Claimed from the Dark

"Death, it turns out, isn't the end of the conversation. It's just where someone else starts talking."

Nothing.

For how long, I cannot say. Time had no meaning in that place. There was no before and no after. No heartbeat to measure seconds. No breath to mark the passage of moments.

Just the void.

Complete. Absolute. Endless.

I wasn't floating in darkness—that would imply a body to float, a space to occupy. I wasn't thinking in silence—that would suggest a mind still capable of thought. I simply wasn't.

And yet.

Something remained.

A single point of awareness, smaller than an atom, fainter than the most distant star. The last ember of whatever Joel Gibbons had been, cooling in the infinite black.

Waiting to go out.

In that abyss of darkness, where time and reality seemed suspended, a sound emerged.

Not a sound, exactly. Sound requires air, ears, the mechanics of vibration and interpretation. This was something else. Something older. Something that predated sound itself.

It was a voice, ethereal and captivating, slicing through the silence like a beam of light cutting through the night.

The voice resonated, not just in my ears, but through my very being, vibrating deep within my skull, lighting up my dulled mind like a spark igniting a flame.

I existed again.

The realisation came like a thunderclap in reverse—not loud, but profound. Where there had been nothing, now there was me. Or something that remembered being me. Something that still carried the shape of Joel Gibbons, even if the flesh that had housed him lay cooling in a delivery truck half a universe away.

The voice had a mystical quality, as if it was not merely heard but experienced.

It seeped into my being, reverberating down my spinal cord, sending shivers through my somatic nervous system.

Did I have a spinal cord? Did I have nerves? I couldn't feel my body—couldn't feel anything—and yet the voice moved through me as if I were still made of flesh and bone and blood.

I could feel a strange awakening within me, as if the voice was breathing life back into my empty veins, stirring something long dormant.

Not resurrection. Not healing. Something else entirely.

Something that felt like being made.

Reassembled from scattered pieces. Rewoven from unravelled threads. Called back from the void not by love or luck or medicine, but by will.

By command.

"You are mine, Joel Gibbons. Welcome to Clivilius," the voice declared, its tone both commanding and soothing.

Mine.

The word hung in the nothing, heavy with meaning I couldn't yet comprehend.

Not you are safe. Not you are saved.

You are mine.

I had been claimed.

By what, I did not know. By whom, I could not guess. But somewhere in the space between death and whatever came next, something vast and unknowable had reached into the darkness, found the fading ember of my consciousness, and refused to let it go out.

The voice faded.

The void remained.

But I was no longer alone in it.

And I was no longer nothing.

I was his.