'...Am I?' He thought. But his thoughts seemed to scatter, the meaning of them being stripped away along with the rest of his mind. Everything was crumbling, and he had long lost any sensation of the senses... He felt no heartbeat. No sounds. He didn't have a sensation of gravity, nor of floating. He just... Was.
Existence was his core, true foundation, and for something like him that had been a creature rooted in reality... This apparent void was unfathomable. He... Didn't exist? Or... He did, but not in any stretch of the term reality. Time, passed.
Unnoticeable, of course. With no daylight, no rhythm to anything, time was abstract. Time could have reversed, or even restarted, and there'd be no way for him to know. And... Finally, something.
He was alerted to a sensation, of what intrinsically he knew as his soul, as it was being torn apart. An excruciating pain unbeknownst to him before death... And likely never one comparable would ever be known to him, as his soul abruptly fell apart due to forces unknown. His consciousness faded as the pieces of him scattered, and each felt new sensations... One, was ripped into nothingness, and he became away of the... Energy, of this place. The flow and ebb, of tidal forces. Of not water, but... Souls. The energy amalgamated and torn into pieces, becoming part of the whole flow. No identity to it.
Another piece of him was taken by this tide, and swept away into the darkness, for now he could recognize that the energy represented light, and the darkness was the absence of energy. Only a few pieces of him remained close together, and it was through the faint, weak connection of what had previously held his soul together that he held some semblance of mind. Pathetically weak, but just barely enough that, over the passage of time, they drew back together... And slowly began to mend. Energy, does well with energy. And currents of the same level, work better together. So, his soul mended. Poorly, and with obvious flaws, but mended.
And... He had direction. The soul that slowly returned to being truly him, found that it could move. Slowly, but move. And it was far easier if he followed the flow of the tide, and so he did. Why move against everything, if you can make far more progress in going along? He had no destination, anyway.
Time passed, and he could now 'see' a much... Brighter light. A gigantic conglomeration of energy, drawing freely upon the normal, violent flow of once-souls to grow... And he could no longer move on his own. The 'gravity' of the immense star of energy took hold of him, like a vice.
He moved far faster than before, than even the current could move those fragmented pieces of himself that he'd lost forever... And was sucked into that star.
It tore at him, and rocketed him around within its circumference, but was, apparently, not strong enough to tear him apart. Weak as he was, it was not meant for destroying souls, but using them to build itself. And, so it did. With its judging of his usability, he was placed near the top of the star, and time passed. Apparently, he wasn't far from the final amount it'd needed, and slowly the star began to compress... All of the energy consolidating into a far denser, brighter dot of light... Including himself, but he felt no sensation of being crammed like a sardine... Or perhaps a super-heavy black hole.
Regardless, it was not much longer before he felt an immense lurching sensation, and his attention was scattered as the pinpoint-sized, super-dense ball of energy rocketed into a specific direction.
And from the sheer speed itself, he knew once more, the sensation of being unconscious. Or, that is, the lack thereof.
Time, of course, passed.
And as it finished passing, he slowly grew accustomed to the sensation of waking. Of returning from being unconscious in his very soul... Torn even as it was. But, he felt fine, mostly. In fact, he was feeling far more than he had before... There... Was warmth. He could almost cry, if he had the capability. Everything he'd been experiencing for the past... Amount of time, felt so horribly cold in comparison to even the slight warmth he could now feel... Even his fingers were warm...
Wait... Fingers?
The once-man jolted in shock, in a feat of bodily movement that he hadn't been capable of in what felt like an eternity. Yet, now he could jolt! He could feel shock! He was exuberant with joy, inside his mind. Which could now also think far clearer than before in that cold... Lonely void of souls and their remnant energy. But... Where was he? Why was he... So slow, and weak? That, he could not figure out. As, he was apparently stuck in somewhere dark, yet pleasantly warm. And so, he'd wait. He figured that if his perception of time during that... Void, was anything near correct now that he'd regained it... It could've been thousands of years. Now, he had patience more than anything else. A few more years couldn't hurt.