Everything had felt so cold—so cold that my body refused to move, frozen in place. And yet, in that unbearable chill, something had held me in its warm embrace.
Death was never what they said it would be. It didn't seize me with an iron grip or drag me into the abyss with cruel indifference. No… it held me close, wrapped me in a warmth so comforting that I almost welcomed it. Almost.
Never had death felt so near, so tangible. And yet, its touch had been strangely gentle. The cold had seeped into my bones, but death itself had cradled me in a hushed, soothing embrace. It had surrounded me—body and soul—like a presence that wanted me to rest, to surrender.
I "saw" nothing but the endless black of the void. No light, no horizon—just an abyss stretching infinitely in all directions. And within it, I drifted, enveloped in death's warmth, lulled into a sleep that was neither peaceful nor restless. Just… empty.
The silence had been sharp, like a blade pressing against my thoughts, threatening to cut away the last remnants of who I had been. Time had lost meaning. Seconds, minutes, hours—perhaps even centuries—had slipped through my fingers, unnoticed. I hadn't known. I hadn't needed to know.
And then, without warning, I had woken up.
How?
I should have been dead. I was dead. And yet, against all reason, against all natural law, I had existed again. An anomaly.
The moment my eyes had opened, my hands had been the first thing I looked at—small, fragile, unfamiliar. Something inside me had known the gravity of the situation, even if my mind had been blank. Despite everything, I had been there. "Alive."
All I had known—my only tether to any sense of self—was my name.
Raziel.
Beyond that? Nothing. No memories. No past. Just the lingering sensation of the void where I had once drifted, where I had rested in the silent embrace of death before being torn back into existence.
As I had struggled to comprehend what had happened, a voice had reached me. A voice both unfamiliar and oddly maternal. It had stirred something in me—curiosity, perhaps. Or something deeper.
I had awoken in the body of a child, a ten-year-old boy. But I had known, instinctively, that it had not been my body. And yet, it was what I had been given. Perhaps it had been mine once. Perhaps it had been created for me. I hadn't known then. I still don't.
But I had continued forward.
Because history repeats itself. Over… and over… and over again. No matter the world, no matter the version of yourself that walks its surface—unless you change, you are doomed to live the same story, suffer the same tragedies, fall into the same cycle.
I had been a soul lost in the void, trapped in the clutches of death's embrace. And then, I had been given this body—a body not mine, and yet mine all the same. The reason? A mystery. The truth? An enigma beyond mortal comprehension.
All I had known in that moment was the cold—sharp as ice, burning as fire. And the undeniable fact that I existed.