The Iris Theory

Prologue

...cold... c-cold...

The dark, subzero atmosphere surrounding my body had me knitted in its center. Nothing was here but me. My head was cradeled forward in my forearms and I was lying in the emptiness in a position almost similar to a fetal position. That's when my lungs forced out a slow, freezing breath. Then, a feeling surged through my body making me slightly twitch and turn. It was breaking away from a comatose-like state.

My eyelids fluttered halfway open. There was nothing but pitch black all around me. My eyes failed to focus on the pitch black reaches of outer space. I was floating in cold, hollow darkness.

Wispy orbs brushed past my fingertips, and small, dying lights whished past in fragments by my body. The lights were warm and bright. Tiny crystals flew in spirals from my mouth and floated into thin clouds. I couldn't smell, taste... I could barely see or hear anything. Could I even touch?

I didn't even feel alive.

My eyebrows burrowed upward when a piercing explosion sounded off into the distance. I pivoted my body to the best of my weakened ability. Purple surges of light pierced the darkness in layers of cosmic rings around an entity in the center. I squinted my eyes and felt the atmosphere around me begin to slowly fall apart. Air was rushing past my ears, and the whistling of wind cupped around my body as I plummeted toward the explosion.

My head tilted upward at my extended hands and feet. I felt my eyelids become excruciatingly heavy, and a deep desire to sleep swallowed me whole. Silhouettes and minuscule figured of hundreds of bodies were falling head first all around me. Purple light engulfed me, and everything fell into pitch black again as I went to sleep.

Time was irrelevant. All I remember was heat enveloping my body, and plunging head first into the sun. Then, the earth rushed into me as a loud thud snapped me awake.