A/N: english is not my first language and I have never written a big text before, so if any beta finds the story interesting (which should start being by the next chapter) and has some spare time, I'd like to have some help.
The story contains a few original characters by me that I thought they would fit well in the universe of AF for a single adventure.
Chapter 1: The Cradle of Nowhere
A big, black pond of dark mass, seemingly as dense as a soup, lies in a granite rock in the middle of Nowhere. It keeps whirling back and forth, without any identifiable pattern, and sometimes, something can be seen floating there: a mass of organs and bones. That is what the Worldless calls a 'newborn'.
The Nowhere is a place between worlds, where everything is unbound of rules and pretty much of everything too. There is no air, ground or gravity to sustain anything, yet things walk and breath in there. A little orb shines from its center to serve as the only light source, and millions of shadows from the worlds, that wave around spiraling towards the core as is they were huge tentacles coming from a lovecraftian demigod fill the borders of this place. With a naked eye, one could say there is absolutely nothing to see there except the core's light.
The only thing in that place that has a meaning, a name and real mass is the Cradle, a pool of concentrated shadows over a pyramidal granite rock. It received this name because it is the place where all the Worldless, the inhabitants of Nowhere, are born, or, as they like to say, they awaken.
The Worldless. Also known as wraiths or even reapers on the other worlds, are special creatures: they are the embodiment of a strong will which right of living was denied, that comes back for reckoning. There are many ways to "create" a Worldless, but the most common one comes from failed magical experiments involving the duplication of humanoid souls in magic-driven worlds, by wizards who wants to increase their lifespan. There is a rule about existing in a world: you can be only one. That means there cannot exist two of you at the same time, your world only gives you a single "life-ticket". If another of you suddenly appears, it is denied from its living rights, and if its willpower is strong, it becomes a Worldless.
Not that it is any good, though. Its existence is accursed: the lack of a life spark in them generates a very strong resentment against their living selves, turning them into desperate vengeful spirits, whose only purpose is to prive their living selves from their lives too. And after they achieve this goal, they fade away, like a shadow that is bathed by light.
Recently, some events in a not so magic-driven world resulted in the birth of a new Worldless: a man and a woman traveled to the past to save someone from their present, but on the way back, they bought along the man's past self. Although things worked out in the end, something was overlooked: when bringing the man's past self to the present, the time tunnel had to compensate for the woman too, like a scale that needs a counterweight. The only way to do that was to duplicate her existence within the tunnel, but inevitably discarding it when they arrived on their time. That discarded material disintegrated and, after a short while, recomposed itself in the Cradle's black pool, as a huge mess of overlapped and twisted organs and bones.
The only way for a Worldless to "awaken" to its new existence is by being helped by another Worldless, that pulls them from the Cradle, like a fisherman pulls a fish from the water, and then helps it remember who it was as well as what caused it to become another accursed being, thus igniting their will. The process is much like a metamorphosis, as its initial state is hardly recognizeable as a humanoid.
And it is about to happen.
A/N: No, I didn't forget about Jayjay. It's just that animals like him do not come back at all. By the way, the next chapters will be longer.