Timestone

Chapter Two ϟ Captive

White light surrounds me. I'm floating inside of pure energy. It takes me a few moments to piece things together. How did I get here? A cave, a mountain, a bolt of lightn—

That's it. Lightning struck me. I think I'm . . . dead?

Perfect. I wake up after recovering from some traumatic accident, only to be killed by a bolt of lightning. That's great.

But death isn't so bad. It's peaceful. For a while, I just float in the blank nothingness. I realize I'm not in the energy but a part of it. I am energy. I think this is one of the many afterlife theories—that our consciousness or soul or whatever returns to the universal energy that gave it birth. I don't think I ever bought into any of those post-mortem philosophies, preferring just to wait and see when my time came. And now, apparently, my time has come.

As peaceful as this is, I eventually start to wonder what comes next. This can't be all there is to the afterlife. While being one with the universal energy is an enticing concept, I can tell it's going to get old quickly. I'm not sure how long I've been dead because time feels different here, but I'm already on the verge of boredom.

Then, it feels like the universal energy doesn't want to be one with me. It's pushing me away. I don't know why I resist because moments earlier, I had been wishing to un-one myself from it. My mind telescopes in on itself, and my energy is converted back into body—back into the world of confusion and pain.

I'm balled up on the ground, tightly pressing my hands to my ears. A sharp ringing fills my head. I'm not dead after all. And I realize something else about myself—I must be the luckiest or unluckiest skraker on the planet. I can't decide which.

I haven't dared open my eyes yet. My body still feels numb and tingly. If I'm burned or injured, I want to feel it before I see it, so I wait for the numbness to wear off. It eventually does. Besides feeling lightheaded, everything seems surprisingly okay.

I need to get to lower ground before the lightning makes another attempt at my life. I really don't want to find out if I'm lucky enough to survive two lightning strikes in one day. When I raise my eyelids, I can't help but do a long blink. And then another.

I don't know how to react because my brain is shuffling through a flipbook of emotions without landing on one. Finally, it stops on fear. I'm in a completely different location than I was just seconds ago.

I'm lying in grayish-red powdery dirt. I sit up and look around to get a sense of where I am. I can still see the black mountain peak, but it towers over me a lot higher than it did a moment earlier. I can't see the valley below me anymore because I'm in it. I know it isn't possible, but I just moved from the mountain's upper slopes to the valley floor in the blink of an eye. The lightning bolt must have fried my brain.

Sitting in utter confusion, I feel a tiny burst of the universal energy filling my mind again. Well . . . look who came crawling back, I say to it in my head. Then, I think about how I shouldn't get snarky with universal energy. I realize I'm delirious—probably from dehydration.

Something else pushes its way into my mind. It's a voice. Not an audible one—I don't hear it with my ears, but my mind hears it. I'm not sure how I know, but it feels like a woman's voice.

"Go back to the cave."

The universal energy diffuses, and I'm left with just my own thoughts again. I quickly dismiss the whole thing as a side effect of the lightning blast. I don't usually hear voices in my head. At least, I'm pretty sure I don't. Besides, go back to the cave? I'm not about to scale back up the mountain to obey a voice in my delusional head.