He was having difficulty thinking of any at the moment, but he was reasonably confident they existed. Getting eaten by a bear, perhaps. Or whatever it was that happened to people who poked hornets' nests with insufficient enthusiasm. The point was, there was an entire spectrum of terrible deaths out there, and he had simply landed somewhere on it. Unremarkably. Quietly. Alone in his apartment with a half-eaten bowl of instant noodles going cold on the coffee table.
Not exactly the heroic exit he'd have written for himself.
Though, to be fair, he hadn't written much of anything for himself in quite some time.
He became aware of the whiteness gradually, the way you become aware of silence — not all at once, but as a slow accumulation of the absence of everything else. There was no floor beneath him, or if there was, it had the decency not to announce itself. There was no ceiling above. There was no cold, no warmth, no weight to his body, which he was mildly alarmed to discover he still seemed to possess.
He looked at his hands. Still his. Unremarkable. A bit pale.
"You are not dreaming," said a voice.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, the way voices in places like this always seemed to, which told him two things immediately. First, that he had clearly consumed far too much fiction in his thirty-two years of living. Second, that whoever was speaking had either an excellent grasp of dramatic atmosphere or had simply been doing this long enough that the theatrics had become habit.
He turned, more out of social obligation than any expectation of seeing something, and found that there was, in fact, something to see.
The being — and being was the only word that felt remotely adequate — was not quite human. Not in any disturbing way. It was more that humanity seemed like a costume it was trying on, a reasonably convincing approximation that stopped just short of complete. It was tall. It glowed faintly, the way very old things sometimes seem to carry their own light. Its face was kind in the way that mountains are kind — not warm, exactly, but patient in a way that made warmth seem almost beside the point.
"Am I dead?" he asked.
"Yes," the being said, with what he could only describe as gentle efficiency.
He considered this. "The noodles weren't even good," he said finally. "That feels like it should matter somehow."
The being's expression shifted in a way that might, on a human face, have constituted the beginning of a smile. "Few endings are as dignified as we would wish."
"Right." He exhaled — interesting, that he could still exhale — and straightened slightly. "So. What happens now? Is this the part where you tell me about a tunnel and a warm light and the people I've lost?"
"No," the being said. "This is the part where I offer you a choice."
He studied it for a moment. "You're going to ask me to do something, aren't you."
"I am going to ask if you are willing to do something," the being corrected, and the distinction in its voice was not subtle. "There is no compulsion here. What I offer is a chance — nothing guaranteed, nothing promised beyond the opportunity itself."
"Very careful wording."
"I have had a great deal of practice."
He crossed his arms, which felt oddly grounding, and decided that if he was going to have a conversation with a divine entity in the white void that followed death, he was at least going to have it properly. "Alright. Let's hear it."
The being folded its hands — large, luminous, ageless — and spoke with the measured calm of something that had explained this particular offer more times than he could count. "The multiverse is vast. Infinite, in the truest sense of the word. Within it, stories play out — lives, destinies, arcs of meaning that shape the worlds they inhabit. Most proceed as they should. Some do not. Some veer, stumble, collapse under the weight of their own worst possibilities."
"And you need someone to go fix them."
"Not fix," the being said. "Inhabit. Participate. Make choices that the original inhabitant of the life could not, or would not, or did not."
"So. Possession."
"Fusion," it corrected again, and he got the impression it found imprecision mildly tiresome. "The soul of the person you would become would merge with your own. Their memories, their history, their physical self — all yours. Nothing of them would linger to conflict with your judgment. You would simply be them, with the full knowledge of who you were before."
He was quiet for a moment. Somewhere in the whiteness, nothing happened, very peacefully.
"Which story?" he asked.
The being tilted its head with something that might have been amusement. "That," it said, "would depend on you. There are many that require attention. I could allow you to choose, if you have a preference."
He opened his mouth, considered the implications of actively choosing to step into a specific story with specific dangers and specific demands, and thought better of it. "You know what," he said, "my luck can't be worse than whatever algorithm you're running. Let it decide."
The being regarded him for a beat longer than felt entirely comfortable. Then, with a gesture that was somehow both casual and cosmic, a wheel appeared.
It was enormous. It hung in the white void like something that had always been there and had simply been waiting to be noticed, divided into countless sections, each filled with text too small to read from where he stood. It gleamed. It hummed with the low, resonant energy of something with genuine weight behind it.
It spun.
He watched it go, a blur of color and text and possibility, slowing gradually the way wheels do, the way chance always seems to perform its most important work — with agonizing, theatrical deceleration. The sections became legible one by one as it crawled toward stillness. He caught fragments. The One Piece World. Middle Earth. A Court of—
It stopped.
He read the section it had landed on twice.
Then he laughed.
It was not a particularly dignified laugh. It was the laugh of a man who had, against all reasonable probability, found himself exactly where some part of him had always half-expected to end up, which was somehow funnier than any alternative would have been.
"Harry Potter," he said.