Fate's Exchange (Twisted Fate, Book 1)

Chapter Four

Black is death. It holds no light and bears no sound; it exists as a hole to prove your insignificance within the universe and, inside the darkness swirling around me, I felt nothing. For all the pain and build-up leading to death, dying happened in an instant. A breath. Then, like the sun setting on an evening sky, I was gone.

It would be a lie if I pretended I hadn't thought about my mortality, the moment 'life' would end. But whenever I'd thought about dying, I imagined it would occur on a stormy day, signs from the cosmos to mourn my passing. It wasn't a stormy day, though, like the universe just didn't care. I expected to feel sad—sixteen was too young to die. Instead, I felt... content, though I knew that couldn't be normal either. Every moment, each breath I had taken, from the moment I was born until my heart stopped beating, had led to this. People I didn't know, all the strangers I would never get the opportunity to meet, would be able to find peace because of the justice my death served. The police would connect the dots to the attacks and I had meant something. At least to those the Elixir students had already hurt.

Images surfaced through the darkness like a movie behind the lids of my eyes, moving too quickly to comprehend their meaning. There was no semblance of events and no way of pushing pause. I couldn't follow the flickering pictures as they passed to find their detail, but I knew their familiarity with the glimpses I managed to grasp. It was about me: my family, my friends, and all the memories that I had taken sixteen years to build.

It is my life.

The photos slowed, and I watched as they formed scenes that played out before me as a crude black and white film before the inclusion of sound.

Each stage of my life was run: my childhood in the only home I'd ever known with parents who loved me, their 'miracle baby'; starting school and making friends; going to high school and losing friends until only one true friend remained; all my successes and failures; and everything I dreamed of having or doing, but would never be able to experience. There was so much that I was going to miss now—first prom, the first day of college, my first love....

The last week of my life appeared, slowing to a near stand-still. Every movement crawled across the makeshift screen. Sound and then color emerged, and the images burst into life. Every hateful word I'd heard echoed in my head. I tried to squeeze my eyes tight, to block it out, but it became clearer.

How do you turn away from images inside your own head?

It was eerie and hard to digest. The days appeared sequenced like events providing a motive for a perfectly executed suicide. I was grounded for the first time—or, I should say, my parents had enforced my being grounded for the first time. I was humiliated in the lunch room in front of everyone, was hit playing Dodgeball so that I wound up with a bloody nose, failed quizzes I knew nothing about—and that was just Monday through Tuesday. Now, as though it wasn't bad enough to have lived through it, I had to suffer watching its playback, scene by agonizing scene.

What had I done to deserve this?

The images began to fade, slowing to a crawl after I witnessed my last breath, my body still tied to the tree as the Elixir students traded their pipe and what I assumed was vodka for pills. They hadn't realized my death yet or the fact that I was already beyond saving. Their ignorance was baffling. The thought of hearing their screams of discovery when they checked on me was pleasant, though I knew it was wrong to think that. Still, I wanted them to hurt with the knowledge of what they'd done. If they felt a fraction of what I had—not the pain, obviously, since by the time I died my body was numb—they would never be content again. Maybe that would urge them all to spend a life dedicated to doing good things for a change.

It was a reaction I would never see. The images of my life became stationary when my body stopped working, as though no longer able to gather new data. Was it a grace period after I stopped breathing during which I could have been saved within that allowed me the few extra minutes? I didn't know.

Either way, it wasn't long enough.

I need more time.

My whole life was summed up in a few minutes, sliding through time faster than they were experienced, though I guess that is how life works in the end. All the moments are just that—moments. The experiences I'd had skated by in the time it takes to snap your fingers. Even the most horrifying and prolonged instants slithered past in a series of pictures, glimpses of what happened to lead me to this moment. Death—the moment my life ceased to exist. It was all just a series of flashes strung together.

With my final thought, I realized that my life had been short-lived, unfinished. The darkness closed its curtain on the image and I was once again a part of the nothingness that Death created for its newly acquired souls while I waited to endure whatever came next.