🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Death & Beyond (Afterlife) | (27) DB-003-D1
On his third visit, Orrin arrived with a quiet urgency in his veins, as if the afterlife had already begun to pulse inside him, shaping the rhythm of his days. He stepped into the chamber, familiar now. The same soft aperture of light, the slow dilation of sound, the unraveling of gravity into stillness.
But this time, the field was not empty.
A woman stood at the center of the vast hush, her back to him. She did not glow. She did not float. She simply stood, hands folded before her, as if waiting for a question not yet formed.
“I know you,” Orrin said, though he did not.
She turned, and her eyes were layered. Not in color, but in time. Each gaze within her gaze blinked at different intervals, as if she carried the sight of all the selves she had ever been.
“I know you,” she said, and Orrin shivered without cold.
“You died?” he asked.
She smiled. “Not yet.”
“Then how are you here?”
“I remember,” she said. “I remembered before I ever forgot.”
Her name was Mireya. Or that was the name she offered in that version of the afterlife. She spoke like someone who had learned language from mirrors and rain, full of reflections and reverberations.
“You’ve been here before,” Orrin said.
“Every year,” she replied. “And in between.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Neither is time,” she said, and with a flick of her finger, parted the air like fabric. Beneath it was a vision Orrin could not name, an echo folding into itself, alive with unfinished choices.
“They said you cannot bring anything back,” Orrin whispered.
“They said many things,” Mireya answered. “But you are ready for the thing they do not say.”
She reached into the quiet and pulled forth a thread of color so faint it could not be seen, only felt. It moved like memory before words. She placed it in his palm.
“It is not an object,” she warned. “It is not a soul. It is not a story.”
“What is it?”
“It is what you ripple,” she said.
And then she leaned forward, until her lips nearly touched his ear.
“Return gently.”
When Orrin opened his eyes in the waiting room, the technician’s voice called out the time. Five minutes, precise. But the walls seemed to hum. The air did not settle around him the way it used to. The world outside the booth exhaled strange light.
That night, in sleep, he did not dream.
But his sister did. A dream of a river bending backwards. Of a single stone skipping against time. And each skip caused her to remember things that had never happened, her hands shaking with grief she never earned, joy she never met.
Elsewhere, a garden bloomed overnight, though no seeds had been planted. The wind carried voices it was not supposed to know. A blind man wept in a cathedral and whispered Mireya’s name, though he had no reason to know it.
Orrin said nothing.
The ripple moved without asking.
The next year, the booth was closed for maintenance. The afterlife was undergoing renovations, the notice read. Too many anomalies. The veil had grown thin.
Orrin waited.
And the ripple grew.