As your last breath comes to pass, you're suddenly faced with… silence. Not emptiness, no, something deeper. A suspension. A stasis. Void of sound, smell, touch, and even thought. This was… not death. Not life. A place between, outside of time, unshaped by motion or decay. Not darkness… not even light. Just stillness so absolute it carved into your awareness like ice.

This liminal void felt like being stretched through an infinite moment, a pause that never ends. Was this eternity? Or worse, a timeless prison, where nothing began, and nothing could end?

But then, subtly, your senses returned, not all, but some. The sensation of being felt… yet still held immobile. As if your body were an echo of yourself, unlinked from your will. Your breath returned. Then your panic. Your gaze darted in every direction, grasping for something, anything.

A figure emerged, not from shadow, but from the fracture in stillness itself. Her form shimmered like a clock's shadow at dusk, ageless, unknowable, swathed in celestial robes that shimmered with the glint of stars long dead and yet unborn. The ambience filled with the soft clank of chandeliers, clinging to a golden halo more bigger than you thought of. You could not tell if she stepped toward you, or if time itself bent to present her before you.

She turned her head slowly, and her eyes met yours, piercing, amber-gold, like twin hourglasses watching you drain away.

Her expression; unmoved. Calm. Unshaken by your presence.

“Hm…. Who is this visitor we have here?”

Her voice echoed, not through the space around you, but through the sequence of your being. Each word rippled across your life, forward and back, like a stone dropped into a still pond that is your past and future.

And with that, your body awakened. Your breath became yours again. Speech returned. Time moved. Now, it was your moment to answer.