Barking at Oblivion

"They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die. Mine just played dog noises on repeat. Typical."

As I drifted in a strange state of consciousness, everything that defined my existence seemed to have vanished.

There was no sensation of touch, no ability to move, no sight.

Just endless darkness behind closed eyelids, a void where the world I knew no longer existed.

I didn't know if my eyes were closed or if I simply had no eyes anymore. The distinction seemed meaningless. There was only the dark—not the darkness of a room or a night sky, but something more fundamental. The darkness of absence.

No body.

No breath.

No heartbeat to count the seconds.

Just thought, floating untethered in an infinite nothing.

At first, the experience was akin to terror, or at least what I imagined terror should feel like.

But even that emotion felt distant, abstract.

My heart didn't race; my breath didn't quicken.

Because I had no heart. No lungs. No chest to contain them.

I was dead, a realisation that came with an eerie calmness.

I knew it as surely as I knew my own name, yet even that certainty felt surreal. The knowledge existed, but there was no body to feel the grief of it, no stomach to clench with fear, no throat to tighten with sorrow.

Joel Gibbons.

That was my name. I clung to it like a lifeline, repeating it in whatever passed for my mind.

Joel Elijah Gibbons. Born October 3rd, 1999. Son of Kate. Son of—

The thought fractured. Scattered. Reformed.

Jamie Greyson. My father's name is Jamie Greyson.

The memory surfaced from somewhere—a birth certificate, a Facebook profile, a photograph hidden behind another photograph. But the images were flat, dimensionless. Memories without the weight of a body to anchor them.

Questions swirled in the darkness.

Was this what being in hell felt like?

Or heaven?

Did such places even exist, or were they just constructs of a life I no longer belonged to?

Was this void my eternity—a silent, emotionless existence, reduced to a mere handful of thoughts?

I tried to feel something. Anything. I reached for fear, for hope, for anger, for grief. But emotions, I was learning, required a body. Required hormones and neurotransmitters and the complex chemistry of flesh.

Without that flesh, I was just... awareness.

Pure. Clean. Terrifying in its emptiness.

But then, the voice I had heard—the one that called this place Clivilius—came back to me.

Was this Clivilius?

What was it?

It was the only tangible thread I had to hold onto.

The memory of those words resonated through whatever remained of me: You are mine, Joel Gibbons. Welcome to Clivilius.

I tried desperately to focus, to remember more, but the fragments of memory were fleeting, elusive.

They flitted through my mind, leaving no lasting impression, devoid of any tangible meaning.

A swirling gate of colours. A man with steel-blue eyes. A blade, cold against my throat.

Blood.

So much blood.

The images dissolved before I could grasp them, slipping through the fingers I no longer had.

Time seemed meaningless.

Had it been an hour, a week, a year since I had arrived here?

I had no way of knowing, nor did I understand if this state would ever end.

Time required change to measure it. A clock ticking. A sun rising. A heart beating. Without any of those markers, I existed in a single eternal moment, stretched thin across infinity.

Was there a part of me that even wanted it to end?

The question surprised me. In the void, there was no pain. No fear. No grief about my mother or confusion about my father. Just... peace. A terrible, empty peace.

Perhaps oblivion wasn't so bad.

Perhaps this was better than whatever waited on the other side of consciousness.

But then, a new thought dawned on me, a realisation that was both startling and invigorating.

I could think.

I could remember thinking.

This awareness, simple as it was, sparked a flicker of something new within me—hope.

The very fact that I could question, could remember, could reason—this meant something persisted. Some essential me had survived the violence, the blood, the darkness.

In this void, the realisation that I was still capable of thought, of introspection, felt like a revelation.

It was like a toddler realising that he could stand up after a fall.

These thoughts, these memories, were they the beginnings of a new existence?

Have I been reborn in some way?

Am I still Joel, still human, or had I transcended into something else entirely?

The questions multiplied, each one giving birth to three more. I couldn't answer them. But the very act of asking felt like resistance—a defiance of the nothing that surrounded me.

As I grappled with these existential questions, a faint but growing sense of self-awareness began to emerge within the darkness.

