Hi!
Constructive criticism welcome! This is my first posting on here. While it skirts with some romantic stuff, this is a non-erotic fantasy!
Hope you enjoy!
---xxx---
Second Birth
Will had an inkling he was dead.
As he lay there, eyes closed and smelling clean air, his memory was a rush of confused imagery. There was only one prominent image near the end and he was sure it had just happened.
He'd been hit by a speeding car which had no chance to slow down or swerve out of the way. Quite the end to a miserable day. At least it was over now.
He opened his eyes slowly, surprised to see that he lay upon a field of short grass that stretched for as far as he could see. It was unlike any other grass he had ever seen; lovely and dark with tiny translucent lights slowly travelling across the surface from bottom to top, like tiny bugs. He chanced a roll onto his back and stared up in wonderment, eyes wide.
There, above him in the sky, was a massive stream of luminescent matter, different colours ranging from blues to dark greens and streaks of gold, all rotating around a solid black core. He could barely breathe as he took in how vast it was, and how beautiful and terrifying, all at once. The name that came to mind was black hole, though it did not look like any of the depictions he had seen.
Will now believed he was dead. There was no other explanation for his appearance here.
For a while he lay there, unable to move because he was transfixed on the sight of the huge phenomenon in the sky, along with the thought of his death being a thing of the past. He frowned at the idea of that. He'd always believed that once a person was dead, they were dead. There was no afterlife, no god, nothing to comfort them, no place for them to exist in; just an end to consciousness.
Given he was wrong, and his current circumstances, he felt as though he should've been far more disturbed, but curiously, he was simply existing in the moment and letting those thoughts pass by like grains of sand in a flowing river.
The only thing that did not change was the awe-full terror of seeing the sky.
He blinked and sat up slowly, afraid that his body was broken from the impact of the car, but he was surprised to find he was intact. He looked down to see he was naked, but felt no self-consciousness about it. In fact, he couldn't stop staring because his body looked different. It took him peering very closely at his own hands for him to see what it was; much like the grass he sat in, there were tiny faint lights moving under the top layers of his skin. They were moving towards the fingers and vanishing into nothingness at the tips. A look at his upper arms showed him lights flowing down to his hands. His curiosity piqued, he looked at his legs and saw there were lights travelling towards his feet.
He stood up lazily and looked around. There was no one else there. The field stretched into darkness a long way off, and everywhere he looked, the glow from the ground persisted. He looked up at the sky and a twinge of terror bolted through him, so he looked back down again. It was prudent to avoid looking up for now, he decided.
There was nothing to do but walk. He reasoned it didn't matter which way he went; every direction looked the same. So, after turning a few times with his eyes closed, he opened them and set off.
The main feeling where his situation was concerned was curiosity. There were moments of anxiety, but nothing persisted. Aside from his own brief dull flares of emotions, he realised he could not really experience the passage of time. Was there even Time in this place? Nothing changed in the environment; there was no wind, there were no other objects other than the grass itself, and the only thing that moved was the maelstrom in the sky, soundlessly imposing. Even when he kept his eyes away, he could feel its presence hovering like an overzealous parent.
He couldn't have said how long it was when he saw the first spark of something different. There was a flash in the sky, bright enough to jerk his head up, and right there, in the solid black core, were spirals of light pulsing as they rushed towards the centre. The moment they collided, the entire core blinked a blinding white, before a screaming jet of light shot out and rushed to the ground. He tensed and grimaced violently at the screaming, almost blocking his ears before he noted it was fading in volume.
It landed some ways away. All he saw was the light reach the ground and the strange, metallic scream abruptly ended. Upon seeing its impact, he realised he'd been expecting an explosion of some sort, or perhaps another flash of light to mirror the one from the core. Instead, the light simply vanished.
He started walking towards it.
He knew he'd reached the site of the impact when he saw another body laying there in the grass. From the flare of the hips, he guessed it was a woman. She was lying on her side, positioned like she was clasping something close to her chest.
He hesitated on approaching her. For the first time since he had died, his emotions were no longer dull flares, but brilliant flashes. Inside, he was a vibrating ball of trepidation and confusion as he stared at her. He realised she wasn't wearing clothes and suddenly, his own nudity mattered.
Nevertheless, he couldn't just ignore her. He walked over to her reluctantly. The closer he got, he could see her spine had a faint luminescence to it, muffled by the layers of skin. It glowed enough that he saw tiny lights radiating from it, fading quickly. He wondered if it was the same for his body.
He walked in front of her, looked at her and quickly averted his eyes; her nudity felt almost too much to look at.
The environment around them looked much the same as where he had landed.
He took a deep breath and he turned to her again. He bent down carefully and reached out to briefly nudge her arm. Upon contact, his fingertip surged with light, albeit tiny and brief, but it surprised him enough that he jerked his hand back. The sensation that came with it was oddly pleasurable and not unlike an electric feeling.
That touch alone was enough to wake her. She groaned and balled up into a foetal position for a few moments before she stretched out. He watched as she opened her eyes and looked at him. She stared for a while with a squint, as if she wasn't sure she was looking at something real. Then she frowned deeply as she pushed herself up to sit.
Will did nothing. He waited to see what she would do.
The moment she was sitting up, her eyes relaxed and she looked up at the sky. It elicited an expression on her face which disturbed him more than he cared to admit, and he realised it was probably the same expression he had made when he first saw the kaleidoscopic monster above. There was something almost trance-like about her staring, right up until she blinked and looked down at him.
"Am... am I dead now?"
It was a whisper, but in the constant silence he had been walking in, it was startlingly loud. Her voice gave him goosebumps.
"I don't know," said Will carefully. "I think so."
"You think so?"
He asked, "What's the last thing you remember?"
She looked off into the distance and her brow creased slightly. "I was in the hospice. I was laying there. My children and my grandchildren were there."
"Grandchildren?" His voice betrayed his surprise. She didn't look to be more than a young woman in her mid-twenties.
"What?" She asked.
Will shook his head. "Nothing. Uh, keep going."
She gave him a light shrug. "That's all. I was dying. Stage four cancer. I just remember glimpses of them and darkness. And then I... well, I fell asleep." She looked around. "No... I died, didn't I? I must've. How else am I here?" She frowned deeply. "Where is here?"
"I don't know. I woke up here just like you did," said Will, nervously scratching his arm.
"What's that?" Her voice was a snap.
"What?"
