🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Death & Beyond (Afterlife) | (27) DB-003-S
Once a year, every citizen was allowed five minutes in the Afterlife.
No one remembered the first time it happened. The law was older than nations. Older than ink. Passed down not through governments, but in bone and sleep and the soft hum beneath the wind. When the time came, the summoning bell would ring in the soles of your feet. That was how you knew.
You stopped what you were doing.
You stepped outside.
And the sky peeled open like a fruit too ripe to hold itself together.
You were not lifted. You were not pulled. You simply ceased to be in one place and found yourself in another.
They called it the Afterlife, but it was not a place of judgment or clouds or flame. It was a field of mirrors that did not reflect you. It was a song sung in a voice you once knew but could not name. It was your grandmother’s hands wrapped around a cup you never drank from. It was not heaven. It was not peace.
It was truth, peeled raw and placed in your palm.
For exactly five minutes, you knew.
You knew what waited after the body failed. You knew the secret longing of trees. You remembered the sound of your own soul being named.
Then you returned.
And you forgot.
The forgetting was absolute. The law of return was sealed with sorrow. All that remained was an echo, a sensation behind the ribs, a thirst without a mouth.
But the forgetting did not mean nothing changed.
No one could recall what they saw. But those five minutes shifted everything. The mother who had wept for her stillborn child began planting lilacs in the shape of vowels. The boy who had stolen from his neighbor spent his mornings baking quiet bread. A leader who had ruled with severity stepped down without a speech and vanished into the hills.
Some tried to write during their five minutes. Their hands would move, but the pages turned blank before they returned. Others tried recording, but machines could not follow them into the veil. One woman carved words into her own thigh, and when she came back, her skin bore only a single phrase:
"I forgive you."
Children often returned laughing or sobbing or with eyes too wide for comfort. The elders returned silent and content. Artists painted more slowly after. Thieves began to sing. Wars shrank.
Not all were comforted. Some emerged shaken, teeth chattering, fists clenched around nothing. They would sit in doorways for hours, afraid to move, until something unseen loosened inside them and they walked into the river fully clothed.
No one was forced to go.
But almost everyone did.
The only exception was a man named Arien, a cartographer of internal lands. He refused his summons each year. Said he preferred mystery over memory. Said he would not trade five minutes of clarity for a lifetime of longing.
He was respected, but pitied.
On his hundredth birthday, the bell rang once more, louder than it ever had. His neighbors stood in silence as the air shimmered around him.
This time, he stepped forward.
When Arien returned, he was weeping and laughing and empty and whole.
He said nothing.
But that year, he burned every map he'd ever drawn.
And he began walking.
Some say he is still walking.
That each footprint he leaves becomes a portal.
That those who stand where he stood feel, for just an instant, the wind shift inside them and the shape of the afterlife stirring softly beneath their ribs.
Five minutes a year.
That is all we are given.
But it is enough to make the rest of time worth living.