Fate, the thing responsible for everything. Despite how many have tried to wield it, the power of fate continues to be uncontrollable and unchangeable. During birth, you are given a destiny.
You could be chosen to combat the forces of evil and slay a mighty dragon or picked to be murdered by a beggar on the curb. Whether good or bad, destiny is something no human can control nor manipulate.
The Golden Strings of Fate are knitted around everything at their creation, binding them to a road they can not diverge from. Unfortunately for some, that road is short.
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'Huh? Where am I?'
Floating in a black abyss, a lone soul could be seen floating aimlessly, its ethereal light shining like a star in the darkness.
This soul belonged to Adam Ristola, a young college student who died in a freak accident while working. On Earth, he worked a part-time job as a waiter in a small diner. Late one night, one of the local biker gangs decided to stop by, and despite being warned to not approach them, Adam did.
His young curiosity took hold of him, and he went to ask a gang member he recognized his name. While heading over to the man's table, he slipped on a greasy footprint left behind by one of the bikers and fell backwards, knocking over a table in the process. After a glass bottle hit the ground and shattered, a large shard got propelled towards Adam.
Due to him sitting up after he landed, the shrapnel was able to glide right past the front of his neck, slicing it open. The wound bled like hell, causing Adam's throat to be filled with the viscous liquid.
Instead of bleeding to death, the young man drowned in his own blood.
Now, he was just a soul, riding his fate towards his new beginning. In the meantime though, he was incredibly confused.
'What the fuck?! What happened?' The speed in which his death occurred caused him to not even realize what happened to him. His mind was racing, trying to figure out what was going on and where he was.
He began to force himself to calm down. 'Alright Adam, think. I was at the diner working my usual shifts, went to go ask one of the big oaf's his name, and slipped on something. Then...then everything went dark.' After he calmed down enough, he was able to think clearly and reflect on the incident. 'Now I'm here, in this weird void...holy shit! Did I die? Is this the afterlife?! But what even happened?'
Adam's life wasn't one worth living, so he honestly didn't really care much that he died. His parents died when he was young due to an illness, his sister...also died, and he had no friends or lover. He was completely alone, not even having a pet, just going through the motions of life day after day. It could barely even be called living.
Gazing into the abyss, his thoughts which were previously going into overtime, came to a sudden halt. The darkness that he had thought was all-encompassing, was in fact cut by small, almost invisible golden strings.
The threads were overlapping, spreading in all directions, and emitting a strange presence. What gave him pause, however, were not the strings themselves, but the familiarity he had with them.
Adam felt like he had seen them before, and it caused him to feel...fear, as well as a tinge of pain in his heart. From what he gathered, he had died. That means that whatever these strings were, they where something from after death. If he saw them before, then had he died before? The thought of having a previous life wasn't what scared him, no. It was that if he had lived a life, or maybe even lives, before being Adam, then he had forgotten about them.
His mind went back to his old family, remembering the pain he felt after losing them. It hurt him to think about the idea of having other families in past lives, but not being able to remember them. To have people you loved being wiped from your memory, only to be lost in time, forgotten.
Trying to clear his head of those perilous thoughts, he went back to thinking about the strings themselves.
They were semi-transparent, but shone with a radiant golden color. The threads were woven together, forming intricate patterns while simultaneously branching out all around him. The scene was beautiful, making Adam feel at peace despite having just died a particularly gruesome death.
He tried to reach up and touch a string sitting right above him, but he realized with a fright that he could not feel his limbs. He tried turning his head down to look at his body, only to notice he didn't have a head to turn.
It was then that he thought that maybe he didn't actually see the threads per say, but 'felt' them. He was able to somehow discern their locations, existence, and even color by sensing the strings.
He didn't know why or how he could, he just...well...could. Just as he was about to go into a rather interesting monologue about his life and non-existent regrets, he sensed a new string. It shot out from the abyss, heading in a straight shot for his conscienceless. He attempted to move out of its path, only to remember he couldn't move.
