I always thought of death as a relatively straightforward concept dressed in the robes of something much grander. It's not much more than a switch, really. On or off. One or zero. True or false. As big and frightening as a state of such utter nonexistence is, my sentience gave me the power to boil down death to near simplicity, to reduce the void itself to the subject of a single, effortless question.

Yes or no?

I was wrong. Because of course I was wrong. I'm a human being. We're wrong, all the time and always. We think, we reason, and then we assume the conclusion we came to was the right one. It takes circumstance, an environment, a frame of reference, the truth of a harsh world to bring us crashing back to reality from the lofty heights of our own heads.

Problem was, there was no circumstance anymore. There was no environment, no frame of reference, no truth of a harsh world, no reality to crash into, just like there was nothing to see or hear or smell or touch or taste or even comprehend. There was no more time, no more space, no more of anything than this.

The void.

I sat, or stood, or lay, or ran, or jumped, or whatever other action or inaction I could possibly conceive, in a darkness that wasn't dark. Darkness required light, and I remembered the terror of the dark to a child's eyes and a child's mind buried in bed and blankets, desperately trying to soak up warmth and push out the night, holding it out strong for coming dawn. But this wasn't that. This wasn't fear or terror or horror of the unknown. This was much, much worse than that.

I was afraid of spiders. I was terrified of spending a life wasted and alone. The thought of a world burning beneath the nuclear flames of war, hot enough to set the sky ablaze, horrified me.

I was scared of all the absence. The word did the overwhelming sensation of a cold fright that violated my entire soul with its glacial, freezing touch little justice, but this place didn't care for that. Not for peace, not for justice, not for right or wrong, and certainly not all the things I had ever cared about. It took all of those things away. But even worse than the total lack of everything I ever knew, I was stuck with my simpleton's idea of death's dead man's switch, a state of nonexistence that existed nonetheless, whether I liked it or not. I was stripped of everything I knew, and left with my biggest failing: thinking I could make death something small.

I would've joked about it, made some more witty remarks to stave off the inevitable philosophical struggle and perhaps entertain whatever divine entities liked this sort of messing with mortals, but that was before I felt the abyss started to gnaw at me.

It was a hungry thing, and it seemed that such unknowable hunger left little room for things like manners, a little bit of dignity and decorum for the soon-to-be consumed. And, of course, for the sake of simple insult to injury – with no small pinch of whatever passed for salt in the void rubbed into that gaping hole of a wound – it was slow, because it had all the time in the world.

With no lungs to laugh, I settled for a soulful chuckle. That nonexistent noise didn't last long, either. Once I stepped without stepping over the corpse of my own idea, I grappled with a few images: gilded gates, geysers of hellfire, warrior's halls, rivers of lost spirits, a place in misty clouds where everyone kind of hung around in cliques and conversation as their path in the afterlife was determined for them. It was all sorts of things, all sorts of religions and mythologies that floated in my headless mind to torment me. Any one of those probably would've been better, or at the very least, slightly more interesting. All I got was an absence of everything and an eldritch nonexistence chewing on my soul like a dog with a bone.

For some reason, I say it like it didn't hurt. The truth was far from painless.

Union, in the pasts of people that came long before me, was an agonising process. It came with blood, it came with violence, it came with war, and it came with death. Harmony was never easily achieved. The lessons of history taught that well, and it seemed some of those seemingly useless lessons in school applied to something much larger than a few bits of paper, a couple dozen scrawled lines of ink and an hour's worth of examination: nothingness itself.

My presence here, or there, or wherever, issued a reaction. I was something; it was nothing. Can't have that, now can we? I was stripped of everything I knew on arrival, but the abyss found another way to take away, to even the score. Predictably, it wasn't like the void one-upped me. It just subtracted the damn points. One-zero became zero all.

In the darkness that wasn't, I was a soul. No more body, no more flesh and no more blood. From within, the abyss started to eat me without jaws. From without, the void started to swallow me without tendrils.

It was pulling and chewing, tugging and gnawing, but it never evolved to yanking and crunching, tearing and biting. The void, the abyss, or whatever I could name it, would never resort to force. What need did it have for force when I would do the work for it? A soul was a flame, a fire that burnt bright and fast. And no fire could last forever against the boundless tides of eternity. The void accepted my reluctance, my gallant, heroic and tragic battle for existence. With the desperate struggle of my will and my resolve, it stretched waiting arms wide open to the dwindling cinders I was becoming, my furious strength of scorching life and wild spirit fading to ash and embers, dust and echoes of what I once was.