There was a part of me that still existed, that still clung to the identity I had known.

Joel Gibbons.

Courier driver. Origami folder. Amateur astronomer. Son.

I held the words like talismans against the void.

In the midst of this unfathomable void, a familiar sound pierced the silence.

I can hear a dog barking, I realised.

The sound came from impossibly far away—muffled, distorted, as if travelling through water or across vast distances. But it was sound. Real sound. Something from outside the void.

An instinctive wave of panic surged through me.

What if it attacks me?

The fear was reflexive, absurd given that I had no body to attack. But the response itself was extraordinary—fear meant adrenaline, meant a nervous system, meant something physical still existed.

But then, another sensation washed over me—familiarity.

Recognition.

I know that dog! I've met him before!

The barking resolved into something specific. High-pitched. Insistent. The yap of a small dog, not a threatening growl.

Henri.

Or Duke.

The Shih Tzus from Luke's house. From the house in Berriedale where I'd delivered tents and found photographs and watched reality dissolve into swirling colours.

How could one of them be here?

Wherever here was.

Suddenly, a bright light erupted, banishing the oppressive darkness into oblivion.

It was as if the void itself recoiled, shrinking away from the intensity of the illumination.

The light was violent in its brightness—pure white, searingly intense, flooding through eyelids I suddenly realised I possessed.

Eyelids.

I had eyelids.

Which meant I had eyes.

Which meant—

As my senses reeled from the sudden change, muffled sounds began to filter through the light, growing steadily louder and clearer.

Voices! I exclaimed internally, a surge of excitement coursing through me.

I can hear voices!

They came in fragments at first. Syllables without meaning. Tones without words. The sound of human speech, recognisable in its cadence even before I could decipher the content.

Urgent. Confused. Afraid.

Multiple voices, overlapping, impossible to separate.

A thought fluttered through my mind, a hope—perhaps I was in a transitory state, on the brink of entering heaven.

Would my father be there?

The prospect excited me momentarily, but then the harsh reality hit me.

The clearest memory yet resurfaced—my father was still alive.

Jamie Greyson. Living in Berriedale with Luke Smith. Profile picture of two Shih Tzus. The same face I'd seen watching me from across carparks and streets.

A wave of sadness engulfed me.

Would I ever get the chance to meet him?

The question ached with a grief I shouldn't have been able to feel. But I felt it now—felt it in whatever new form my consciousness had taken. The wanting. The loss. The terrible irony of dying before I could confront the truth I'd spent nineteen years not knowing.

"Help me!" a voice thundered in my head, so loud it felt as if it would shatter my very existence.

The words weren't spoken—they exploded inside my skull, bypassing ears entirely, erupting directly into whatever remained of my consciousness.

A flurry of voices followed, a cacophony that overwhelmed my senses.

They were loud, terrifying, and I desperately wanted them to stop.

Dozens of voices. Hundreds. Thousands. All speaking at once, in languages I didn't recognise, in tones ranging from whispers to screams. They layered over each other, creating a wall of sound so dense it became physical, pressing against me from all sides.

Too much. Too much.

I could feel a strange pressure near my mind, as if my consciousness was trying to grasp something tangible.

Is my mind still in my head?

But that couldn't be—I died.

Or had I?

Maybe I was in a hospital?

But why a dog? Do hospitals use dogs now?

The thoughts spiralled, fragmenting under the onslaught of voices. Each new sound threatened to tear away another piece of whatever identity I'd managed to preserve.

The confusion and noise became unbearable.

Make them stop! I mentally screamed. Please Clivilius, make the voices stop!

The word came instinctively—Clivilius. The name the voice had given this place. I called out to it as a drowning man might call out to the sea, begging for mercy from the very thing that was killing him.

And as if my plea had been heard, the voices immediately receded, fading into a soft, soothing rush, like the sound of a gentle stream.

The chaos in my head subsided, leaving me in a state of relative calm, floating in the unknown.

It listened.

It actually listened.

The realisation was as terrifying as it was comforting. Something was here with me. Something that could control what I heard, what I experienced. Something that had claimed me as its own.