As the golden thread approached his soul, Adam tried to stop sensing it, hoping to disconnect the link between himself and the strings so he didn't have to see it hit him. Unsurprisingly, he was unable to, and could only watch as the singular thread pierced into his soul, stopping just before it went all the way through. He internally grimaced, even though he didn't feel any pain.
Once the golden thread touched him, it underwent a change. It slowly started turning blood red, as if corrupted, and started emitting an aura of chaos.
Suddenly, he felt the thread start to retract. It slowly began retracing its path, bringing Adam along with it.
While being pulled towards his unknown destination, his mind went back to one of his earlier days in college.
It was his third week, and his sister was finally starting attending classes. She had been in a fatal car accident, a few months prior, and was staying in the hospital. Adam had been driving her home from a friends house on a very rainy night, and a careless driver had been drinking and driving.
The man had almost hit them, but Adam had managed to swerve just in time.
His car hit the bump of the sidewalk, and he lost control. The car hit a child who was riding his bicycle in the rain and continued into a house. Adam, his sister, and the other driver were alive, but the child and one other from the house were killed on impact.
Adams sister, being the idiot she was, hadn't been wearing a seat belt. Following Newtons first law of motion, she was flung out of the windshield due to the sudden stop of the car when it hit the house.
The house they had driven into turned out to be her crush's house, and the boy and adult they had hit were his family members. Safe to say, they never got together.
Normally, one would be stricken with regret in a situation like Adam's, but he knew that what he did was right. If he had not swerved like he had, the car would have hit them. Despite the fact that his car had ended the lives of two people, one being a child at that, had not mattered to him. All that he cared about, was that his twin sister Amanda, the only person he had left, was alive.
It may have been cruel and twisted of him to think like that, but past trauma does that to a person. It warps their way of thinking, and in Adams case, made him only think about the survival of his sister.
Internally, Adam shook his head, trying to forget the memory of the crash for now. He didn't even know why he remembered it now. Maybe it was because he was in a similar situation to what the two people he killed were in–he had died without knowing how or what had happened.
Or maybe it was because it was one of the last memorable, despite how bad it was, moments he had spent with Amanda...
Being brought back to the event at hand, he sensed helplessly as the crimson thread dragged him through the mostly empty void. He couldn't feel where it was taking him, but his intuition told him it was important.
Adam silently waited to reach the string's destination, going through his last memories repeatedly, trying to figure out exactly what happened.
'So the fall itself didn't kill me, it was something after that. I sat up...and heard a bottle shatter next to me. I...I think I felt a pain in my neck for a second,' After a while of racking his thoughts, he started to come to a conclusion, 'There was a liquid that filled my throat and ran down my neck, presumably blood. So I either died by getting my throat slit by a fucking piece of glass, or drowned in my own blood. Both aren't very good ways to go out, but can't say I didn't deserve it.'
Right after he figured it out, he noticed something at the end of his senses. The thread led to a giant spherical shape, with slight protrusions bulging out here and there. For some reason, Adam couldn't sense the color of the object, unlike the strings constantly surrounding him.
Judging by the size alone, if he could even accurately measure things in his state, Adam believed the sphere was a planet, and the 'void' he had been stuck in for who-knows-how-long, was outer space.
Surprisingly, Adam wasn't bothered that much knowing that he was traveling through space on weird glowing strings that spanned across the entire universe from what he could tell.
From the speed he was approaching the giant planet–that Adam believed to be much larger than Earth–he concluded that the strings were pulling him somewhere between the speed of light and the speed of sound.
Before he knew it, Adam was pulled into the planet's atmosphere and kept being dragged by the thread. It brought him down onto one of the planet's six continents, straight into the middle of the landmass. A second later, he was able to sense a large kingdom reaching towards the heavens, with the red thread bringing him towards the middle of it, to a mighty castle.
He passed straight through the castle's stone walls, and into the body of a baby boy who was surrounded by crying adults.
A few seconds later, and he opened his eyes for the first time...again.