Desiring something, I condemned myself to nothing. The void was one tricky bastard for a big ball of absolutely nothing, hard to see and harder to understand as anything more than an idea, a concept that was the closest thing that anything would ever be to neither here nor there. On its own, an idea was harmless. With me, it had the fuel of a soul's raging fire, and it became the most powerful thing in both all creation and all that wasn't.

The forceless concept of the void gained force, gained absolute power over all within, and it forced me through itself. I knew, and then I didn't. I felt, and then I didn't. I was, and then I wasn't. The abyss that ate me from the inside worked its way through my soul in one last chomp of miasmatic teeth, and the void that swallowed me and my bodiless existence with misty tendrils pulled me in with one last yank.

As the void embraced me and I embraced the void, my soul dispersed, vanishing into the thin air of nothingness like wisps of smoke.

The paradox was at an end.

... Or, it should've been.

I was okay with nonexistence. Thought I was, at least. After a while, after I'd finally burnt out in my last valiant efforts to be, misty bits of me all over the place seemed to understand what couldn't be understood. How parts of the whole became greater than the whole itself were far beyond me, but I got the gist of the supposedly gist-less: at one point or another, everything would return to what it once was – nothing. I was just a little bit ahead of the curve.

The void, in all its infinite-yet-nonexistent wisdom, thought otherwise.

At my scattered core, there rested something that was not at peace, not at rest: something was still energy, and something was still something. Klaxons of paradox went off somewhere and messed up some admin's day. Something inside my dissolved sense of self still fought, still wanted, but the void had already swallowed me. It had tried to accept me, but I was giving it a stomach-ache. The void had no force of its own, nothing to use but nothing itself until a soul fell down from wherever and fire lit up the not-quite dark with the brilliance of a thousand suns. It didn't really have that anymore.

So, nothingness decided it could wait.

The miasma and mist of every last bit of me shook with unrestrained violence, and I was suddenly me again, pulled from everywhere. And then the void began to push me away. Well, it wasn't so much a push as it was a retch. The void kind of spewed me out like bad lunch, and I went up its throat so fast I was going down.

I was falling.

And then I wasn't. I stopped, and existence started screaming.

A wave of new wetness surged new sense and new skin, overcame me and what I was again before sight came along with it. The lights were turned up to eleven, then twelve and then a million because it was like the sun was staring a newborn in the face from a metre away before it faded into a whirlwind of moving shapes and shadows and giants the size of skin-tone mountains.

Sounds rushed in not a moment later, and it was like the thunder of a hundred storms combined with a tsunami combined with an earthquake combined with the dying screams of a woman somewhere in all of that chaotic mess. My ears rang beneath the deafening sounds before I could even make out anything, voices and words and language that shouted and spoke and sang in a god-awful chorus of aural murder.

To say my heart was close to beating its way out of my chest wasn't much of an exaggeration. Nor was it much of an exaggeration to say the entire world stunk of coppery blood, foul excretions leaking from somewhere far below, and the noxious scent of a little vomit dribbling down from somewhere else.

And then there was the way my body jiggled. And, oh, did it jiggle. It was like being a pond made of flesh, blood and floating bone constantly poked with a stick by some small child with an undying interest in all things rippling. The reverberations through my tiny ribcage were not pleasant.

And then it all stopped again. Every last bit of it – the moment full of screaming, crying, sensation, and deadly, rising awareness of my surroundings – froze.

I could feel. I could hear. I could see.

What I felt was a mixture of cold and warmth, material and skin that felt like gravel rubbed into my behind in the hands of the giant that held me. What I heard was a metallic echo, tinny breath through a tank or mask that made me afraid at a level so basic, it was still trying to understand what a noise was. But what I saw...

I saw white-blonde hair falling down the back of a dark cloak in a dark room, a swirling pattern on the chest of something thick and fabric, a coiled length of chain and sickle by a waist, and a helmet of solid metal that rang with the sound of harsh, sharpened breath through a mask that only just held back the violet poison that rode on foul-smelling air.

When I realised just the where, how and who of all this crazy-ass reincarnation bullshit, I decided that if I had had the lungs and the tongue with the breath and skill to speak the moment I was born again, I would've said this:

"Holy shit, Hanzō of the fucking Salamander is my grandfather."

Well, I had a self-insert/OC idea. Hopefully it's slightly more original than most.

If people find this promising, I might try and carve out some time to get an actual story made out of this thing.

Until then,

A238