Known Afterlife (The Provider Trilogy: Volume I)

by Trey Copeland

  *****

  Steffor floated in black nothingness, caught between what was neither life nor death. The oppressive vise squeezed the essence of his soul as though death's hand crushing eternal life. The nothingness mocked him. The vise tightened. Language, beliefs, ideas, love, the final fibers of life, faded from consciousness. Sadness, the last emotion to register, before the void that was nothing, forever consumed his existence.

  After what could have been an eternity or no time at all, Steffor's soul revived to soft, musical vibrations. The frequencies of sound massaged and healed, repairing his essence piece by piece. Surrounded by crystalline whites and rich mosaics, his reformed energy floated in a plane of infinite size and possibility.

  He would have stayed in that existence if not for the sudden ping of another; one bound to his soul through endless love, forged over countless lifetimes. His guide materialized at that moment, a pulsing, violet energy contained by a faint human outline. Patient but with a sense of urgency, she pulled him from his ethereal bed, back toward the dense material plane.