There was no light, only a weightless, suspended feeling. A thick, oil-like liquid held her, supporting her limbs without effort. Her lungs, operating on an instinct deeper than thought, demanded action. Moving upwards, she broke a surface she hadn't known was there.
She gasped, the air cool and strange in her lungs. The water tasted of nothing she knew—clean, metallic, with an undercurrent of something sweetly rotten.
She was floating.
Her hands paddled weakly, finding no purchase. At first, the liquid looked like a starry night. But upon further inspection, it simply reflected what was above. By itself, it was opaque, a deep violet-black, with faint, lazy swirls of silver moving within it like captive galaxies. It clung to her skin with a silken weight, but left no wetness behind.
She blinked, trying to clear her vision. Light came from the expansive pool, a faint, phosphorescent glow that illuminated the immediate space around her.
Bringing her hands close to her face, the realization came, 'I'm... back?'
Looking up, a tapestry of bright, alien stars stared back. They were not the distant, polite pinpricks of Earth, but great, swirling bruises of violet and cobalt, veined with silver, pulsating with a slow, cosmic light. Around the pool was a platform of marble—circled by grand, giant columns.
Her last memory surfaced without ceremony.
'... I was shot.'
A flat, factual statement. The flash of fire in her apartment. The brutal, physical shock of the impacts. The final, numb letting go.
'So that was death.'
It wasn't a question, just an observation. Her mind, the part that had catalogued her own misery for so long, was now cataloguing this. There was no pain. Just a profound, disorienting wrongness.
Then, the other memories came—as reminders of broken glass, sharp and invasive at first. The cold satisfaction of watching an army die. The feeling of a man's flesh unraveling into dust under his will. The searing, intimate pain of a woman's hand pushing into his chest, like a key turning a lock.
Mei.
The name was a brand in her mind. She saw a face of terrifying beauty, a smile of rapturous betrayal. She felt the echo of a heart breaking not from love, but from the realization of a thousand-year lie.
Virgil.
His life. His reign. His death. It was all there, a complete and horrifying archive, along with the plan for his return. The panic was budding. Despite the sheer amount of memories spanning millennia, her mind was able to accommodate it all. This was absolute, fundamental wrongness.
She forced air into her lungs, then let it out slowly. She repeated the process several times, her gaze fixing on the sky. This was not Earth. This looked like Virgil's world.
She was Serena. She had died. Her body was most likely gone.
... Her world was gone. The life she had lived—exhaustion, chemical escape—was over. There was no more Earth—no New York, no Palestine.
And now she was here.
The hollow feeling returned, not as emptiness, but as a vast, quiet space. The initial panic left behind a profound and weary acceptance.
What was the point of screaming? Or crying? She didn't even really feel like it. Her breath evened out as she recalled Virgil's last memories.
This wasn't the afterlife. This was a destination. A specific, engineered point for a specific 'soul'. But he was gone. She knew it with the same certainty she knew her own death. The 'he' that had experienced those memories was extinguished. She had the data, but the user was deleted.
'Then why am I here?'
She was in a pool. Maybe meant for him. But she was her. Serena. The one who died in a spray of violence.
"... A cosmic mistake." The thought was almost laughable. Of course her death would be as messy and malfunctioning as her life. She stilled, floating on her back. The starry liquid swirled around her.
Her mind circled the two sets of memories, hers and his. She remembered the feel of canvas under her fingers, the smell of turpentine, the crushing weight of exhaustion. She also remembered the feel of a country shifting under his will, the taste of stolen power, the absolute silence of a throne room after a decree of genocide. They didn't mix. They sat side-by-side, contrasting, a natural collage of a curatorial assistant and a God-Emperor. Yet, at the same time, they coexisted perfectly, as if they had several millennia to get along with each other. The hum of his power was there, too. A low, dormant current in her being. This, unlike the memories, felt like a foreign organ that had been transplanted into her body. A sleeping beast she knew not to wake.
"..."
There were no answers here. No voices. No guides. Just the liquid, the foreign sky, and his 'ghost' in her machine.
His experiences, memories, and magic was only supposed to float in the multiverse—not implant itself in a new person entirely.
What was she supposed to do? Wait? For what? If this was his resurrection platform, where was Antikleia?
'Am I the vessel?'
.
.
.
The water offered no resistance as she paddled towards the edge. Her limbs moved with an unfamiliar, fluid ease that felt both wrong and natural. She hauled herself out, the strange liquid sluicing off her skin without leaving a trace of dampness, and stood on cool, smooth stone.
Her first few steps were cautious, feeling the ground beneath her bare feet. She moved beyond the ring of columns, and the full scope of the place opened before her. The structure was not isolated. The 'pool' was a junction. From the central circle where she had awakened, the violet-black water flowed out in four perfectly straight channels before disappearing into the tree line that encircled the entire area kilometres away. There was nothing but forestry beyond that.
Above, the alien constellations pulsed. And right below it, the glowing canal cast shifting silver light onto the surrounding forest. The trees themselves were a deep, velvety indigo, their leaves edged with bright phosphorescence.
Fireflies—or something like them—drifted in the air, their light a soft, persistent gold, while larger, luminescent butterflies traced lazy paths through the branches.