Die Awake (The Soul Trap Chronicles, Book One)

Once upon a time…

God died.

Not one of those beings who would later come down from the sky and call themselves gods. A real one. The god who held every reality together, with the magic of all things inside him.

Nobody knows how. Nobody knows why. There was nobody yet to know.

And from his body, the titans rose.

They walked the seas when the seas were young. They were so large that storms broke against their knees, and so old that the stars still remember them. Nobody counted their years, because there was nobody yet to count.

Then the titans died. Not all at once. Slowly, over billions of years, the way mountains die. They lay down in the water and never rose again.

They did not fall onto the land. They became it. The continents you stand on today are their bodies. The mountains are their shoulders and their knees. The rivers are their veins. If you put your ear to the ground on a quiet night, in some places of this planet, you might still hear something very far down, very slow, like a heartbeat that forgot to stop.

Their magic did not die with them. It sank into the earth, and after a long time, it came back up.

It came back up as life.

Elves rose from the old forests. Fairies were born in the light between leaves. Gnomes woke inside the stone, and trolls climbed out of the mountains. Unicorns ran on the plains, and dragons slept on the warm rocks of the coast. The world filled with creatures made of titan magic, and they lived in it for ages. Millennia. Maybe millions of years. Nobody knows, because they never wrote it down. They were not builders of machines. They did not measure time.

All except the dwarves. The dwarves were born engineers. They dug, they forged, they built, and they understood how things worked the way the others understood the wind. But even the dwarves stopped counting after a while. When nothing ends, there is nothing to count.

They were not so different from us. They had their wars, and their peace treaties, and the long grudges that come after both. They had their gods and their heretics, their weddings and their funerals, their children who would not go to sleep. They had heroes whose names were sung for a thousand years, and traitors whose names were never spoken again. They had legends, and tales, and epics told around fires that burned for whole generations.

They had everything we have, except one thing. They never felt the need to own the whole world. Their kingdoms ended where their mountains ended, or where their forests ended, and that was enough for them.

* * *

And then the six-fingered came down from the sky.

They had traveled far. They had seen many worlds. They had taken many worlds. But they had never seen one like this. So full of magic that it leaked out of the ground.

In less than one year, the planet was theirs.

They wiped it all. The forests, the kingdoms, the songs. Some of the old ones fought. Some ran. Some found doors, and went through them, and closed them behind them, and were never seen again. Most simply died.

But magic is energy, and energy cannot be destroyed. It can only break.

So the magic of that world was born again, in pieces. The same power, broken into many small sparks.

Small souls.

The six-fingered wanted those sparks.

They could build bodies. They were very good at building bodies. But a body without a spark is only a machine. It moves when it is told to move, and it stops when it is told to stop. It has no will. No wanting. The spark is what turns a body into a life.

So they went into their laboratories, and they began to make the perfect worker. A slave that would not need a whip.

The first attempts failed. Some came out half fish and went back to the sea, and sailors would later call them sirens. Some came out half bull, and were hunted, or killed, or locked in labyrinths. Some came out half horse and ran wild across the plains. Some came out with only one eye. Some came out as tall as towers. There were many more “failures” like these. The old myths remember them as monsters.

They were not monsters. They were drafts.

After many drafts, they made us.

Humans were exactly what they wanted. Smart enough to use the tools. Obedient enough to keep working without an order at every moment. The perfect worker had been born.

And still they kept changing us. Generation after generation, they reached into our blood and turned something down, a little at a time. They made us weaker. They made our lives shorter. In the beginning, a human could live twelve hundred years. By the end, a hundred, if he took very good care of himself.

But the six-fingered liked what they had made a little too much. Human women were beautiful, and the six-fingered took them, and children were born. The old peoples gave those children many names. One of them was Nephilim. Generation after generation, that blood mixed with ours, until it was so thin you could not see it anymore.

But it never disappeared. They are still here. Fewer. Quieter. Hidden. But still here. They keep the real history. They keep the technology. They keep the libraries we are told never existed.

And they keep the Golden Law.

* * *

The Golden Law is simple. Reality reflects what the collective of souls feels. Not just what they think. How they feel. On average. All of them together. When most souls feel fear, the world becomes more frightening. When most souls feel kindness, the world becomes kinder.

It sounds so logical that it almost sounds true.

Here is the part they do not want you to know. The change does not have to be slow. We are used to slow. Slow progress, slow inventions, slow history, released a little at a time. But if more than half of all souls changed what they felt in a single night, the world would not improve a little. It would rise. You would wake up the next morning in a different reality, and you would not have had to do anything except feel it. Reality would take care of the rest.

That is why the six-fingered work so hard on our emotions. Not too miserable, or we would revolt. Not too happy, or we would start to believe the world could change. Just right in the middle, forever. A prison that feels like a normal life.

And when a corner of the world starts to feel too much anyway, they start that corner over.

How many times have they done it? Nobody knows. Too many. Never the whole world at once. One region at a time, across the entire face of the earth. Wars. Nuclear bombs, long before anyone in our history books invented them. Weapons that could erase a whole continent with one touch.

That is what happened to the Sahara. It was not always a desert. In the middle of the Sahara there is a great eye, made of rings, so big you can only see it from the sky. That was Atlantis. All around it was ocean. Now it is an ocean of sand.

Fire. Sickness. Floods of mud, to bury the old cities and build new ones on top. Old truths taken apart, and new ones put in their place, again and again, in so many corners of the world that only they know how many. Hundreds, maybe. Maybe more. They are the only ones who kept count.

And the great floods. The last one was sent to drown the last of the “monsters” and the last of the giants. After it, there were only humans left. That was the point. They wanted us to believe we were the only ones. That we were alone. That we were in control.

* * *

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, they took one small spark into their laboratory.

Mine.

They used it to learn how to catch souls. How to hold them. How to send them back, again and again, without ever letting them go.

I was born a thousand times, and I was never born. Every time, they put me in a body that was not finished. A fetus that would never grow. A body made wrong on purpose, with no use except to hold my soul for a while. Always in a jar. Always floating in the warm liquid of an incubator. In a thousand lives, I never opened my eyes. I never heard a sound. I never said a word. I never had a single thought.

My first thought came in life one thousand and one.

With what they learned from me, they built a net around the whole planet. A soul net. Every death falls into it. Every birth comes out of it.

When the net was finished, they did not need me anymore.

So they let me go.

That is where my first life begins. Or my one thousand and first, if you want to be technical.

* * *

There is something else you should know. After every life, every soul walks a hallway. Everyone has one. Everyone has been through it many times. Most souls have learned something by now.

Not me.

I had lived a thousand lives, and I had learned nothing. Not one thing. A soul has to learn everything, even how to read. So the first lives are slow. They are lessons. But the more a soul learns, the faster it goes. And the faster it goes, the stranger it gets.

This is the real history of this world. The altered one.

And you are here now, after all of it.

You have a hallway too.

You just don’t remember it.

* * *